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Wow....just read through all of his posts. EPIC is all I can say. I've seen a LOT of builds and done several myself, but this takes the cake. Very clean, versatile, and should make for some comfortable brewing on a nano scale.
 
strat_thru_marshall said:
I must be missing something, why do you need 5 separate vessels?

Cool looking build though, very shiny.
Click to expand...

If you read back through, he's got some pretty awesome concepts in this build. It's being built for a nano-brewery....he wanted to have 2 MLT's and 2 BK/Whirlpools so he could do independent batches or combine them for a bigger batch. Good thinking, because from what I've read, you don't want bottlenecks in your system.
 
This just keeps happening: Just when I think I have my design phase done on a new nanobrew system, someone comes along with something I've never seen before and completely turns my world upside-down.

EXCELLENT WORK! I'm very inspired and excited.

To answer strat's question, here is a couple paragraphs from his website:

"It's a 5 vessel system because the addition of 2 vessels to the typical 3 opened up a fascinating list of possibilities for someone both desiring to supply a dozen tap taproom with small batches of constantly rotating styles and also desiring to brew bigger batches of certain styles for a little wider distribution. In a single brewday on the Bluto 555, you can brew anywhere from 1 bbl of a single beer to 4 bbls of 4 different beers (adding a tankless water heater), and with another addition of a large pre-boil reservoir, up to 12 bbls of a single beer in a single brewday is a possibility.

It's perfect for decoction mashes, turbid mashes, separate boil downs for kettle caramelization, also producing Belgian candi sugar. It doubles as open fermenters, a pre-bottling sugar/yeast mixing reservoir and a clean in place system. Stack up a hundred used bourbon and wine barrels, brew as many single brew lengths on the Bluto 555 as your heart desires to fill them all with something different and end up with barrel aged beer galore!!! The Bluto 555 is the beast of barrel brewing."
 
Pretty Fancy! Great idea with using 2 mash tuns. I am still thrilled with my more modest 15 gallon system. It also gives me the option of using two boil kettles so that I can make two relatively different beers off one mash tun.I just collect the first running which are more concentrated in the first boil kettle,then after my hl tank is empty I sparge into it and collect the second runnings and boil a lower gravity session beer in the hl tank. This is a pic like the system I am using from Synergy brewing systems: http://www.synergybrew.com/complete_systems/custom-complete-brew-system/
 
Wow...just wow. I've seen a lot of really nice builds posted up but this thing is a stainless freight train. Tremendous build you have there.

-cheers
 
You may see on his site that I have commented a time or two on his pics a while back. I am still DUMBFOUNDED at this build! What an amazing feat it is!
 
It really is a great build. I hope he posts his journey to creating a nanobrewery....this thing looks so much more brewer friendly than many of the nano's that I've seen pop up lately.
 
Hey y'all. The Bluto 555 is my labor of love. My buddy Jeff and I were sitting over here last week drinking a few beers and looking at the system, and I was lamenting how I wished I'd get more comments on the website asking questions about the particulars, so he came over and started this thread and one on morebeer. I've always wanted to write everything up in great detail, but when the time comes to do it, it's just too much work, so I end up summarizing. Hopefully the website gives you a good idea of how I hope to use the system.

The comments here have been awesome! Thank you!!! I totally love brewingmeister's comment that the Bluto is a stainless freight train. LOL. Perfect!

Last year, I was perpetually a few months away from being ready to test this thing out, and now it seems I'm stuck being a few weeks away from testing. The lesson I've learned is that it always takes longer than you think, and I suppose I'm resigned to that fact with respect to the rest of the brewery as well. I've run into a delay getting the final wiring installed, but I hope to break through that logjam soon.

Please keep an eye on the site. I'd love to have you pick the Bluto and the idea apart, and I do plan to post data concerning various tests in order to add to the field of knowledge concerning Brutus Ten style RIMS systems.

One of my goals is to demonstrate that you can do something like this too!
 
EarthBound said:
I plan on doing exactly that and making a local distribution business out of it. Do you have any similar plans?
Click to expand...

Absolutely, but I'm going about it slow, insisting on building most everything myself. It has been good therapy for a burned out lawyer. I've practically made a new career out of building this thing. :) I have no prior mechanical or electrical engineering experience, so alot of this has been a learning process for me. I have every intention of finding the perfect piece of land and building the brewery as well. That'll be a whole 'nother learning experience.

As long as my family is healthy and happy, I plan to keep at it as much as I can. I have no doubt it'll take years to do it the way I'm doing it. Maybe one day the vision will be realized :) It sure would help to reach the first milestone, which is just being able to brew the first test batch on it!!! I've got a friend here in Auburn who's going to record the first brewday, and put clips together for a youtube video.
 
Whoa, I hadn't seen this until today. Great build, it is just freakin' gorgeous.

I think I just went from 6 to midnight
 
I've brewed twice on it. Total of 4 beers, and they've all turned out great. I didn't get much video at all because there was just too much going on and too much drinking. You'd think I wouldn't touch a beer while brewing on this thing the first few times, but I guess it can't be helped when all my buddies come over to watch the first brew sessions on something that has been in development so long.

I haven't yet written anything up to accompany the pics I've taken over the past few months, but I can give a short summary that had a bunch of problems the first brewday because I tried to use the system to its highest and most automated capabilities, but didn't have the programming right, so I had to switch to manual real quick. Also the wort return manifolds immediately sunk to the bottom (duuuuhhhh!) so I just recirculated through a single tube to the top of the grain bed, moving it around manually, just to see if the mash would stick at the approx 3.5g per minute the flow was restricted to. It didn't stick, but I didn't do a mash out because things just weren't going the way I planned.

For the second brewday, I decided to go as simple as possible and just batch sparge. It was a very good brewday, but I had adjusted the flame down lower for this one, so it took longer. The gas valves have an adjustment screw that, turned all the way one way, will cause flames big enough to come up half way around the side of the kettle. But they can be turned down really low too. I'm still working on getting that right.

I've got another brewday planned for this month, and at this point I'm just trying to adjust and correct one or two things at a time. I found a way to make the wort return manifolds float, so this next time my main goals will be proper recirculation and achieving a mashout.

The whirlpool/immersion chilling worked fine but of course with Alabama ground water in August (hot) and October (still hot) took longer than I'd like. It would be awesome to have a Cold Liquor Tank and be able to run 33F water through them.

The tippy dumps make cleaning easy, but dumping the mash into a yard cart made a huge mess. I'm planning to install some snaps on the frame so I can snap on a square of tarp under the kettle being dumped to guard the inner stuff from the sticky mash splash.

No plan to put the solenoid valves to use next time, but may try to get the float switches programmed right.

The 3 prongs on the bottom of a 55g Blichmann false bottom do cause some serious dimples in the bottom of the kettle when you have a heavy mash. That false bottom also allows stuff to get sucked around the sides, but I have a buddy who designed a gasket for around the false bottom to prevent that, and he says it works great, so I'll try something similar in the future.

Butterfly valves on the outside of the mashtun wort return ports don't provide as fine a control of the flow rate as needed, so I plan to take those off and try ball valves on the inside next time. (you have to take a look at those thru port fittings to get the idea).

The triclamp ferrules on the kettle walls definitely make cleaning easy.

I don't have the tubing and tees and valves system configured so that I don't have to disconnect and reconnect things yet, but that's going to be something I'm really going to want to do in the future.
 
I’m glad to hear that you’ve made some good beer and that you plan on continuing to brew with it!

:mug:

I’m sure you’ll get more efficient with each brewday... especially when you get the programming right. I know that you didn’t recirculate properly or mash out, but I’m still wondering what kind of efficiency you achieved and what you hope to achieve on your next brew day.

I haven’t heard of gas valves with adjustments screws until now, but they are something I will definitely consider. I currently use needle valves for flame control, and they work great.

Have you considered using a shopvac for grain removal?

I’m not sure what you meant by that last sentence. Do you plan on configuring them so that you do have to disconnect and reconnect things?
 
I mean that there's a way to configure hoses, tees, crosses and valves so that you *don't* have to disconnect anything... just open and close different valves.

Hadn't thought of a shop vac, but it seems like a couple hundred lbs of spent mash might be a bit much for that.

For the first brewday, I had anticipated 75% for a approx 1.060 and a 1.080 beer. I was low on the 1.060 and just boiled it longer. And I was higher on the 1.080. Go figure. I'm clueless as to why. It was hectic with things going wrong, so really I just wanted fermentable beer to come out. The 1.080 Biere de Garde ended up being really really good, but I think that is primarily because of the great job the yeast did at the temp I had it at. 33g of this in the fermenter for 2 months, and it was gone in 1. I miss it very much. :)

The second brewday were bigger beers. I was shooting for a 1.11 wheatwine and a 1.090 belgian pumpkin. I knew I was going to be batch sparging so I estimated 60% but thought that might end up being high. And I recall they were a little lower, but I've lost my notes. (Yep, there was drinking involved again). I know I boiled the wheatwine down to 25 gal because I wanted it big, but I left the belgian pumpkin as it was. It may have been 1.085. The nice thing was that even with 60% wheat in one and a bunch of canned yams in the other, and even running them off at full speed, neither got stuck. Previous tests with water only had those pumps moving 6gpm. These didn't run off that fast because I remember the tubing from the main port to the pump inlet kindof flattened out some because of the pull... but wort continued to come through until most of the expected volume was in the boil kettle. These 2 beers just keep getting better.
 
Well, the freezer is perfect, and I would say the Stout conical is great except for the lid design. There's a silicon gasket that is supposed to fit inside a groove around the underside of the lid. When I clean and sanitize the conical, lid and gasket and then try to put the gasket in place, it just wants to slip out of the groove. In other words, you can get 80% of it on, but as soon as you start to put the other 20% of the gasket in place, the other side of the gasket slides out of place. Four hands can't even do it. And if you're lucky enough to accidentally get it on because all the planets are lined up correctly, you still have to flip the lid over, guess what happens? The gasket falls off. And if you're ever lucky enough to get it on and flip the lip over without it falling off, it probably needs cleaning and sanitizing again because you've handled it so much.

The other problem that's gasket related is that if you want to push the beer out by sending CO2 through the barb in the lid (and how else would you get it out given that most would assume that the fermenter will be sitting on the ground or in a freezer), you'll have to turn your CO2 regulator to about 15-20psi because most of the gas will escape around the gasket and you might have 5psi or so being applied to the beer to push it out.

That's just my experience so far. I haven't discussed the problem with Stout to try to find a solution or alternative gasket. I'd be interested to hear anyone else's experience with it.
 
I just ordered the 40 gallon stout conical last night - a day too early I guess ;-)

So the gasket doesn't seal?? It sounds like the gasket is a little too large. Do you get CO2 out the blow off tube or does it all leak out the lid?

I would contact John @ Stout to see if he has a solution. Let me know what you find out.
 
Once it's on, it does seals enough to get CO2 coming out of the blowoff tube. It's getting the gasket in place in the lid's underside groove that is the hard part. I don't think being too large is the problem because if it were just a bit larger, the opposite side wouldn't keep popping off when you work your way to the other side.
 
I misunderstood your problem. Maybe it is too small to get a good seal. I have a pump I can use to keg but I was hoping to push with CO2...

Hopefully John at Stout can come up with a solution for you. All of their larger conicals (20 gallons to 225 gallons) use the same type of lid. One would think that you are not the first to run into this problem.
 
Beautiful!

Just curious, for the amount of money you likely put into this (assuming it was a lot) couldn't you have built/purchased a much larger system? I'm not critiziing, just curious
 
No doubt. But it kept me occupied for a couple of years while I recovered from a complete fvcking mental breakdown, so it was worth it. Now I'm better, and I have this thing and intend to do something with it. It might take me ten years, but I have some other ideas that just need some extra moola to take shape.

I really need to update that blog.
 
That will be awesome to not have to disconnect anything!

Instead of a shopvac, maybe you could install a chute that would help direct the grain as you dump it out. This could help mitigate the mess that's made because it give the grain something to slide on between the MT and the cart. You could add a hinge to the chute to make it kind of "fold out" when it's used. I think I've seen something like that on HBT, but I can't seem to find it.

It sure sounds like you make some good beer. That's what matters! :rockin:

...

Out of all the breweries I've seen, yours is my favorite because, IMO, the whole point of your system is to produce variety. Of course you could've built a larger system, but it would produce much less variety. I plan to emulate your design in the future because of that, and I can't thank you enough for posting what you've posted on your blog.
 
The morebeer tippy dump has a chute. I like the idea, and I've thought about it several times, but I'm not too clear on it yet.. I think I'd want it very easily attachable/detachable... Something that is stored on a shelf or against a wall somewhere that would only be used when needed. I was thinking of something that hooks onto the frame somehow., and it might need the same sort of bolt and cotter pins I use to keep the kettle either in the upright or dump position.
 
Hi John,

It is easiest to install the gasket when it and the lid are dry. Then spray it with sanitizer after that (or use your CIP to sanitize after the lid is on).

Cheers,

John
Click to expand...

Quoted above is some feedback from Stout on the gasket issue. I'll give it a try next time I brew a full barrel, which I don't think is going to be the next time I brew.

What I have in mind for next time is filling up two kettles with mash (testing the recirculation and mashout this time), using the other three for water, having some buddies bring their kettles over and doing a 6 beer partigyle (3 batch sparge runoffs from each mash into six 15g boil kettles). Two high gravity, two low gravity, and two somewhere in between... figuring out the hops once the gravities are known I'm sure it will be fun. Won't need the conical though, and will just ferment in Sankes.
 
Hey, Scott !

I've been lurking on your blog since you started posting.

Your design had a big influence on the brew sculpture I'm about to build.

I'm using an inline hot water heater to supply my strike and mash out water directly. No MLT.

I'm setting it up with 1 tippy mash tun and 2 boil kettles, so that I can be doing 2 boils at once.

I'm thinking that I can get the mash tun cleaned out and the second mash going before the 1st boil is done and then chill the first boil while the 2nd mash is recircing.

But depending on the boil times, I might be sparging into the 2nd kettle before the 1st boil kettle is done.

I thought about having 2 tippy mash tuns and 2 boil kettles but thought that was overkill. I think I can make due with 1 tippy MT and 2 boil kettles.

I'm setting up to brew small batches. I want to brew small batches of many different beers every year. 11 gallon vessels for 6 to 8 gallons into the fermenters. If I want to brew a big batch, I'll do 2 mashes and 2 boils back to back and dump them into the same fermenter. Its a bit more work, but I then get by with smaller equipment and more versatility.

I'm putting PID controllers and gas valves on all my burners.

I'm also putting a removable chute behind my tippy.

As soon as the 1st mash sparge is done, I want to put the boil kettle on auto pilot, dump the 1st mash, add the strike water, put the mash tun on auto pilot and add the crushed malt. Bing, bang, boom.

We'll see how it works in reality.

You and your setup were what convinced me I should be shooting for 2 batches per brewing session.

Thanks for taking the time to document what you did.
 

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