First off, thanks HBT for all the valuable information. I've drawn heavily on this forum assembling my brutus 10 clone (thanks for the awesome plans Lonnie).
It's taken me ages to get my rig up and running, and I brewed on it for the first time this weekend. As to be expected a number of things went wrong in the first go around, and if I can't troubleshoot them all I'll follow up with additional posts. The issue I wasn't expecting is that the pilot light on my honeywell VR8200 valve feeding a BQ 14 burner ended up leaving a big scorch mark directly above the pilot light in my mash tun.
I'm running one of jaybrid's false bottoms (so a full false bottom) and I had to run the mash in manual mode. I did not recirculate with a pump the whole time, but whenever I turned the burner on I would let the pump run while firing and then for a while afterwards. I did a 60 minute mash ( fortunately of a dark beer, and so far it tastes fine). When I pulled out the false bottom while cleaning I found a circle about 3" in diameter of scorched matter above the standing pilot light.
There is a picture attached of how I have mounted the pilot light. Its almost at the edge of the pot, where there is the least amount dead space with my keggle and false bottom. I had a hell of a time figuring out a way to mount the pilot lights. That's the one thing that no one seems to have documented very well, and I stumbled across the problem right when I was running out of motivation the problems just keep arising during the build process. I couldn't figure out how to mount the pilot onto the burner (despite atleast one post of someone doing that here), so I ended up drilling into the brewer's hardware windscreen and bolting it on.
Now for my laundry list of questions:
It will suck to move the pilot light, but would that fix the problem? If I do move it, any suggestions on where to remount it? The pilot light seemed to be putting out alot of flame, I'm pretty confident I swapped to the propane orifice, but if I got it mixed up with the NG orifice would that cause this problem? Do people think there are other fixes without tweaking the pilot light?
If I run the pump for the whole mash would this fix the problem? I'm not sure if the grain bill (which was probably way too big for a first attempt on a new rig, almost 40#) played a role. I would just try another batch, but I've promised a friend half a batch of pliney the elder clone for my next brew, and I'm not going to risk scorching that. I'd really rather not have to move to HERMS already, as I was really excited to mostly be done with my setup, but is that the smartest course of action?
Any and all insight would be greatly appreciated. After almost a year of tinkering it felt great to brew on this thing. But a scorched mash is a serious setback. Pointers would be appreciated.
It's taken me ages to get my rig up and running, and I brewed on it for the first time this weekend. As to be expected a number of things went wrong in the first go around, and if I can't troubleshoot them all I'll follow up with additional posts. The issue I wasn't expecting is that the pilot light on my honeywell VR8200 valve feeding a BQ 14 burner ended up leaving a big scorch mark directly above the pilot light in my mash tun.
I'm running one of jaybrid's false bottoms (so a full false bottom) and I had to run the mash in manual mode. I did not recirculate with a pump the whole time, but whenever I turned the burner on I would let the pump run while firing and then for a while afterwards. I did a 60 minute mash ( fortunately of a dark beer, and so far it tastes fine). When I pulled out the false bottom while cleaning I found a circle about 3" in diameter of scorched matter above the standing pilot light.
There is a picture attached of how I have mounted the pilot light. Its almost at the edge of the pot, where there is the least amount dead space with my keggle and false bottom. I had a hell of a time figuring out a way to mount the pilot lights. That's the one thing that no one seems to have documented very well, and I stumbled across the problem right when I was running out of motivation the problems just keep arising during the build process. I couldn't figure out how to mount the pilot onto the burner (despite atleast one post of someone doing that here), so I ended up drilling into the brewer's hardware windscreen and bolting it on.
Now for my laundry list of questions:
It will suck to move the pilot light, but would that fix the problem? If I do move it, any suggestions on where to remount it? The pilot light seemed to be putting out alot of flame, I'm pretty confident I swapped to the propane orifice, but if I got it mixed up with the NG orifice would that cause this problem? Do people think there are other fixes without tweaking the pilot light?
If I run the pump for the whole mash would this fix the problem? I'm not sure if the grain bill (which was probably way too big for a first attempt on a new rig, almost 40#) played a role. I would just try another batch, but I've promised a friend half a batch of pliney the elder clone for my next brew, and I'm not going to risk scorching that. I'd really rather not have to move to HERMS already, as I was really excited to mostly be done with my setup, but is that the smartest course of action?
Any and all insight would be greatly appreciated. After almost a year of tinkering it felt great to brew on this thing. But a scorched mash is a serious setback. Pointers would be appreciated.
