Just changing brewing method

[herms bay]

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[herms bay]

An inspirational build. You obviously put much thought into your new process. It would be lovely if you kept the forum informed of your progress while the system beds in.

I have made 52l net Grapefruit IPA, 53l net Pilsner and 52l net Munich lager so far with results hitting the numbers. Get about 85% extract efficiency and 76% Brewhouse efficiency.
for the pilsner I tried a basic recipe; 9kg lager malt, 200g Biscuit malt and 200g rice hulls, Ended with 54l in fermenter @ 1.045 OG so ended up with 52l at 5%abv
When i went to recirculate through HLT I was at full throttle within 1 minute and stayed there as you have to balance between flow rate and HLT temp. If I reduce the flow rate my delta from HLT to mash temp reduces from about 1.5 DegC to 0 so only adjust the temp to in HLT to change mash temp.

Have added a mod to the pickup of my kettle (stainless trub guard) so that it holds back the hops at the very end of the drain to fermenter. This allows me to drain all but 0.5l to the fermenter.

Just for reference my boil and HLT are 71l ~(Dia 450mm) and I get about 7-8l evaporation/hr during boiling. Also always pump sparge water through HLT coil then to the mash as it cleans out the coils as well. Any questions will try to answer.

[Eric]

Yes, very good figures and might suggest your efficiency is higher than you advise. Also use 70 litre boiler and HLT, but with 40 litre MT. Did run very simple RIMS for a few years, but gave up for a number of reasons.

Your results are impressive, amazed you lose less than 1% volume to hops, my losses can be closer to 10 times yours and need to take a series of measures to achieve a similar outcome to yours. Very well done.

[herms bay]

Yes, very good figures and might suggest your efficiency is higher than you advise. Also use 70 litre boiler and HLT, but with 40 litre MT. Did run very simple RIMS for a few years, but gave up for a number of reasons.

Your results are impressive, amazed you lose less than 1% volume to hops, my losses can be closer to 10 times yours and need to take a series of measures to achieve a similar outcome to yours. Very well done.

My transfer is so slow as my heat exchanger/cooling coil is not very good, this has the added bonus of draining slowly and the trub cone collapses very slowly so the cone is quite dry by the end. It can take 30 mins to transfer from 80C to 20C to the fermenter. I only added 100g of hops: I prefer to use high alpha bittering first and use Saaz for flavour and aroma, less hops less waste. this ended up at 35 IBU's

The weird thing is expansion, I probably loose 9 l of actual liquid in evaporation.

Magnum (German) Pellet 14.7% 40.00g 60 Mins
Saaz (Czech) Pellet 3.9% 30.00g 10 Mins
Saaz (Czech) Pellet 3.9% 30.00g whirlpool 10 mins

[Eric]

Yes, my kettle drain off rate is too slow in truth. Just looked at some old figures and see one of 8 times hop weight for retained beer, while of late used relatively large quantities of low alpha cone hops. There's a filter fitted, so after some recycling, no debris reaches the FV.

Boil for 90 minutes with greater evaporation, but can frequently brew at higher gravity and have to liquor back. Very interesting.

[emyrjones88]

Hi Hermes, nice build, Im just starting on a similar panel build. Is there any chance you can share your wiring diagram/pictures of the inside layout?

[LeeH]

Pm me your email I can send you mine if needed.


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[LeeH]

Talk us through the decision making on why the MT doesn't sit flat. Not seen that before.

Center drain, was very common 10 years ago to eliminate dead space when 3V systems were popular.

I would never go back to one personally on a homebrew scale. I sold mine.


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