Sparging with room temp water

[mashani]

Lead is the Secret Ingredient that makes my beer so good.

True Fact: Back in the day the Roman wine makers though it made their wine taste better. They could have used copper but thought it was sucky.

[Kealia]

Lead is the Secret Ingredient that makes my beer so good.

I thought it was all of the "barrel aging"....

[John Sand]

[bpgreen]

I shouldd point out that I don't think I got better efficiency _because_ I used refrigerated water. I think it's just one of the variables that I need to fix.

[denny]

Actually it does matter what the temperature of the sparging water is. It's just that the result, as evaluated by a human being, may not be that noticeable (which of course is what all our beer is evaluated by). Similar to whether your mash PH is 5.3 or 5.35. There is a difference, but you may not notice. The difference is also less likely to be noticeable on a 5 gallon homebrew batch vs. a 7 barrel batch at a commercial brewery, because the hot sparge water increases the flow of the wort, which speeds up the brewing process, which allows them to make more batches.

Just make sure that you're either using cold tap water, or heated tap water. You should not be brewing or sparging with water heated by a water heater. Why? Because hot water leaches lead from water pipes (assuming you have copper pipes). Same goes for cooking, always use cold tap water.

If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

[alb]

My pipes are red/blue PEX tubing so no lead there. My water cooler in the kitchen, which I fill with filtered, UV-treated water from the purifier attached to my tap, also has a heating element and it comes out of there about 153 degrees. I've used that to sparge since it sits right next to the block and tackle I hang up to lift the grains. Never noticed a problem with it.

[Yankeedag]

When I sparge, I normally run the brew through the grains a few times just to capture the goobies from the preboil. Once I've done that, I will do a final rinse of the grains with about 1 gallon of cold water to "wash" that last bit of sugar out of the grains. My thinking on that was, if you're just running the juice back through the same grains, you may wash some more sugars out, but leave some behind that you had already. So, once I cleared up the preboil, I figured it was time to wash out that last bit of fermentable. It has worked for me. YMMV.