The Brew Bag Blog — no sparge

There are some misconceptions in the home beer brewing culture that lead me to write this post. Efficiency is a simple term in brewer's lingo. It means the degree to which the starch in grain, with the help of enzymes, is converted to sugar(s) during the grain mash and transferred into the boil kettle. The explanation of the conversion of starches to fermentable sugars is very complicated and involves PH, water temperature, and enzymatic hydrolysis. I won't go any further on this ( because I don't know much more), but will say that all brewers key in on this term...

In a recent article discussing different methods of brewing, the author differentiated "all-grain" from Brew In A Bag. I had to read the sentence twice. BIAB does not use extract, does not come in a kit, (although Brewer's Best is now offering six BIAB kits that include the hops, grain, priming sugar, yeast, and caps) and utilizes the same mashing schedule as the "all grain" method. Now here's the kicker - to make beer using a brew bag you start with grain, that's right, BIAB uses nuttin but grain! I'll tell you what's happening across the USA - new and...

Many of the sparge brewers I talk to about BIAB scratch their heads when they hear that the brew in a bag method is a no sparge method. Nearly all of them say "but what about all the sugars that get left behind in the grain, aren't you losing valuable fermetables?" At issue is not whether no sparge "loses" fermentable sugar, but how much is actually in the boil kettle. While it is true that the grain bag after lifting from the mash tun has sugars remaining, at what point is sparging a zero return effort? The concept of brew...