Hi All,
I've gone all over the internet and can't seem to find anyone with my issue, so I pose it to y'all...
I recently got into all grain. Bought a 5 gal round cooler MLT with a false bottom. With both of my all-grain attempts, there is almost no flow out of the tun. I've tested with water and all flows well. I've blown back into it and nothing's clogged, but for whatever reason the flow out is a trickle at best.
The only thing I've been able to do to get some flow is take my stainless spoon and press on the hose that goes from the false bottom to the ball valve. Usually once I curse at it and move the spoon around enough I start getting a little flow. Once, it actually flowed out quickly, but as soon as I batch sparged it was back to the same old tricks, even with no change to the grain bed.
Everytime I've run into this I've tried to remedy by emptying out all of the grain into a bucket, try and clean out the tun in case there was some issue I couldn't see, and try again. Haven't tried the beers that have been done this way so we'll see what kind of effect that had.
The only other thing I could see causing this is a siphon problem, but I have a hose clamp on the hose on the outside of the tun, and during one of my 'empty and start over' phases, I put a clamp on one end of the inner hose (maybe I should have one on both ends??).
I'm thinking of just giving up and buying a bazooka screen to replace the false bottom, but before I do that, I'd really like to hear if anyone thinks I'm missing something. Thanks!
I've gone all over the internet and can't seem to find anyone with my issue, so I pose it to y'all...
I recently got into all grain. Bought a 5 gal round cooler MLT with a false bottom. With both of my all-grain attempts, there is almost no flow out of the tun. I've tested with water and all flows well. I've blown back into it and nothing's clogged, but for whatever reason the flow out is a trickle at best.
The only thing I've been able to do to get some flow is take my stainless spoon and press on the hose that goes from the false bottom to the ball valve. Usually once I curse at it and move the spoon around enough I start getting a little flow. Once, it actually flowed out quickly, but as soon as I batch sparged it was back to the same old tricks, even with no change to the grain bed.
Everytime I've run into this I've tried to remedy by emptying out all of the grain into a bucket, try and clean out the tun in case there was some issue I couldn't see, and try again. Haven't tried the beers that have been done this way so we'll see what kind of effect that had.
The only other thing I could see causing this is a siphon problem, but I have a hose clamp on the hose on the outside of the tun, and during one of my 'empty and start over' phases, I put a clamp on one end of the inner hose (maybe I should have one on both ends??).
I'm thinking of just giving up and buying a bazooka screen to replace the false bottom, but before I do that, I'd really like to hear if anyone thinks I'm missing something. Thanks!