BYO magazine also recently posted an article about a German lager where the step mash is performed by direct heating of the mash tun. After several step-ups in temperature, they finally drain the sweet wort and then do a sort of triple batch sparge. I'm describing this based on memory, but essentially what was described was that you wanted to get half your volume from the first runnings as normal, but then after that you split your sparge into three equal parts, adding a third and draining completely, then repeating this process two more times. This process, also, sounded very much like batch sparging to me, with a twist in that they keep the mash very thick by only sparging a little bit at a time, three times. But I bet it would accomplish pretty close to your conventional batch sparge. This article, too, might have been written by Horst Dornbusch? Sometimes I have a pretty good memory... other times, not so much. But I just read the article about 10 days ago so I'm probably not too far off.
Thank you, Denny, for sharing. Interesting seeing that the Germans are not as far off from the conventional wisdom of the rest of the world as some might believe.