Nicely done John... How's it working? Any surprises?
It's working great, now that I have all my numbers (boil off, etc.) figured out and dialed in. I initially had a false bottom in the brew kettle, with a secondary filter covering the dip tube to filter out pellet hops (which worked just fine), but I ditched it for whirlpool type setup, with a whirlpool arm and a pickup tube off the the side of the bottom of the kettle. I use both march pumps in series for the whirlpool and it works great.
The only down side is that I need to let the proteins and hops settle out before cooling and transfer to the fermentor, so the wort sits for about 20 mins after the boil. With the false bottom, I could hot kill the plate chiller with filtered wort and then get it below 150º. Both methods work fine, but I feel I get less break and hops in the fermentor by whirlpooling. I can easily put the false bottom and pickup tube back on, if need be (say, to brew a lager or pilsner and to chill the wort ASAP, thus avoiding potential DMS problems), so that's convenient.
It took a while to figure out how to raise the mash temp during vorlof efficiently, but other than that, it works great. Brewday is about 6 hrs, but if I hustle, I think I could shave 45 mins or so off of that time. It's also far less work setting up to brew than it was before, where I had to get everything setup of the shelf.
Nice setup!
