Lautering Issues?

Hey all,

I've been noticing a couple issues with our lautering lately, and I'm not sure what's causing it, and therefore don't know how to fix it. Typically, when you're lautering and one manometer is lower than the other, it's indicating a dense grain bed and you're on your way to a stuck sparge. However, I've been noticing that both manometers are reading the same, however when you look in the MT, the water level is still much higher (above the grain bed), when the manometers might indicate it's halway down. This doesn't happen often, but it's happened twice this week. The end result is the lauter flow seems to going just fine until you realize you're sucking mostly sparge water, so my OGs have been much lower than my target, not too mention much smaller batch sizes. The issue that gets me is that the mash-in process hasn't changed at all, and the next batch will be completely fine. I'm not sure what's causing it, so I'm trying a bunch of different things, such as slower rake turning during mash-in, but I can't see how that would do anything.

Any thoughts? A stretch would be a higher concentration of beta glucans from our base malt, as I've noticed that we get a layer of gummy substance at the top of our grain bed and it might be causing the sparge water to run-off to the sides?

Any ideas would be awesome, or if someone has experienced this before!


Avery

Could you explain your full mash-in, rest and vorlauf steps. Need more info than maybe I could help.