First Brew Day - Sparging The Mashed Grist

Continuing on from Part One, Mashing the grist... (please excuse the change of tenses as you read on, some of this was posted as it happened and some, like this bit, has been added later.)

Well the mash didn't go too bad I think, final temp in the mash tun was 58C though so I'm a bit worried about that. Not sure what the minimum is, all my books etc say keep it around 65C...

Could everything have gone wrong already? During the mash time I weighed out my hops, had a clean round and sterilized my fermentation bin, hydrometer etc

Bittering hops and aroma hops weighed out whilst waiting for the mash.

At the end of the mash I cracked open the valve and a drained about 2 litres of wort into a jug until it ran clearer before allowing the rest to drain into a fermenting bucket - just to hold it until the hot liquor tanks hot water has been used up by sparging.

The mashed grist prior to draining off before sparging.

The wort will end up in the HLT that will then become my boiler or copper as it's called. A lovely coloured liquid ran forth and my home made mash tun drained really well. Once the out flow had dropped to a very slow trickle I tipped the tun slightly to get more wort.

Sweet wort run off from the mash tun prior to sparging the mashed grist.

I waited a few more minutes and then connected to hot liquor tank to the stub on the top of my mash tun that feeds the internal, sparging spray bar.

My home made sparging device is working well, nice slow, gentle trickle over the mash surface.

Sparging the drained grist. This process rinses the grains that have been mashed in order to extract as much converted starch from the grains, converted starch = more fermentable sugar for the yeast to convert to alcohol... it's a bit more complex than that BTW.

Please note, the photo above is from my test set up last night. The photo I took of sparging today has thrown up a fault and won't open in photoshop :(

Sparging liquor temp is 75C and I have about 3 litres left to go...

Hey up! I just found another pic of the sparging process...

Hot liquor passes slowly through the mashed gist but this time you can see the run off from the mash tun into the collection bucket.

See you soon. Follow the link for part 3, Boiling the Wort and adding the Bittering Hops