Stainless Steel Sparge Arm

This sparge arm is a good deal for it's price however, it takes some attention and DIY know how.

Pro: Works as described, PRICE,

Con: The black caps on the ends are loose fitting (had one fall off into the grain that I dumped into the compost, I had to dig into the compost to find it) The tubing is VERY thin and doesn't stand up to sparge temps. When it gets warm it collapses under it's own weight and stops the flow where the hose meets the SS tube. I had to rig up a loop to take some pressure of the spot and hold it for a while.

Its a little cheap on quality but it does the job

It does the job but the tubing is too low temp, as it collapses because of the sparge temp. Be sure to buy a length of high temp hose. The black ends break/fall of REALLY easy. We ended up soldering on some new metal caps found at the local hardware store.

Don't plan to sparge with this straight out of the box.

My brewery connections are all stainless steel quick disconnects and 1/2" hi-temp hoses. So it took a few parts to make it compatible with my system.

First I removed the existing clamp and hose and added a 3/8" to 1/2" stainless compression fitting. Then I used a male stainless steel disconnect. Once the female end and hose was connected, the hose quickly crimped and wouldn't pass water. So I added a 90 degree stainless steel elbow and the male disconnect off that. Success! The hose doesn't crimp, but the weight of everything tends to drag the contraption to the side, or worse, pull it off the mash tun.

I've since added a bungee cord from handle to handle across the plastic cross piece and it works perfectly.

Now to figure out how to keep the cheap silicone caps on while sparging. A previous poster suggested welding small caps on, but before I do something permanent, I'll try some thread seal tape, see if that adds enough to keep the caps on.

There are pros and cons for this sparge arm:

Pros: it works as a great sparge arm when use correctly

Con: I had to find out the hard way that it works on gravity, as well as if your tryign to match your flow with the flow comming out of the mash tun, if you dont have the water flowing full power it will not spin. Hense it will not really trickle the way its supposed to and might distrub the grain bed.

This is almost like the sparging effect at the jack daniels distillery. It works great and helps maintain grain efficiency after mashing.

I had this for a while and dumped it on CL. It definitely requires a height differential to work, but more importantly I found that the rotating sparge arm is very not necessary. I now use a DIY built from CPVC, which gets very high and consistent fly sparge results. It took about 1hr to make and about 1/10th the cost. Save your $ and buy more ingredients.

Yes, there are sparge arms you can build yourself. Yep, they'll work just fine. If you don't have time or the inclination to build it yourself, this is a GREAT way to go.

The white plastic can slip around if you don't affix it. I use double-sided duct tape. The metal crossbar might not spin if you're gravity feeding, but as long as you keep about an inch of water above the grainbed, it won't matter.

A relatively inexpensive item that does what it says, and works perfectly in my 10 gallon igloo cooler mash tun.

Works great. Very pleased. Easy set up. Great upograde for all grain brewing.

It works if you keep an eye on it and do it right.
The end caps don't fit well, so keep an eye on them. Make sure the water is flowing well, else it stalls.