Sparge Water

[WobblyBob22]

Good Morning Brewers,

First post on here and I'm a first time brewer also. Admittedly, i have jumped in at the deep end and started out with purchasing myself a Brewzilla Gen 4. The question i have is, for my first brew im doing a Timothy Taylors clone and the recipe says it is a 23ltr batch. Does this mean that i start out with 23ltrs before mashing then when i sparge, do i top up the remaining brew back up to 23ltrs before boiling? apologies if i have got the terminology wrong, still learning.

thanks in advance

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Water will get absorbed and it will evaporate during boiling. You need about 31 or 32 litres between mash and sparge. I usually mash with 18 L and sparge with 14 L. That should give you about 27 L to boil which should give you a batch size of 22-23 L.

 

[Agentgonzo]

Normal liquor-to-grist ratio (how much water to use for your mash) is in the range of 2.5-3 litres per kilo of grain. Then you use 'the rest' for sparging.
As the Cat says, you get losses along the way (absorbed by the grain, and at the bottom of the kettle, left in the fermenter etc that you don't transfer over).
You can do the calculations yourself based on the above info, but there are also tools like brewfather.com and beersmith that will do the calculation for you and tell you how much water to add at each step, and how much you'll end up with in the fermenter.

eg, this is from the app you get with the grainfather. I just plug in the batch size and efficiency (you'll find this out as you brew a few batches, but 80% is probably a good starting value for the Brewzilla) and it calculates how much water to add at each step for me. Brewfather etc is similar

I think that brewfather/beersmith have default profiles for the brewzilla that has preconfigured values for the efficiency/losses etc.

 

[Rwilts]

Welcome and good purchase 3.1.1 brewzilla user here. Another vote for using software, I use Brewfather and have paid I use it so much, but the free version is good enough to start .

Also have a read of the brewzilla user guide thread lots of good learning there