When Do You Sparge?

Generally you would use an amount of sparge water up to the volume of the finished beer (5 gallons in this case). It should be at a temperature of around 170 °F (77 °C), since this will keep the bed at a reasonable temperature and the wort at a low viscosity so that the water will flow freely through the bed.

Do you need to Sparge?

So why doesn't everyone use the no-sparge method? Because continuous sparging usually works just fine — and pound for pound, it extracts the highest yield from the grain. No-sparge uses more grain and doubles the size of the mash tun.

Why do you Sparge?

Sparging is the rinsing of the mash grain bed to extract as much of the sugars from the grain as possible without extracting puckering tannins from the process. Typically, 1.5 times as much water is used for sparging as for mashing (e.g., 8 lbs. ... The temperature of the sparge water is important.