Water for sparging
one more Campden tablet
kinda hard to tell, but there's a hole allows the hose to under...
attached...
Generally, I shoot for 2x mash water for rinsing. So in this case I had just shy of 3 gallons, so I'm going to sparge with about 6 gallons of hot water.
So what if you have a lot of grain and a lot of sparge water? You will have a lot of wort to boil. And if the point was to get a high gravity beer, you will have to boil it all down to the desired batch size. Unlike extract brewing, to get a high gravity beer it's not as simple as adding *more*. Grain gives you so many points per pound per gallon. More grain also requires more mash water, more sparging water, so if you add more grain, you get more... wort... So a barley wine may have 10 gallons of wort that you have to boil down to 5.5 gallons to get that 1.100 OG you're looking for...
So, treat your sparge water for chlorine (filter or Campden tablet).
Sparge water is heated to 170 - 175F.
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I use a false-bottom setup for sparging. A curved piece of food-grade plastic with hundreds of holes drilled in it is placed in the bottom of a bucket and a hose underneath that collects the strained wort.
Before loading with the grains, an "underlet" is formed by putting some of the hot water to float the grains above the false-bottom. *CAUTION* Be sure all clamps are closed before loading with hot water or grain! Hot water can burn!