Beer Making-checking the beer

Speaker: Okay. So now we are ready to go on to the next part of the process, which is the sparging and lautering. Now, sparging, sparging is generally I believe for spraying because essentially what we are going to be doing is we are going to be spraying hot water at a fixed temperature over the grain so that it will wash all of the sugar off of or through the grain and pull it out of the bottom and then lautering is we are going to be pulling it from the bottom below the screens and bringing it over to our brew kettle. Now that we've measured the Plato of the wort but we haven't started to mash them. We know that we are ready to go on.

Okay. First we are actually going to start the sparge where we're bringing the water over. So now the idea is that we want to drizzle the water on top. We can spray it gently and it will form a layer over the grain bed. So that way we'll be able to make sure that we get as much of the sugar to wash off as possible. So it is very important to do this process in a way that maximizes the amount of sugar that we are extracting form the grain, flavor that we are extracting from the grain.

However, doing it in a way that we don't also extract some of the other not so desirable flavors from the grain, which is why we actually stop this process while there is still some sugar left on the grain. If we kept on going then we start washing off the tannins from the husks of the grain and the beer would become way too bitter for anyone to drink.

So now we have about an inch or two hot water sitting on top of our grain bed. So we've started the sparging process and now we're going to start the lautering process, which is basically going to involve opening up the tank from the bottom and pumping into our brew kettle.

So you could see in here what we are doing is we are bringing in the wort from the bottom of our mash tun is being pumped into here and we are going to be filling this tank, probably just onto the level of that spray ball in the middle.


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