What to do with 3BBL Mash Tun?

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Bobby_M

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Fill it! Duh.

The Whales mashed 267 pounds of grain for a 65 gallon batch of Russian Imperial Stout.

We got 20 gallons of 1.055 OG "tails" for another little session batch.

100gRIS.jpeg
 
We mocked up a quick external direct fire RIMS. It gravity fed into a keggle on a burner and we pumped it back. I put an inline temp probe coming out of the keggle to watch the temps and just regulated to maintain about 4 gallons in there. It was effective in holding temps but was obviously pretty slow for any ramping.

We doughed in by filling buckets half way with strike water, passed it on to the next team who used a drill driven mixer to stir while grain was added. Pass that on to the next team that dumped it in and passed the bucket back to the HLT.

The HLTs were two 55 gallon barrels that later become boil kettles. The first 50 gallons of runoff are collected in HLT one while HLT 2 is still holding sparge. After HLT 2 is empty, we equalize the two and boil.

I have some video footage of the day that I hope to get up on youtube by next week.
 
thats crazy! and amazing all in one shot... with the thing holding the blanket, it looks like an older paint can
 
How did you get that? Club purchase, or what?
It belongs to another club member. His whole family is big into making homemade wine, and his brother aquired it years ago when a local company was dismantling a factory. It was a distilled water tank in its past life.

Really, we're just lucky that he's willing to lend it to the club for these big brew projects.
 
awesome! any more pics?

here's all the grain after we milled it. stored in the shed overnight. (that 55g fermenter is filled with 13g kitchen bags of grain, too)

WBBSgrain.jpg

and this is 6:06am when I lit the burners to start heating the strike water. 84g strike water, 41g sparge water. The 2 big mamas are 55g on custom Bobby_M stands with 3 burners each. And the kettle in the foreground is 25g that we used to boil up the 2nd runnings (20g of 1050 wort).

lit_burners.jpg
 
How many bottles of gas did you burn through?

Congrats on the epic brew!
We used about 60 lbs of propane.

Found some more pics.

We doughed-in the first 40-50 lbs in buckets until the CPVC manifold was covered

dough-in-bucket.jpg

Manifold is almost covered

fillingMLT.jpg

Here's the barrel we got for aging the stout in. It was drained the morning my pal picked it up in Kentucky

barrel.jpg
 
The nice thing about a MT that size is that you can just fill it up with your hot chiller run off and have a nice soak at the end of a long brew day. :mug:
 
bobby_m just posted a video of our brewday and when we racked the beer to the barrel.



and here she sits in my basement (currently surviving Hurricane Irene).

barrel.jpg
 
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Unless I missed a post, I came away wondering.......how was that much wort chilled?
We used a therminator and recirc chilled the wort until it was in the mid 90's (hot hot day and the groundwater was 80º IIRC) and then we filled my 10g mash tun with ice and pumped the icewater through the coolant side of the therminator while transfering to the fermenter. Worked well, but we didn't have enough ice in the end.

The 20g second runnings we chilled with an immersion chiller.
 
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