Equipment updates

[SavaShip]

I want to run this by you guys to see if anyone can come up with a better method. I love the ease, and simple setting the temperature control you have with electric brewing, but I am fairly limited on funding for new equipment so I have to plan out months in advance.

Currently I have:
1 32qt kettle with thermometer, ball valve, and 1500 watt electric water heater filament mounted. I've been doing BIAB with it, but want to move onto brewing with a little less water, as the kettle is full for only a 2.5 gallon batch of Bock.

My plan:
Get a 2nd 8-10 gallon kettle with ball valve, filter tube and thermometer, total cost will be about $100 for that. Use the 2nd kettle as the mash tun, gravity feed the wort to my existing kettle where it is heated, and use a steelhead pump to recirculate the wort back to the brew kettle. When done, I'll raise the temp on the electric kettle to mashout temp, and sparge back into it for the boil. Boiling is achieved with the help of the electric stovetop and the filament.

Does this sound viable? Any suggestions would be appreciated, and thank you!

 

[Bobby_M]

Is the goal to be able to do 5 gallon batches?

 

[SavaShip]

Is the goal to be able to do 5 gallon batches?

Yes, the goal is to do 5 gallon batches up to 1.060 OG

 

[TexasWine]

Personally, I don't think you need to buy anything else to do 5 gallons of 1060 beer with your current set up. Mash, do a little dunk or pour over sparge, and then boil. If all the sparge water doesn't fit in the boil kettle immediately, just pour it in a little at a time as you boil off.

 

[doug293cz]

Personally, I don't think you need to buy anything else to do 5 gallons of 1060 beer with your current set up. Mash, do a little dunk or pour over sparge, and then boil. If all the sparge water doesn't fit in the boil kettle immediately, just pour it in a little at a time as you boil off.

I agree. I did up to 14 lb grain bills and OG's of 1.074 @ 5.5 gal to fermenter with BIAB in my old 32 qt pot. It's a tight fit, but can be done with some sparging.

Brew on

 

[SavaShip]

Personally, I don't think you need to buy anything else to do 5 gallons of 1060 beer with your current set up. Mash, do a little dunk or pour over sparge, and then boil. If all the sparge water doesn't fit in the boil kettle immediately, just pour it in a little at a time as you boil off.

Thanks for the advice. I've been trying to get away from BIAB, because my efficiency drops to 52% every time I've tried resulting in a lot of wasted time and energy. Plus with an exposed filament, I don't want to just add a filter tube because it would burn the barley. So while it's not necessary to add equipment, I think it would make my day easier and achieve better results. An easier day means I'm more likely to make beer!

So the question is, do you guys see anything glaringly wrong, or inefficient about my proposed 2 pot recirculating idea? The general idea is to keep the grains out of the electric heated kettle, and do a normal brew with the convenience of temperature control from the electric kettle recirculating into the filter tubed mash kettle.

 

[doug293cz]

So the question is, do you guys see anything glaringly wrong, or inefficient about my proposed 2 pot recirculating idea? The general idea is to keep the grains out of the electric heated kettle, and do a normal brew with the convenience of temperature control from the electric kettle recirculating into the filter tubed mash kettle.

It will probably work, but will be labor intensive to control. Your proposal is basically a RIMS system using a pot with an element in it, rather than a closed tube with an element in it. You would have to carefully balance the flow out of the mash tun, and the pump flow back into to the mash tun. Pump too fast, and you will pump your BK dry, probably damaging your heating element. Pump too slow, and you will dry out your grain bed, which would drop your mash efficiency. You will be constantly adjusting the pump flow during the mash, unless you come up with a float switch arrangement to turn the pump on and off to keep a relatively constant amount of wort in the pot. Even with a float switch, you would want to try to balance the flow rates pretty closely, and have some on/off hysteresis in the float switch, so that the pump doesn't cycle too frequently. Also, be aware that pump flow must be controlled with a valve on the pump outlet. If you try to throttle the pump input with a valve, you are likely to have pump cavitation, which will damage the pump.

Thanks for the advice. I've been trying to get away from BIAB, because my efficiency drops to 52% every time I've tried resulting in a lot of wasted time and energy.

If you're only getting 52% efficiency with BIAB, you have serious process issues. The 14 lb grain bill I mentioned in my earlier post yielded about 79% brewhouse efficiency (efficiency into the fermenter.) The grain bill was too large for a full volume mash, so I used a pour over sparge with the bag suspended above the BK to reach pre-boil volume. If you want some pointers on diagnosing efficiency problems, check out my post here: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showpost.php?p=6914382&postcount=13

Brew on

 

[SavaShip]

Thank you Doug! My sparge mashes end up at 80%, and my BIAB end up ridiculously low to the point where I have to boil down to a ridiculously low volume which means hop additions become all screwed up. I have fine crushed grains, stirred the entire process, used temps between 151 and 158, just no success, I do appreciate your advice you provided via the link, it is solid, but I think I'm done getting my hands scorched on the bag, and I'm not a fan of the whole BIAB process.

I expected to have the primary battle be the flow control, but recirculating should help starch conversion, shouldn't it? I could also rig up a rudimentary toggle switch set to heater unit volume if I didn't like watching my brew, and going to watch episodes of Half in the Bag instead You're right though, this seems a lot like RIMS without a separate boil kettle. With your feedback in mind, I'm going to try it, it'll take me a month or so to get the equipment, the pump being the largest expense, but I'll let you know how it goes, unless someone else points out a major flaw in the plan.

 

[doug293cz]

Thank you Doug! My sparge mashes end up at 80%, and my BIAB end up ridiculously low to the point where I have to boil down to a ridiculously low volume which means hop additions become all screwed up. I have fine crushed grains, stirred the entire process, used temps between 151 and 158, just no success, I do appreciate your advice you provided via the link, it is solid, but I think I'm done getting my hands scorched on the bag, and I'm not a fan of the whole BIAB process.

I expected to have the primary battle be the flow control, but recirculating should help starch conversion, shouldn't it? I could also rig up a rudimentary toggle switch set to heater unit volume if I didn't like watching my brew, and going to watch episodes of Half in the Bag instead You're right though, this seems a lot like RIMS without a separate boil kettle. With your feedback in mind, I'm going to try it, it'll take me a month or so to get the equipment, the pump being the largest expense, but I'll let you know how it goes, unless someone else points out a major flaw in the plan.

Since you tried BIAB, and decided you don't like the process, then moving to a different process is the correct decision for you. Sounds like you have a pretty good understanding of what you want to do. Don't let any bumps along the way discourage you. There are lots of ways to brew that work, so...

Edit: Forgot to address the (sort of) question about the effects of recirculation. Recirc, at a high enough flow rate (needs to provide some level of fluid shear in the grain bed), that flows thru most of the grain bed (i.e not a lot of channeling) can improve conversion efficiency in cases where the mash times used are not sufficient to achieve complete starch to sugar conversion. That is, recirc can help the mash complete faster. It should have no effect on anything other than conversion efficiency. So, if your conversion efficiency is already close to 100%, no additional efficiency benefit will be obtained.

Recirc can help maintain a more uniform mash temp, which may or may not have observable benefits.

Brew on

 

[dyqik]

Another "traditional" option would be to add a 10gal cooler mash tun, with a false bottom/filter braid alongside your kettle. Then you wouldn't need to recirculate, as it will hold temps well enough, and you can sparge from kettle to MLT and run-off into buckets (either fly or batch sparging) under gravity.

This is pretty much my system, although I use a second cooler as HLT to hold the sparge water I heated in my 32 qt boil kettle and run-off into the kettle. I've brewed up to 6 gal into fermenter batches of 1.075 OG ( Pliny clone and a Dubbel with a 90 min boil) in that kettle (haven't tried higher).

Then you can add the pump, HLT, RIMS/HERMS, etc. later as funds allow.

 

[SavaShip]

Update
So I ended up doing something a little different, but it worked out great, and only cost me $50.

Same general concept, cycle the wort from an electric heating kettle with a ball valve to a screen shielded grain filled pot with a ball valve, but no heat. Cycle back and forth. I used a 2qt pitcher to cycle back and forth, which left me busy the whole time, but it was enjoyable, I felt connected to the brew, while also seeing a clear way to automate it one day with a pump. I ended up with 85% brewhouse efficiency on a full 5 gallon batch at 1.052, with no troubles at all. If I would have started with this setup, the total electric startup with no gear at all would have cost only $550 including corny keg, CO2 tank +fill, 8 gallon brew pots x2, box freezer, thermostat, electrics (filament, wiring harness), fermenter, wort chiller, hoses and supplies. Sounds expensive, but there's a box freezer in that price, and a johnson controls hot/cold cut in/out thermostat. I'm really happy, and now know for certain with how much headroom I had on the last brew that I could do brews as high as 1.080 at 5 gallons. Thanks to everyone for the advice, I took it all in consideration, specifically the comment about pump regulation difficulties, which led me to save some cash and skip the pump... for now As always, you guys rule!!

 

[augiedoggy]

you can add a food grade 3gallon per minute 24v dc pump for under $40 including the powersupply and pwm speed controller...
if you havenet seen them already search "cheap wort pump"