Nice, could you give some information about the mash mixer.
I don’t like philosophy of circulating wort over the false bottom in the herms/rims process for a couple reasons and I wanted to do step mashes. So I got a home depot variable speed “mud mixer” and made an agitator out of stainless parts from amazon. The mixer luckily rests on the keg rim nicely and I used spring clamps to hold it in place. Works well overall.
Mash is heated with a 1650w 120v element.
I will manually turn on the mixer if the mash controller output is on/able to add heat.
For example, during a mash temp ramp the heat and mixer is of course on.
During a mash rest after temperature is met, I manually turn both off.
Then every 5-10 minutes I’ll need to turn both back on to bring the temp back up after some heat loss.
Depending on mash volume and environmental temp it heats the mash at 0.7-0.9c/minute.
Some learnings:
1) needed to get the controller adjusted to not overshoot when doing a rest temperature correction
2) Mash mixing speed should be fast during ramp but not so fast that air is getting whipped in
3) Mashing in below assumed gelatinization temperature will cause scorching on the element (<140 or so)
This took me 4 scorched elements to figure out. Also a scorched element doesn’t seem to recover from the cleaning very well and tends to scorch again eventually (in my experience).
If I do need a rest below that temp then I sit the kettle on a burner and adjust it manually using the controller temp probe.
4) To address point 3, I thought some enzymes could be added to prevent the scorching because I saw this once in an industrial setting with a rice mash that liked to stick on the steam jacket. But enzymes aren’t easy to find at retail.
I thought another possibility would be to pulse the relay output but that didn’t heat fast enough. Anyway I most always do a multistep infusion mash.
5) I needed a couple layers of insulation! Ignorant of me but thought I could get by without insulation. I’m using the silver bubble wrap stuff but am kn the lookout for something better if anyone has ideas!
Got about 30 brews on the electric system so far and it keeps chugging along.