Glossary
Sparging
Rinsing the grain bed with hot water to recover the sugar that would otherwise be left behind in it.
Pronounced SPAR-jing.
Also called sparge, sparging water.
The full record
Sparging has its own catalogue entry with the detail this page summarises — causes, thresholds, related styles and evidence.
Sparging — Rinse the grain bed with hot water to recover the substantial quantity of sugar that would otherwise be left behind in the liquid clinging to it.
A mash retains a great deal of sugar in the liquid clinging to the grain. Sparging washes it out, and typically recovers a third or more of the total extract.
The limits matter. Sparge water that is too hot or too alkaline extracts tannin from the husks and produces astringency, and sparging too far — down to very low runnings gravity — extracts the same harshness. Brewers therefore stop at a target gravity or volume rather than rinsing until nothing sweet remains.
Related
- Fly sparging — The continuous method.
- Batch sparging — The simpler discrete method.
- Astringency — What over-sparging causes.
- Tannin — The compound extracted when sparging goes too far.
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.