Making wort can be dead simple or ridiculously complicated, but no matter how you mash it, it’s going to need to be separated from the spent grains before the boil. In this article we explore a few different ways to get that sweet goodness into the kettle.
A typical lauter begins by first raising the temperature of the mash (mash out), then recirculating the wort (vorlauf in German) to establish a filter bed and clarify the runoff, and finally rinsing (sparging) the grains to collect the available sugars in the boil kettle.
By first heating up the mash, we help the sugars from our first runnings into the kettle to flow more freely, giving us a better overall yield. Taking the extra time for a thorough vorlauf, we decrease the amount of grain particulates going into the boil, which otherwise would lead to unwanted levels of tannin astringency. Finally, our sparging method will largely determine just what percentage of the total available sugars we are able to capture in the kettle.