SPARGING WITH A FULL WORT BOIL

Mornin guru's,
Been brewing a certain way for years and never gave thought to sparging.
Now when I mash, I will pull the runnings off and reintroduce them through a shower head type strainer back into the grains to clarify. Because I usually end up with 5 or 6 gallons at the end of my boil, I have never run plain water through my grain bed. Everything I read about it indicates a partial mash base to work with.
Thoughts? should I cut back a gallon or two so I can run water through, or with a full mash, am I getting all or most of the sugars anyway?

BILLY BREW said:

Mornin guru's,
Been brewing a certain way for years and never gave thought to sparging.
Now when I mash, I will pull the runnings off and reintroduce them through a shower head type strainer back into the grains to clarify. Because I usually end up with 5 or 6 gallons at the end of my boil, I have never run plain water through my grain bed. Everything I read about it indicates a partial mash base to work with.
Thoughts? should I cut back a gallon or two so I can run water through, or with a full mash, am I getting all or most of the sugars anyway?

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You really should be doing a proper sparge otherwise you are leaving sugars on the grains . I tend to use a pretty lengthy sparge and mash cycle. Adding water to my mash every 30 minutes for 90 minute mash and then sparging 4 times gradually decreasing the temp of the water untill I sparge with a gallon of cold water at the end. Have gotten my best beers that way.

Cutting back on the mash water and using it to sparge is the more common method of doing an infusion mash. Full volume mashing is more recent in popularity, but certainly not new.  I've done both and keep with the full volume mashing for the majority of my recipes.  Only when I get to high gravity beers (above 1.080 or so) do I resort to performing a batch sparge.  I find that I get better efficiency and wort quality for lower gravity beers when I do a full volume. 

On high gravity recipes, the loss in efficiency is greater and I have less head room in my pot to mix in the grains.  So here, performing a sparge step makes it worth while.  On the border line recipes, those around 1.070 to 1.080 the loss in efficiency of full volume vs sparging  costs me a little more in grain, but the loss of 1 or 2 points of efficiency versus the ease, time savings, and less equipment to clean is well worth the extra $0.25 to $0.40 in added grain.

Thanks for the input, I will work with it on my next batch.

http://dennybrew.com/ gives a good summary of the sparge process and  includes some arithmetic to calculate a way to split the mash and sparge water.

Thanks fellas