Well after trips to both home depot and lowe's, I'm still short the 10-gallon cooler and the SS washers. I'll hit ACE this afternoon -- or it's off to the internet. Thanks for the great write up FlyGuy!
p.s. Lowe's didn't have a threaded ball valve, so I bought the unthreaded one on accident. oops. But Home Depot had the threaded one.
p.s.s. I'm pretty excited to be going all-grain and am no longer "afraid" of terms like strike water, mash, sparge, lauter, dough in, vorlauf, mash efficiency, sparge efficiency, and Bobby_M's N.M.O.D.B.S.
Ace has a good selection of ball valves. If you have a west marine near you, you should be able to the ss stuff there.
See this post and the couple I have about the ss washers. And there is that other place that is mentioned too, I forgot the name though, they may have them. Ace is too expensive for that kind of stuff anyway.
I've been noticing very slow draining during my batch sparges, so I took a closer look at the braid and there were bits of husk stuck in the braid.
I put a hose inside the braid with notches similar to FlyGuy and you can see a white part of the braid where all the notches are.
So I headed to the hardware store and picked up the parts to build a copper manifold. It was cheaper than I expected, probably about $15 total. I had to get a little creative to connect the spigot to the manifold since I wanted the manifold to sit flush on the bottom of the cooler. Here are a couple pictures:
I ran a test run with just water and there was probably less than 1 cup of water left in the bottom of the cooler.
Edit: Used it for the first time this morning and while it took a little longer to vorlaugh, I'd say that the manifold will shave off an hour of my brew day because of the really long sparge times I was having with the braid.
The reason the stainless steel hose clamps rusted is because many manufacturers use stainless steel bands with carbon steel screws, which will rust. You need to buy marine grade stainless steel hose clamps, like those found here: http://www.plumbingworld.com/marinegradeclamps.html
The best idea I have seen so far is the post by skifast1 on the 4th page of this thread. It looks like he used a brass tee with compression/flare fittings to clamp the stainless steel braid, while getting a nice circular loop. I imagine his design gets better flow rates, than a single length of braiding.
The best idea I have seen so far is the post by skifast1 on the 4th page of this thread. It looks like he used a brass tee with compression/flare fittings to clamp the stainless steel braid, while getting a nice circular loop. I imagine his design gets better flow rates, than a single length of braiding.
Actually, the flow rate is set by the inside diameter of the fittings (in this case, 3/8"). Adding additional lengths of tubing, in any shape or design, can't overcome this bottleneck in the flow. One could use 1/2" (or larger) fittings instead, but they don't fit the original seal from the spigot of the cooler, which is retained in this conversion.
While a round braid configuration like skifast1 constructed is much better if one intends to fly (continuous) sparge, some have also claimed that a shorter length of straight tubing is better for batch sparging. When batch sparging it is common to drain the mash tun quickly, and unlike fly sparging, channelization in the grainbed actually facilitates a faster drain with less chance of a stuck sparge. A straight piece of hose is better at creating channelization, and is therefore preferred. Or so the theory goes. IIRC, it was Denny Conn himself who experimented with this.
Having said all this, I am about to install a circular loop in my MLT because I want to try a hybrid batch/fly sparge technique for some higher gravity brews, and I need a more distributed lautering system for the fly sparging component. Note, one can also make a slightly less expensive and more compact circular braid setup by fitting a plain copper pipe tee to the bulkhead and then securing a loop of braid to the tee using the marine-grade stainless worm clamps you mentioned.
So, I've taken a decently long break from brewing for several reasons. Money was one (the goverment people stole my money in March and I've been feeling it as the savings rebuilds) and wanting to age my existing brews was another.
Anyway, my mash tun ended up becoming a mold farm. Let me tell you, that's NASTY.
So, I spent a week steaming it out, soaking it in sanitizer, oxycleaning, sanitizing, drying and the like. I'm planning on doing Mash Tun version 2.0 this week. I've got the saltwater fishtank ready silicone sealant and proper sized SS washers ready to replace my ugly neoprene ones.
Has anybody used a Bazooka Screen with the 10 gallon Rubbermaid mentioned here? Did you have to get fitting adapters for the parts listed here (I have a perfect clone) or did the Bazooka Screen fit?
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