South Bay, Los Angeles County, California

Do you want to make better beer with less effort and in less time? If so, then you should skip the sparge during your brewing sessions. According to Louis Bonham at the National Homebrewers Conference, the No Sparge Brewing technique results in richer, maltier-tasting beers, and is the "secret weapon" of many award-winning brewers. Since a lengthy runoff step is eliminated, it's easy to see that the modified brew session will require less work and less time.

The no sparge benefits aren't free. The biggest disadvantage of this technique is a drop in extraction efficiency over traditional sparging, which leads to an increase in the amount of grains required for a given quantity of beer. For a typical 5-gallon batch, though, this increase is only about $3 to $5, which is not much if your goal is make the best damn beer.

The no sparge method is really an ancient technique. Old brewers lacked the large kettles that are available today, and in order to extract the most sugars from the grains, the mash tun was repeatedly filled and drained to create a series of beers of decreasing strength. This "Pure No Sparge" method is a great method to use for big beers, and some smaller commercial breweries still use this method today. At the club brew in February of last year, the barleywine Stinkfoot was made with the first runnings from a mash, with its little brother Stinktoe coming from the second runnings. The original gravity of Stinktoe was a big 1.084, so we could have easily sparged a third time for an even smaller beer.

Boiling the entire runnings from the mash tun together is a fairly new technique, done for economic reasons and not for quality. Louis points out that the reason for the quality of the no sparge runoff might be due to the fact that during the sparging process we are extracting more than just sugars from the grains. As the sparge proceeds, the pH and gravity of the runoff drop. As the pH and the gravity drop, the liquid extracts more polyphenols, fatty acids, and silicates from the grains and husks.

One hypothesis is that polyphenols like to stick to proteins. In beers with a high polyphenol content, they coat the tongue and taste buds and therefore mask the taste perception. No sparge brewing reduces the amount of polyphenols, giving a richer, maltier tasting beer.

In a sparge versus no sparge experiment, Louis brewed identical OG 1.044 beers using both the sparge and no sparge techniques. The final gravity of the no sparge batch was a little higher and the color a little darker than the conventional beer, but more importantly, it had a statistically significant lower level of polyphenols. The two beers were compared side by side in a blind taste test using the American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) Triangle Test. This test is the industry-standard method of determining whether there are perceptible differences between two beers. In the test, tasters are presented with three beers, two of which are the same. The third beer is chosen at random, and all beers must be presented blind-no peeking at the beer color. Tasters are forced to select the beer that they think is different among the group of three, and the results are considered statistically significant if more than a given number of tasters pick the correct beer.

In the no sparge taste test, the results were found to be significant at 5% error (the error decreases as the number of correct responses from the tasters increases, and smaller error is better). Commercial brewers easily picked the different beer in the test. Of those that picked the different beer, most described the no sparge beer as richer and maltier. It was easy to tell that Louis is convinced no sparge brewing makes better beer.

The usual no sparge technique is the "Dilute Mash" method. For this method, the grain bill must be increased by 20 to 30% over that for a traditional sparged batch. The mash is conducted as usual. After the mash is complete, all sparge water is added as a mash out infusion. The wort is recirculated until clear before being drained into the kettle. The trick to this technique is to size the mash out infusion so that the total wort collected from the lauter tun is the correct gravity and volume desired for the batch. If you're limited by the size of your lauter tun, the grains can be increased a little, the mash out infusion decreased, and the wort can be diluted in the kettle to the desired pre-boil gravity.

John Palmer, homebrewer, author, and NHC speaker, developed a series of No Sparge equations for Louis. Using a spreadsheet developed from John's equations, here's an example ESB recipe:

For both techniques:
    Mash ratio of 1 quart / pound of grain
    Pre-boil volume of 7.5 gallons wort
    Post-boil volume of 6 gallons wort
    OG 1.054

Traditional Sparge:
    Assume a mash extraction efficiency of 30 pts / lb / gallon
    10 lb. Pale ale malt
    1 lb. Crystal malt

Mash in with 11 quarts of water. Sparge to collect 324 gravity points. For me, this usually takes less than 7.5 gallons of total wort, and I have to dilute the wort in the kettle before the boil.

No Sparge:
    Assume every pound of grain retains 0.5 quarts of water
    Assume one pound of grain in one quart of water has a volume of 1.3125 quarts
    11 lb. Pale ale malt
    1.1 lb. Crystal malt
    Mash in with 12 quarts of water.

Mash out with 6 gallons of hot liquor, giving a total mash volume of 10 gallons. Drain the mash tun of 7.5 gallons of wort. The grains retain the remaining 1.5 gallons of liquid used in the mash.

At the end of the mash, the gravity of the liquid is probably around 1.100, give or take a few points. The wort runoff in the traditional batch will have a gravity that varies from this starting value to somewhere around 1.020 to 1.015. In the no sparge batch, the mash is diluted from 1.100 to 1.043 in the lauter tun, and the runoff gravity never drops below this value.

If you have a decent value of 30 pts for your extraction efficiency, the no sparge technique only requires an increase in the grain bill of 10% over the traditional method. For the example Louis used in the session, he assumed 34 pts for the efficiency, giving a no sparge grain increase of 20%. So, as the traditional method efficiency increases, the additional percentage of grains required for the no sparge method goes up. This extra amount of grain is a small price to pay for making better beer.

We can see from the example that about the only other disadvantage of no sparge brewing over traditional methods is the large equipment size required. For this ESB, 6-gallons of 1.054 wort required a mash that would fill 10-gallon Gott cooler. If we wanted to increase the OG of the beer without using a larger mash tun, we would be required to increase the grains and decrease the mash out liquid, resulting in decrease in system efficiency. For a 1.070 OG ale, for example, the no sparge technique requires about 20% additional grains over the traditional method, but the total mash volume has increased to almost 11 gallons. If we need to fit the mash in a 10-gallon cooler, the grains need to be increased to about 35% over that for the traditional method. Eventually, we reach the point where we should use the pure no sparge method and then make a small beer from the second runnings.

Home | Club Info | Calendar | Newsletter | Photo Album | Recipes | Technical Info | Brew Reviews