My old man's electric rig

I taught him how to make beer, then when he got bored of BiAB (it can get a bit cumbersome and messy) he made this.


The HLT is 25 liters, and the MLT is 36 liters.


Heating element is a 2.2 kW water boiler.


He's gonna need a false bottom there.


Looks a bit scary!


German instructions, wee! So far, only I can turn this on. (Celcius!)


A pump from a washer, we're not sure how much heat it can take yet.

He winged most of it, but I gave him some pointers - even though I don't know that much about these kinds of rigs. This is currently the wet dry run, seing if it'll burn down the house or leak.

That's cool man. Way to go.

Seems to be having problems reaching mash out temp. Any suggestions? We'll be isolating the kettles, but I don't think that'll be enough. It's currently at 68.2°c. There's 10 liters of water in the HLT, should not take two hours to heat up to mash temps.

I'm guessing the universal thermostat is the bottleneck.

Hard to tell what's being used for a heating element but it appears to be 110V and woefully small for the application.

Check out this thread for a 110V build

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f170/how-build-5-gal-110v-ebiab-kettle-304914/

It's 230V, and like I said it's from a water boiler.

Onihige said:

It's 230V, and like I said it's from a water boiler.

Click to expand...

Sorry, didn't see that you were in Sweden. Little too quick on the reply. Is there any way that you can remove the thermostat from the loop and run the element full on to see what temp you can reach?

Yup, just have to disconnect it. But one one the hoses started leaking so we're gonna have to fix that first.

Bloody 'ell, a bunch of things went wrong on the test brew. First of all, it sprung yet another leak - in the worst place, this time. Just above the electric heating element. Luckily, we noticed it fast enough and he fixed it, after several hours.

Someone had messed with the mill, so we got flour rather than crushed grains. Also, we had to substitute one malt for another. We had problems maintaining a good temperature on the mash, we're gonna drill a hole in the mash tun and install a thermostat hopefully fixing that issue. Currently we only have a temperature probe checking water temp going into the mash tun, which I suspect we need to tweak too. May be dropping some temp during the drizzle and what not.

Huge temperature drop when we mashed out, way below required. Measured OG, post boil, was 1.060 - it should've been around 1.070.

Spiggot was open in the fermenting bucket, so we lost a liter or two. Also, it looks like mud in the bottom on the fermentor, tried to drain a sample from the spiggot - would hardly drain, so thick. It was brown, sort of looked like a muddy puddle on a rainy day.

Due to the darker grain we had to substitue with, this can in no way be an IPA... maybe call it Muddy Waters DIPA?

Hello. Mostly a lurker here, but I'll pitch in when I can. You need to insulate that mash pot or switch to a cooler for mashing. You probably have better/cheaper access to a
reasonably priced Bruheat element with thermostat than we do in N. America for the wort boiler, 2200 watts power IIRC. I used one for a few years and it worked great for 5 gallon brews. As for the pump, I used a "modified" washer pump for a while until I found a March pump on Ebay for a really good price. As for the fermentor, there is always a thick cake of yeast/trub sitting in the bottom after ferment, no worries.