Cleaning/draining a complete 3 keg brewery

So I'm in the process of building my brewery, I have the kegs, courtesy of New Belgium (15 bucks a pop from their fortcollins brewery!). I'm using a brew troller setup and have everything except the hop and grain additions automated (yes sparge is automated).

I'm using 2x LG 3-MD-HC pumps and one peristaltic pump that I put together with PWM motor control for fly sparge. I'm also using a 40 plate plate chiller from duda diesel. I have one solenoid valve for the water from the faucet and then I have motorized ball valves for the rest of the control valves.

I'm going all SS pipe for this, not tubing, and so everything will be screwed together using fittings, mostly because the compression fittings are so DAMNED expensive, and I can do it this way for much cheaper.

Well I've got most of it built, stand is built, control box is done, code is written and mostly tested. Now I'm to the point where I need to measure out exactly what all fittings I will need and exactly how I want to pipe the thing to get everything like I want it.

So here's the problem. I'm trying to plan this so it's not a royal PITA to clean each time I brew. I plan to recirculate with hot PBW/oxyclean through the system after sucking the grain and pellet hope debris out with a wet/dry vac, then doing a rinse cycle. The issue I seem to be having is how to make sure the system will drain completely after I'm done so I dont have water just sitting in some of the fittings.

For example, the pumps, due to how they are arranged with the 3/4 input with the flow direction perpendicular to the pump drive shaft means there will always be a low spot on the pump head where water will sit no matter where you place it.

Another example is that in many right angle fittings, etc, the middle of the fitting sits lower than the threaded part, allowing water to pool there when you're done.

So I'm trying to come up with a way to make sure that if not all, enough of the water will drain out that it wont cause a problem, or such that what is left in will evaporate without any issues.

So any hints/tips/tricks you guys have for doing that I'd love to hear.

Thanks!

I'm not sure about how the pumps would take this...but what about rigging up some sort of air compressor to it? When you're done rinsing everything, you hook up an air hose to one of your ports and blow compressed air through the entire system. Not sure if it would work how I'm thinking...but it's a thought.

I'm no expert, but why not just leave the lines filled with water from your tap? You could close off open air access, so the chloramine treated tap water would stay good for quite a while. Of course maybe you have not plumbed it with this in mind. And this assumes your tap water is treated with chloramine.

Folks talk of chlorine soaking being a no-no for stainless, but I doubt your tap water would be a problem.

Now I'm thinking I've missed something and have just put my foot in my mouth.

With my tube in tube CFC, I just let the rinse tap water drain, but there's bound to be water that remains. I put some tin foil over the ends to keep the spiders out.

Most folks use copper/stainless/aluminum, from what I read. Obviously you don't want to have acidic fluids like Star San hanging around for a long time in ... say ... copper.

Is it important to dry our metal gear?

I've thought about compressed air, though I dont have a compressor that is oil-less, so I'd blow a little bit of compressor oil through the whole system unless I got a different one.

What I'm afraid of is that leaving water in is a great place to things you dont want to grow, to grow in, and leaving some things in water is a great way to get corrosion, though with the whole thing stainless and the pump heads being ryton or what ever they are, it "shouldnt" be a problem to leave it full of water, minus the fact that I have to push all that water out on the next brew.... which I dont like that idea. I'd like to be able to drain it.

If the joint of the 90s are sitting lower than the threads, you could replace them with T's? You could attach the bottomost part of the T to a small piece of tubing and a ball valve that you could open at the end of cleanup to drain the vertical tubing and any tubing sloped towards the 90?

Am I making any sense at all, have another one ey?

I push almost every drop of liquid out of my system with CO2... costs a bit, but I have 2 20lb tanks at my disposal. I made a flare->camlock fitting so I could just hook it up to my rig as is. It may not get every last drop out... but I'm happy with it.

Yea the T idea had occured to me as well, however if you use it to make the 90 degree turn then you'd have to pretty much drill a whole in the side to be able to drain it or it would have the same issue as the regular 90 turn.... unless they make fittings where they are a 3 way conector with one out on the x axis, one on the Y and one on the Z then that would do it... might have to look into that.


I suppose I could put a very fine one or two micron air filter on the air compressor and then use it... hmm...

I love the C02 idea, too bad I dont have access to something like that.

If you have a 3 keg system you better have some access to C02. You could either use C02 or filtered shop air (air compressor).

What about using stainless tubing and flared fittings? That might be cheaper than compression fittings. I'm sure there is a reason why all the breweries have plumbing that can be disassembled and cleaned....

Both the flaired and the compression fittings are very expensive. For example, a single compression or flair fitting can cost 20 bucks, but to get that same setup to work with screw fittings they are 4-7 bucks a piece, less than half for the same usage most of the time.

Not sure why I'd better have access to C02 with a 3 keg system... only possible reason I could think of is for a kegerator system or something of the like, but currently I dont have anything like that, I bottle all the beer, and even if I did have korny kegs the C02 bottle is pretty small... but as far as operating the setup... no need for C02 that I can think of, well except this application, but I'd rather use the filtered air compressor air I already have.

I've been trying to brain storm an idea on how to do the piping so that it has a continous downill slant so that the water will all just flow out, though for reasons I've already talked about I dont think I can do that, especially with the pumps.

So far I'm thinking I'll put a fitting to connect the air compressor with an inline filter in a good spot to blow it out so that's one option. I'd like to explore all the options though, even though I'm not sure there may be others, haha.

shushikiary said:

Both the flaired and the compression fittings are very expensive. For example, a single compression or flair fitting can cost 20 bucks, but to get that same setup to work with screw fittings they are 4-7 bucks a piece, less than half for the same usage most of the time.

...

I've been trying to brain storm an idea on how to do the piping so that it has a continous downill slant so that the water will all just flow out, though for reasons I've already talked about I dont think I can do that, especially with the pumps.

Click to expand...

Yeah, but with the flare fittings you can use tube and bend it to the way you want, i.e. no need for more fittings (elbows, etc.) to change directions. The flaring tool might be a killer for that idea unless you can borrow/rent. Have you also factored in the price of stainless pipe vs tube, at the size for a home brewery I have been told you'd have to go with sch 40 pipe to allow it to be threaded (sch 10 or less would leave very little material leftover after threading or something). There is much more material in sch 40 pipe compared to tube and that means more $$$.

You will need to mount your pumps at the low point to get them flooded (unless your not using the usual march/LG/chugger style) so why not put low point drains at the pump inlet and any other low spot.

I dry mine out with filtered shop air, I have been doing it for years. I do, do a hot H20 rinse before I use it again, but all in all my system is cleaned and blown dry before I put her to bed.
Using a bottom drain on all kettles helps too. Just a thought for ya'
Cheers
Jay

Good for you. I can't imagine going back to bottles now. I try to keep my batches to 20 gal and to bottle that would take hours. Figure it would take at least 3-4 mins a bottle when you take into consideration cleaning, sanitizing, filling, capping... That would be around 5 1/2 hours for 20 gals! There would have to be a couple of good games on to sit at the bar all day and bottle.

What about using stainless union fittings? That would allow you to keep using the stainless threaded pipe and to disassemble for cleaning.



I use this one for my gas line. A handful of well placed unions and your system can break down enough to really clean it

Hmm the unions are an interesting idea. I've never really used them. Another option similar to that I suppose is that the cam lock fittings on bargain fittings are at a REALLY nice price, in fact for both the sides of the stainless camlocks they sell it's only like 2 bucks more than buying a union of the same size.

I can definitely put a drain at the lowest point where the pumps are (they are placed at the lowest point in the system). I'd just have to take the pump head off time to completely drain the pump head, though that's not that hard I suppose. I could.. though kind of risky... drill and tap the pump head and put a small 1/4 ball valve or something there to drain the pump head with and the entire system at the lowest possible point... not sure I want to try that though.

As far as the pipe, the tubing and the sch 40 pipe are almost the exact same price for 72 inches of the stuff at onlinemetals so sense the tubing and the pipe are the same price the question is more in the cost of the fittings. I see your point about the bending though, so I could cut out a lot of the right angle fittings and it would actually be easier to make sure the system stays clean without dis-assembly.


For bottling, with 3 of us involved we have it down that we can get 50 bottles bottled in about 30 minutes, with about 30 minutes of prep work. The prep work would be about the same for twice the bottles sense we make sure the bottles are clean after use it's really easy to deal with them. So I bet we could bust out 100 bottles for a 10 gallon batch in 1.5 hours of total work. Though I have been tempted to get a korny keg setup and keg 5 gallons and bottle the other 5.

And yea currently we've been using a sponge to 100% get all the water out of the bottom of our keggle, it would be nice to simply have a valve on the bottom to drain with. Though thinking about it... I'd have to put a nut on it (everything is weldess fittings) which would raise the drain level higher than my current dip tubes have them set unless I had the fitting welded in (lids are already off the kegs so I cant use the awesome tri clover setup or other things like that that some have used).


Thanks for all the suggestions, it's giving me idea's!

You guys rock at bottling! Funny, my friends always seemed a bit busy when it came to bottling time or we all had a few too many to be efficient.

Hmmm. Drilling and tapping the pump head could work. Easy to screw things up but if you're careful it could be very cool. It could help prime the pump and act as a sampling valve. I put a sampling valve after the pump for that very reason.



Tri-clovers are very handy. I imagine I could clean everything in place but I can't help but break everything down. It's kind of fun too.

What kind of fittings are those that you put, what appears to be SS tubing, into the end of the tri clap fittings?


Yea I just did some math on a basic layout idea... I need 23 SS elbows to get the job done, I can get them for 1.55 a piece for 304 SS from murray equipment, to do the same job with tubing I have to buy 15 compression fittings... at 16 bucks a pop... $240 vs $36.. MUCH cheaper to do the elbows and pipe.

Attached to the pump? Those are stainless threaded couplings. I welded some tri-clovers to the end of them to make the fittings I needed.

It's all SS tubing. The coil is my heat exchanger and RIM coil as well. It's a tube inside a tube and then bent in a hexagon. I run water from the HLT in the big tube while recirculating my mash water thru the smaller line to maintain the desired mash temp. I then do the same after the boil but run cold water thru the big line. It works great.

I'm in the tiny shop vac camp.

Take a look at your plumbing lines. I bet if you changed out a handful of screwed fittings you could still partially take it apart.

If you do decide to go permanent then Ridged and Husky both have a 2.5 and 2 gallon shopvac. I've used the Ridged before and that little thing is powerful! It can suck or blow (insert joke here) and it doesn't take up much space at all.

Would be cool to see some pics!

The seats in the valves and the internals in the pump are usually for rougher service. I woundnt worry about it unless your leaving it sitting for a long time.

You coud put a couple of stainless tees in the line with a plug for a cleaning air/drain port. Remove plug after brewing for draining then blow in the port or blow on top somewhere and let it drain to the bottom where the tee port is facing down.