Glossary
Lautering
Separating sweet wort from the spent grain, using the grain bed itself as the filter.
Pronounced LOW-ter-ing.
Also called lauter, run off, runoff.
The full record
Lautering has its own catalogue entry with the detail this page summarises — causes, thresholds, related styles and evidence.
Lautering — Separate sweet wort from spent grain, using the settled grain bed itself as the filter medium.
The husks of the malt settle into a bed that filters the liquid passing through it. This is why grain is milled rather than ground: intact husks are the filter medium, and flour-fine milling produces a bed that will not run.
Related
- Vorlauf — Recirculating until the bed clarifies.
- Sparging — Rinsing the bed to recover more sugar.
- Stuck sparge — When the bed compacts and stops flowing.
- Husk — The part of the grain that does the filtering.
More vocabulary
Arrested fermentation · Barrel ageing · Batch sparging · Biotransformation · Blending · Bottle conditioning · Bottom fermentation · Burtonisation · Cask conditioning · Centrifugation
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.