Wort stirring

Has anyone made a wort stirring contraption out of an Icecream machine? I saw one somewhere, cant remember where. They attached it to the top of the BK and switched it on, low RPM's. Looked like a neat little device to keep agitation up, without hot hands in the steam.

I was ckecking out some sites of brewing systems today and saw just exactly what you are talking about..... here is one I saw.

http://www.goldendogbrewery.com/boiler.cfm

That is the one i was looking at. Damn.....you are good!...Thankz

OK, I give up- why would you want to stir your wort?

Mikey said:

OK, I give up- why would you want to stir your wort?

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I second this. Boiling in general does a pretty fine job of agitation.

Mikey said:

OK, I give up- why would you want to stir your wort?

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The only thing I can think of is that keeping the wort moving helps prevent boilovers.

i try to NOT stir my wort...i know the big breweries like to agitate theirs but my propane burner creates such a massive rolling boil i dont see the point. Plus i dont like to stir the hot-break back into the wort.

it looks like it would work though if you want to do that.

I'd use this thing to stir the mash in a heated and temp regulated mash tun. So thanks for the tip, I may go back to this idea when I build a bigger system.

There is no real need to actually stir the boil. Except for decoction mashes.

Kai

Stirring the top of the mash while sparging is a good way to prevent channeling.

Kaiser said:

I'd use this thing to stir the mash in a heated and temp regulated mash tun. So thanks for the tip, I may go back to this idea when I build a bigger system.

There is no real need to actually stir the boil. Except for decoction mashes.

Kai

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Now that makes sense. If you could stir your mash with that you would probably get a more consistent temperature. Only problem I see is heat loss out of the top of the mash tun.

Insulate the top of the mash tun to solve that problem.

Also, when batch sparging, an automated stirrer could probably grab a couple more efficiency points for you.

RichBrewer said:

Now that makes sense. If you could stir your mash with that you would probably get a more consistent temperature. Only problem I see is heat loss out of the top of the mash tun.

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It is easier to fasten a stirer to a mask kettle (e.g. heated mash tun). And if you stir the mash in a cooler, you may end up loosing more heat than in an unstirred mash just because you create convection that normally doesn't exist.

That's why I added "heated and temp regulated".

Kai