Building a mash tun for 10gal of OG1.100+ beers

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MZRIS

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Well I hope this makes sense.... We usually brew high gravity beers and we wanted to jump up to brewing 10 gallon batches. queue this 70qt coleman extreme i scored from academy sports.

I am thinking about running a nipple out of the T heading toward the ball valve to be installed and I will connect ball valve and nipple with a length of braided SS. I see most people use a hack saw to score long lines in the pipe for draining usually. I am thinking about using a dremel for smaller width lines, anyone have any other suggestions on this build before I make the final touches.

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I used a Dremel and would recommend that over a hacksaw. Go slowly or you'll burn through a million discs though.
 
My first thought is that that's not a big enough mash tun for all-grain big batches. If you go with a 1.25q/lb mash ratio, you're looking at 46 pounds of grain tops into a 72qt tun, and assuming 70% efficiency and a grain bill of all base malt, which is about a max ppg of 37, you're going to get between 1.080 and 1.90 at kettle full, depending on dead space loss, etc. You can go with a thicker mash, but your efficiency will also suffer the bigger you go.

If you use a lot of simple sugars or are ok with adding dme to big beers, you can get away with it, but otherwise I wouldn't go smaller than 100qt mash tun if all you want to do is 10+g batches of 1.100+ beers.
 
For a personal anecdote, I have a 25g cooler mash tun, and last year did a barleywine where I was aiming for 14g preboil to knock out at 12g to get 11g into two carboys. Grain bill was 50lbs of base malt, plus specialties, plus simple sugar. Turns out my 100qt cooler wasn't quite 100qt - or at least didn't agree with what the Green Bay Rackers calculator said - and while everything fit, it was super close, and of course my efficiency dropped into the low 60's.
 
I will connect ball valve and nipple with a length of braided SS. I see most people use a hack saw to score long lines in the pipe for draining usually. I am thinking about using a dremel for smaller width lines, anyone have any other suggestions on this build before I make the final touches.

agree probably too small. I am thinking the stainless steel braid will take so much of the flow, that the copper manifold wont get utilized. as if it was just replaced with the ss braid alone.
I am interested in switching my ss braided hose out for a copper manifold design. Although I batch sparge, and I stir it vs fly sparge, I dont 'really' have to worry about channeling but I think the minor channeling that does happen on my one run off could benefit from a more uniform drain
 
I have the same style of manifold in cpvc. I used a band saw to cut the slots and found that I had quite a few burrs on the piping afterwards. I used a gun cleaning kit with a 20 gauge brush to deburr the pipe. It work great and I couldn't be happier. Mine is a 36 quart and I've done a 1.1 og beer but that was at 1qt. Per pound and I also added honey and sugar to the boil. I think you can skip the braid if you use a ball valve with a copper sweat joint coupler. Just cut the last length of pipe the correct length and pivot the assembly together. No need to solder the manifold.
 
I guess, I can always move the manifold and ball valve to a larger cooler if we are not hitting target OG's I guess, lol. appreciate the feed back, everyone.

The SS braid will effectively only be less than an inch long, as the nipple and ball valve will be close together. I am hopeing that the pressure from the manifold will over power the braid, yet -still allow the last bit of the cooler to drain when it gets low. I will use some food coloring drops and fill it with water to do some hydro-dynamics testing to see how the water is flowing.
 
I used a Dremel for mine and it took ages to cut all the slots but works great. Instead of SS braid I used a short piece of silicone tubing. Also Palmer would recommend not cutting slots in the two end pieces to avoid preferential flow. Less Dremeling is a nice plus!
 
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