We have a friend who is transitioning from a homebrewer to an actual brewer by opening his own brewery with a group of friends. He is who we ask the stupid questions. So far, he's been super patient and helpful... and I plan to milk that for all it's worth:). The other day, I asked him for a good Hefeweizen recipe and he gave me one with a couple of terms that were unfamiliar to me. The one that I'll be defining today is SPARGE.
Let me backtrack just a moment. When Ty decided that we were going to become homebrewers, he went to the homebrew store solo and came home with the kit, ingredients for the intial batch and two sets of instructions. One set was the basic, generic instructions for brewing any beer and the other set was for a specific recipe (in this case, stout). There were minor differences between them so we followed the generic recipe for the most part and the stout recipe only where it varied from the generic recipe.
Because the generic instructions are written for novices, like us, when Jim's recipe called for SPARGING, I panicked. We've really been doing this by the seat of our pants and I haven't read much yet (mostly because there's so much terminology that I don't understand that I just get lost and confused). While we'd actually SPARGED both of our batches to date, I didn't realize it!
When I asked him what it meant, he gave a very clear and concise explanation so I'll be using it verbatim:
The small amount of grains used in the first step are crushed (not pulverized into flour, but still have the husk attached), placed into the grain bag, and steeped like tea in the hot (155) water. This is called the mash when using all-grain. The sparge is rinsing these grains and saving the rinse water (wort) for use in the boil. This is a very small step toward all-grain brewing, and opens up all kinds of creative possibilities.
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