Recirculating?

Hi, I'm a new brewer, considering going to all grain via BIAB. After reading many of the threads here, I'm trying to decide if a recirculating system is important or not? The commercially available systems being sold such as unibrau, brew-boss, etc all recirculate, and use electric elements. Does anyone use an induction burner and recirculate? I realize there's little automatic temp control with induction, but it appeals to me.

Does recirculating add any more effiency? And does it help with temperature at all? I'd like to build my own system, just trying to decide where to go.

Thanks for any help

Jeff

In my experience it does not help with extract efficiency. Recirculation wont help with temperature either unless you are planning on RIMS or HERMS. I can't speak to induction burners.

IMHO all the fancy electric systems are more fun than necessary, or important as you said. Both a 3 vessel $3k electric system and a $100 stove top BIAB system can both produce great beer. That said I'm in the middle of rebuilding my own electric RIMS brewery because it's just so darn fun.

If you're already getting good conversion efficiency (>92%), then recirculating won't help your efficiency much, maybe an extra 1%. What it helps with is

1) Speeds up gelatanization which is what's making the starchs available to the amalyze enzymes for conversion. Think cooked oatmeal instead of dry oats.

2) Allows for more uniform temperature, which is of arguable benefit.

3) Allows for automatic temp control with an additional source of heat.

I know of brewers successfully using 10 gallon kettles on 3K induction burners.

As with most brewing topics, there are many opinions. I do either single vessel BIAB or two vessel MIAB with an induction cooktop as my heat source. I have a pump and can recirculate when I mash in my kettle. But after doing it a bunch of times, I didn't see a consistent efficiency benefit. Of course when you recirc, you also need to actively monitor and control temperature. So there's a snowball effect to the complexity. I don't have a PID/controller nor do I want one, so that affects my choices.

Without recirculating, I just insulate the kettle or cooler mash tun, accept the loss of 2-3 degrees during the mash, and end up with the same (BIAB) or better (MIAB with batch sparge) efficiency. I still use the pump to get my strike water into the cooler via underletting, which is nice because it avoids doughballs. But I think my recirculation days are numbered, if not over.

pricelessbrewing said:

If you're already getting good conversion efficiency (>92%), then recirculating won't help your efficiency much, maybe an extra 1%. What it helps with is

1) Speeds up gelatanization which is what's making the starchs available to the amalyze enzymes for conversion. Think cooked oatmeal instead of dry oats.

2) Allows for more uniform temperature, which is of arguable benefit.

3) Allows for automatic temp control with an additional source of heat.

Click to expand...

Spot on, as usual. I'd like to expand just a tad.

#3, I find I can get better consistency with temp control. I can hold what temp I desire, regardless of ambient temps.

Also, I like to do step mashes (Hochkurz). 144F for 15 or so minutes, ramping to 162F for 30 minutes. Without a pump and temp control that'd be much more labor intensive.

SalmonJefe said:

Hi, I'm a new brewer, considering going to all grain via BIAB. After reading many of the threads here, I'm trying to decide if a recirculating system is important or not? The commercially available systems being sold such as unibrau, brew-boss, etc all recirculate, and use electric elements. Does anyone use an induction burner and recirculate? I realize there's little automatic temp control with induction, but it appeals to me.

Does recirculating add any more effiency? And does it help with temperature at all? I'd like to build my own system, just trying to decide where to go.

Thanks for any help

Jeff

Click to expand...

When I was first debating going wth an eBIAB set up I weighed out all the various vendors and landed on Brau Supply (makers of the Unibrau).

Around that same time I also saw a tally that Steven (owner of Brau Supply) had put together with the costs of all the various components that make up his system and links to those items. Now I am confident if you did some shopping around the Chinese websites for some of those items, you could DIY even cheaper than he advertised. But for me, the hassle of finding the absolute rock bottom price for all the components, then figuring out how to assemble it all, hopefully not electrocuting myself, just wasn't worth it.

So, my advice, if you're like me, just buy one off the shelf.

I will say, I've gotten really handy with step bits and weldless bulkheads. I assemble my own kettles now because they're easy and it's cheap. Going to drill a hole in one tonight for a recirc port

I suggest you get some experience doing basic BIAB with just a kettle, a bag and a heat source. When you get good at that you can decide if it is worth it for you to go down the rabbit hole and start fooling with pumps, pids, hoses, false bottoms, etc.

Simple BIAB is so easy and effective I see no need for me to "improve" a process that is not broken.

I think most, just my opinion, who prefer automated systems do so for the pleasure of operating them and fiddling with them more so than that the beer is noticeably "better". I agree automation could result in more consistent beer, but I brew different varied beer almost every time, and I can't remember the nuances of a beer I brewed a year ago.

JMO again, but I feel that there are many more important things to worry about in homebrewing than hitting and maintaining a "perfect" mash temp, and with a bit of experience you can come pretty darn close using simple techniques.

I am a fan of simple in case you haven't noticed....cheers and welcome!

Personally, re-circulation helped my efficiency. Or maybe it was the move to a RIMS system, don't know exactly. All I know is that in my old setup that was bare bones BIAB wrap the kettle in a sleeping bag and hope for the best while stirring a bunch of times I was getting about 70% extraction efficiency, and only if I did some sort of rinse sparge after the mash. With my electric RIMS setup I got 84% extraction efficiency.

Did I need to go to a fancy electric setup? Not at all, I was making good beer. But I like projects and this one was fun.

Most often efficiency is related to the crush of the grain which also determines how long the mash needs to continue. With uncrushed grains you can get conversion and perhaps extract the sugars that are in the kernels but it might take many hours to do so and the temperature would need to be held constant to get the conversion. As the size of the particles goes down, the time needed to gelatinize the starches, get them converted, and extract the resulting sugars reduces. With grains crushed or ground to near flour, that process is very quick. With all that in mind, you can decide based on the milling of your grains whether you would benefit from heat retention or recirculating. If you do decide to recirculate you have to keep in mind that you can plug up the weave of the bag with the fine material so you would have to control the speed of recirculation as well as the heat added.

Thanks everyone, your thoughts and insights confirm my suspicions. Now it's off to the malted barley store...