Wort recirculation is widely considered best practice amongst brewers – but to do so without special equipment can be cumbersome. If you have a fancy brewing system like the Clawhammer Supply system, it’s great, but what about the rest of us who can’t afford something so high-end? I decided to do some research to determine: is it really worth it to recirculate your wort manually or with a clunky DIY setup?
Recirculating the wort during the mash increases brewhouse efficiency, allowing you to extract more sugar (and ultimately alcohol and flavor) from the grain with less. At the homebrewing scale, efficiency is a lesser concern: if you are brewing the beer you like already, it may not be worth it to recirculate your wort.
Nearly all commercial brewers use wort recirculation. At that scale, it’s incredibly important – every little bit of mash efficiency can save the brewer a ton of money!
Us homebrewers don’t have to worry about that as much. If you’re not getting the mash efficiency you’re looking for, just adding a handful of extra grain to the mash might solve your problem – and it might cost you pennies!
That’s not to say that there’s not value in recirculating your wort. If you can do so easily, then you might as well!
However, if, like me, you’re using a simple cooking pot as a brew kettle and a basic BIAB system for mashing your grain, then it may not be worth the added time, effort, or money to recirculate manually or to come up with a clunky, difficult-to-use setup.
What is Wort Recirculation?
Wort recirculation is an extra step performed during the mash.
The idea is to take the wort from the bottom of your brew kettle – the bit of liquid that is not in contact with the grain bed – and transfer it to the top of the kettle, so that it can filter back through the grain again.
Ideally, this would be a constant process, where wort is constantly recirculating from the bottom of the kettle back to the top – although doing so requires extra equipment.
How to Recirculate Wort
There are quite a few different systems for recirculating wort, but they all boil down to two methods: the manual way and the automatic way.
Manually Recirculating Wort by Pouring
While most homebrewers don’t do it this way, recirculating your wort can be done manually.
All you really need is something like a pitcher, and to make sure your brew kettle has a spigot.
By letting the pitcher fill part-way with wort from the spigot, and then pouring it back into the brew kettle at the top, you’re able to achieve a crude version of wort recirculation.
Unfortunately, this is not a very effective process. You’re not going to gain very much in terms of mash efficiency by doing it this way, since you’re not doing a constant recirculation: the wort only gets recirculated periodically, as you pour it back in.
This is also an incredibly manual process, and requires your constant focus and effort throughout the mash. It would be one thing if doing this added a lot to your beer, but all that work for minimal gain just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
The one time I think this would be valuable is if you are using a three-vessel system instead of BIAB. With a three-vessel system, you should be sparging anyways. Recirculating wort manually is very similar in process to sparging, it just occurs during the mash instead of after. You can get some value in this case by simply starting the sparge process before the mash is complete and recirculating the wort a bit.
Automatically Recirculating Wort With a Pump
Recirculating wort with a pump is much easier, and is probably the way most homebrewers do it – if they do it at all.
If you buy any of the high-end brewing systems, like the ones made by Clawhammer Supply or Grainfather, they will come with a complete wort recirculation setup.
For those with the budget, these systems seem well worth the money. You get a whole lot more out of them – wort recirculation is just the cherry on top! And they make it dead simple to do.
However, even for brewers that can’t afford these high-end systems, it’s possible to build an automatic wort recirculation system.
This still requires the purchase of a pump that can handle hot wort, which can be pricey, but beyond that you don’t really need to buy anything else expensive: mostly just some extra hoses to move the wort through.
If you are even a little bit handy, you can easily rig up a mount from some scrap wood and clamps, hook everything up to the pump, and let it run throughout the entirety of the mash.
(If there is a lot of interest in it, I wouldn’t mind building one of these setups and making a video/article detailing the process!)
However, unless you already have the parts (or you have a wort recirculation setup built into your brewing system), it probably isn’t worth the time, effort, and money to build one. There are likely other areas, such as fermentation temperature control or reducing chances of oxidation post-fermentation, that can be improved before worrying about eeking that little bit of extra efficiency out of your brew day.
What Does Recirculating Your Wort Accomplish?
The most important and meaningful thing that wort recirculation does for your eventual beer is to improve mash efficiency.
What this means is that, as the wort washes back through the grain bed, it pulls out more fermentable sugar from the grain. This will result in a slightly higher O.G., which will then result in a slightly higher ABV and a bit more malt flavor (without using any extra grain).
It can also help filter the wort as it runs through the grain bed more often, stripping some of the proteins that cause haze. However, this is a very minimal effect – and if you give the beer enough time in the fermenter, keg, or bottle (especially chilled) then the particles causing haze will settle out anyways, and you’ll wind up with the same result.
What recirculation does not do is alter the flavor of the final beer. It may provide a tiny bit more flavor, but it won’t be any different.
Even then, most brewers who have tested this have stated that the flavor difference is negligible – if it’s even noticeable in the first place.
Brülosophy and determined that any difference in flavor is imperceptible.
Should You Recirculate Your Wort?
So, then, the question remains: should you recirculate your wort?
At this point, I think it’s fairly clear what my research has concluded: for the majority of homebrewers, wort recirculation is not necessary, and is probably not worth the time, effort, or money you might spend doing it.
The primary reason to recirculate wort during the mash is to increase mash efficiency – but it only eeks out a couple of percentage points more (resulting in just a couple of extra points of O.G.).
You can choose to spend the entirety of the mash manually pouring wort back over the top of the grain bed, or you can buy a (somewhat expensive) wort pump and spend some time and energy rigging up a DIY solution to automate the process.
In either case, you’re spending your time, energy, and money for just a couple of gravity points.
Plus, you have to set the whole wort recirculation system up every time you make a batch!
Alternatively, you can just toss in an extra scoop of grain. Doing this will also achieve a couple of extra points of O.G.
For even a large 10 gallon batch, you might only need about ¼ lb of extra base malt to achieve the extra gravity points. For ¼ lb of pilsner malt on MoreBeer.com, at the most expensive price by volume (a small purchase of pre-milled grain), this would only cost 54¢!
It’s even cheaper if you buy grain in bulk, store it, and mill it yourself (as detailed in a previous article)!
If you were a commercial brewer making hundreds of gallons of beer in a batch, the extra grain needed for those gravity points would cost quite a bit. But at the homebrew level, you might not even notice the cost of that extra grain.
But you will notice the time spent setting up your DIY recirculation system, not to mention cleaning and maintaining it!
So, for the average homebrewer who is using basic equipment and the BIAB method to mash, I don’t think it is worth your time to worry about wort recirculation.
There are two very specific caveats, however: if you are using a high-end system that already has wort recirculation built in, and it is easy to use, then I’d say definitely use it. If it is not an annoyance on brew day, you might as well use the system and get that tiny bit of added efficiency.
Similarly, if you are using a three-vessel system and you’re already sparging or transferring the wort between tuns with a pump, you already have everything you need to do wort recirculation anyways – there’s no real additional time or effort necessary to perform wort recirculation.
Conclusion
As for me – I don’t do wort recirculation, and I don’t think I will add it to my process any time soon.
It’s widely considered best practice, but I think this is largely because the big breweries do it. My research has shown me that there doesn’t seem to be enough added value at the homebrew scale to make the time and effort worthwhile.
