Hi again Jam,
You do know I can tell you haven't read the links I posted above yet?
Those links are really important though and, I also now know, that the info there will be new to you. Set an hour aside and a beer or two to read them carefully though - it
is info you won't find anywhere else and is based on a lot of tests.
In hindsight, the info in those links is now completely obvious and logical to me, however, it wasn't initially. It took a lot of thinking, but more importantly, measuring side by side brews to prove this logic was true. The hardest bit for myself and the others who have worked on this was overcoming the education we had received, the same education that brewers are still getting everywhere (unless things have dramatically changed?) except here.
I'm going to trust you will read the above links okay?
After you do, hopefully you'll see how accurate the following is and a big light bulb will flick on that will make things so much easier....
The 'Old' All-Grain Reality
A combination of many, many, things (just two being ambiguous terminology and the complications of measurement in multi-vessel all-grain) resulted in the wide-spread belief that sparging (rinsing) in brewing works exactly like it does in your clothes washing machine. Like you mentioned above, brewers believe that "somehow I am going be leaving sugar in the grain if I do not sparge."
Your clothes washing machine is
not like brewing at all. A washing machine is able to spin an incredibly high amount of water, and the dirt that water holds, out of the clothes.
In brewing, we don't have the spin.
Because we have this "washing machine" mentality, we also think, in brewing, that we can get our grain perfectly clean. Even a washing machine can't get things perfectly clean. Would you expect a full load of clothes soaked in oil to come out clean? No. What about white sheets covered in red dust? No.
Most of our clothes do come out clean though as the machine spins and our clothes are rarely at such extremes.
The 'New' All-Grain Reality
Once again, a combination of many things (just two being clear brewing terminology and the simplicity of measurement in single vessel all-grain [what we first called 'BIAB']) allows us to see things more clearly, we see brewing is really like cleaning a very dirty load of clothes (our grain) in a very inefficient washing machine (basically a bucket).
There is no spin cycle in our "machine." In fact, we can't even wring water from the dirty clothes (grist). At least with say a large beach towel, we can have a person at either end and wring water out. What happens though if you roll the same towel into a ball and then try squeezing the water out? Very little.
Hopefully you are with me so far. If so, the following things may become obvious. Let's imagine we are allowed just 50 litres (say 10 gallons) of water to clean a bag of extremely dirty clothes. With no spinning or wringing, is there any difference between the following two methods?
1. Soak the bag of dirty clothes in one bucket containing 5 gallons of water for 60 minutes and then lift the bag into a second bucket containing 5 gallons of water and let it soak for 30 minutes.
OR
2. Soak the bag of dirty clothes in one bucket containing 10 gallons of water for 90 minutes.
To Sum it Up
Like any advance in understanding, this better reality of making 'sweet liquor', comes from looking at things differently. Instead of the old, "How can I get my grain completely clean," we now see, "I only have
x amount of water available. How can combine that water and my grain to end up with as dirty water as possible?"
Things now become much easier to understand. We can focus on realities rather than impossibilities or distractions. We realise that any extra water used to clean will have to be evaporated off (we can't leave our clothes under a waterfall until they are completely clean); we realise that 'soaking' time makes a difference and can, in fact, be critical with some clothes (malts); we are forced into examining more subtle things such as agitation; we easily understand that really dirty clothes (high gravity beers) will never come out as clean (they'll always have a lower kettle efficiency) than lower gravity beers*.
...
I think that and the links above are enough to keep you busy for a tad Jam
. Let me know if the light bulb appears!
PP
*The BIABacus is the only software the new reality automatically. I suspect you'll be exploring that too within a month