Recent content by bdjohns1

You would be safe to assume the sanitary design standards for a commercial nano/micro/macro-brewery would be comparable to any food manufacturing plant, including separate sinks for hand washing and parts cleaning, non-porous, washable walls and floors, adequate floor drainage (to prevent...

140F should be OK for CIP. I work in a dairy plant, and when we run CIP circuits, the max temperature during caustic (aka PBW) cycles is 155F. 140F should be more than sufficient for beer circuits - you don't get nearly the soil load making beer versus making cream cheese. The pump can...

Looking at the pictures a little closer, I think it might be a combination of overheating as well as cross-contamination from using a grinding wheel previously used for some other metal, based on those rust spots that are nowhere near the coupling. Those spots at least might be fixable with a...

The Pharma guys are where it gets really nuts. Basically, you need a near-mirror finish. I think we accept surfaces finished to roughly 400-grit.

I'm not arguing that they're not up to par in terms of the bead/HAZ. I'd agree your sample photo is just a touch above the 2, but definitely better than 3. That weld would need to be smoothed to be acceptable in a dairy, even if it weren't a threaded coupling (which you can't do and get 3-A...

Not to rain too hard on your parade, but that weld wouldn't pass muster at my day job either. This is a sanitary weld with acceptable surface finish (inside view of a butt-welded tube connection).

I did mine using silver braze. More expensive due to the higher silver content, but it worked really well. After I ground and polished the bead, it looked pretty good. I went weldless for some of the accessory fittings, but I went tri-clamps for my main plumbing. I actually brazed on one...

1" and 1.5" tri-clamps share the same flange diameter. The abrupt diameter change makes it harder to CIP effectively, but the fittings should physically mate up.

Well, you'll be going from the outlet of your MLT to a pump, then through the coil and back into the top of the MLT. That's the flow during mashing. When it's time to mash out and start sparging, your lines will be full of high gravity wort. With the various lengths of hose I have, the...

For a 5 gallon, it would be fine. I usually shoot for about 8 gallons pre-boil, so my mash-in water is usually just shy of 4 gallons. One tip: assuming you fly-sparge, send your water into the MLT through the HERMS coil. That way you don't lose any high-gravity runnings.

I've got a 25' SS that I use for my HERMS. I measure the mash temperature at the outlet of my tun as it feeds into the recirculating pump, so it's slower to respond, but very stable. I'm doing this with a 10 gallon tun and the coil in my 10-gal HLT. It can take 10-15 minutes to ramp to mash out...

Depends on your manifold. A lot of them are just 1/4 NPT to barbs attached to the manifold. You could replace the barbs with NPT to MFL fittings without much hassle in that case.

You could use a plate heat exchanger for circulating your mash liquids, but I probably wouldn't use the kind most of us have that are all brazed together unless I had a very fine filter in place. I'd go with the kind that we have at work handling cream cheese mix (which is about 25% solids)...

If he's done sanitary welding in a professional capacity, he'll probably radius the ferrule and butt-weld. That's pretty much every sanitary weld I've seen at work where the connection is curved (tank wall, sanitary tubing tee, etc.) The dimple method is just a clever workaround to allow those...

If you follow electrical code, thermal losses in wiring are negligible. Don't waste a brain cell. All other things being equal, the thermal loss out of the kettle should be the same for identical kettles under identical ambient conditions. If I were to brew outside with NG on a day where the...