Cheap Mash Cooler Idea and Question

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mimus

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I'm trying to find the least expensive way to modify a cooler for mashing. Rather than spend money on a new cooler, I'm using one on hand that doesn't come with a drain. I've used a spigot assembly from a bottling bucket instead of buying new brass hardware. The spigot attaches only to the inner wall of the cooler. I plan to add a rubber stopper to the back side, then connect to a copper pickup tube and a stainless braid. It's not pretty, but doing it this way saves money for ingredients.

CIMG0329.JPG

CIMG0331.JPG


I'm concerned that the spigot and stopper won't be able to handle the high temperatures of mashing without failing or leaching chemicals into the wort. I've exposed both parts to boiling water and they held up without giving off any chemical smell.

I know this method isn't as good as the other guides here, but I'm trying to save money and don't mind a bit of inconvenience. So, will it work?
 
it will work, but you will be losing a lot of efficiency. in other words, you won't be getting a lot of fermentable sugars out of your grain which, if you put a little work into a manifold, you could get out. ideally, you'd have a copper or cpvc manifold (read: cheap) that went to every corner of the cooler and plenty of cross pieces (think a checkerboard design) with holes drilled on the bottom side of the pipes. then your sugars wouldn't have any dead spots in the cooler where you couldn't get them out, which you'll have big time with the braid.

that said, you should be fine with the braid but you might end up spending more money in the long run on the extra grain to get the same amount of fermentables that you could have otherwise gotten with a more efficient mash tun.
 
doggage said:
it will work, but you will be losing a lot of efficiency. in other words, you won't be getting a lot of fermentable sugars out of your grain which, if you put a little work into a manifold, you could get out. ideally, you'd have a copper or cpvc manifold (read: cheap) that went to every corner of the cooler and plenty of cross pieces (think a checkerboard design) with holes drilled on the bottom side of the pipes. then your sugars wouldn't have any dead spots in the cooler where you couldn't get them out, which you'll have big time with the braid.

that said, you should be fine with the braid but you might end up spending more money in the long run on the extra grain to get the same amount of fermentables that you could have otherwise gotten with a more efficient mash tun.
Click to expand...

Sorry, this is, um.....wrong.

Or at least, it depends. If he is fly sparging, braids suck. If he is batch sparging, (which I recommend, esp for a braid setup), his efficiency will be just fine. With a batch sparge, whether you use a braid, manifold, false bottom, or molecular sieve, the efficiency is the same.

OP, as for whether or not your spigot will leech things that will kill you, don't worry. Hell, many people USE bottling buckets as MLTs, (I do). You are just fine. 100% Have fun :mug:.
 
You might match that internal thread up. If so you can use a female to male barb fitting to attach your braid and just get rid of the stopper.

Edit: Just checked that type of spigot and found a female 3/4" pipe thread will fit it.
 
Mimus, I haven't used a cooler with a braid. I use a keg with a false bottom. I'm sure your braid will do fine because you don't have to have incredible efficiency to make great beer.

But as easy as it is to create a good manifold out of cheap material such as cpvc, I'd recommend it. The solutes from your mash are not going to somehow travel from the corners and bottom sides of your tun to your braid. Why not just put together a cheap manifold that's going to collect from all corners and edges of your tun?

This show explains that "the main impact on your efficiency is your crush and your sparging". So of course you don't need to worry about the manifold/braid issue as much as other factors. But if you're interested in learning about why a manifold will work better than a braid, listen to it.
 
From that show (Brew Strong on the Brewing Network):

Jamil Z and John P note that most of the problems with a mash are probably related to "something of the physical nature...either your particle size (your crush) or it's how you're getting your sugars out of your mash tun".

Later in the show, John Palmer discussed to ridiculous extent the ways to optimize collection of your sugars, and a braid was pilloried. In addition, John Palmer writes about the same issue on his website.
 
doggage said:
The solutes from your mash are not going to somehow travel from the corners and bottom sides of your tun to your braid. Why not just put together a cheap manifold that's going to collect from all corners and edges of your tun?
Click to expand...

I imagine the solutes travel all around the tun whilst I'm stirring the mash doing a batch sparge...no?
 
wilserbrewer said:
I imagine the solutes travel all around the tun whilst I'm stirring the mash doing a batch sparge...no?
Click to expand...

Yup, that's the idea wilser.

Doggage, I agree that what you are saying applies greatly to fly sparging. In fly sparging, you are not disturbing the grain bed. You are pouring sparge water in the top, and taking it out of the bottom. In this case, everything you said is absolutely, 100% true.

With batch sparging, however, first drain down the mash tun entirely, (dry grainbed, pretty much), then refill with sparge water, and stir vigorously. This stirring homogenizes your grain/water mix, and you have no "sugar hotspots" as they talk about. You drain the whole thing again, and refill again, (for two batch sparges). This means that it doesn't matter HOW you get wort out of the grain, as long as you get it out.

Again, I completely agree with what the experts on that show say, and I think nearly everyone on this forum is with you and I. But they are talking about fly sparging. See, with fly sparging, you can develop those "dead zones", where you can't pull out any more sugars because there is no flow there. But with batch sparging, you stir the crap out of your MLT after each infusion. The math with this stirring becomes very simple. Say you get 60% of the sugars out with each "batch". First batch pulls out 60% of your sugars. 40% remains. Second batch pulls out 60% of the remaining 40%, or 24% of the original, now 84% are out, and 16% remain. Third batch pulls out 60% of the remaining 16%, or 9.6%, for a total of 93.6% sugar removed. (This is, not coincidentally, the same reason rinsing a soapy bottle 3 times with a bit of water is far more effective than mixing it 1 time with 3x as much water).

Again, for batch sparging, it doesn't matter if you have a braid, manifold, false bottom, or coffee filter....
 
Shorty, this is what I love about this forum. I was answering someone else's question (going off what I'd heard, but apparently not fully understood) and now I've learned something. Now I'm actually thinking about moving from fly sparging to batch sparging because of your explanation. Thank you!
 
Great discussions. I've got a cooler that has the spigot on it like in the OP and it works fine, no issues with the heat. I have a braid on the back of it and it works OK.
 
doggage said:
Mimus, I haven't used a cooler with a braid. I use a keg with a false bottom. I'm sure your braid will do fine because you don't have to have incredible efficiency to make great beer.

But as easy as it is to create a good manifold out of cheap material such as cpvc, I'd recommend it. The solutes from your mash are not going to somehow travel from the corners and bottom sides of your tun to your braid. Why not just put together a cheap manifold that's going to collect from all corners and edges of your tun?

This show explains that "the main impact on your efficiency is your crush and your sparging". So of course you don't need to worry about the manifold/braid issue as much as other factors. But if you're interested in learning about why a manifold will work better than a braid, listen to it.
Click to expand...

It's been said already but just to concur, Palmer was talking about fly sparge efficiency though he wasn't very clear about it at the time. Batch sparging efficiency is mostly affected by crush and how much dead space you have in your tun so my advice to the OP is to either have a small piece of copper tubing shoved into the stopper that curves down and along the bottom or tilt the tun towards the drain by shoving a 2x4 under the other side.
 
doggage said:
Shorty, this is what I love about this forum. I was answering someone else's question (going off what I'd heard, but apparently not fully understood) and now I've learned something. Now I'm actually thinking about moving from fly sparging to batch sparging because of your explanation. Thank you!
Click to expand...

Whew! Good....I was actually nervous about coming off like a d!ck with that post, to the point where I saved it into notepad, and only posted it a few hours later when I saw other posts in this thread....glad you didn't take it the wrong way! :mug:
 
No problem Shorty, I don't use a manifold but I found it quite interesting that a guy dye tested his manifold and found that the far reaches of the tun were not as well rinsed. This makes perfect sense and obeys the laws of fluids...the sparge will follow the path of least resistance, and tend to flow more volume closer to the outlet of the tun. Perhaps a manifold should have fewer cuts close to the outlet, and more openings further from the outlet for a fly sparge.
 
wilserbrewer said:
No problem Shorty, I don't use a manifold but I found it quite interesting that a guy dye tested his manifold and found that the far reaches of the tun were not as well rinsed. This makes perfect sense and obeys the laws of fluids...the sparge will follow the path of least resistance, and tend to flow more volume closer to the outlet of the tun. Perhaps a manifold should have fewer cuts close to the outlet, and more openings further from the outlet for a fly sparge.
Click to expand...

Yup, I'd think for a truly "perfect" fly sparge, you'd want a false bottom, with the drain underneath in the dead center, and where hole size and hole density increased radially outward from that center point to provide equal flow. Second best would be a manifold as you describe, with either fewer or narrower cuts closer to the drain point, but you'd have to work out the hydrodynamic resistance inside the manifold to know to what extent you'd need to decrease hole size/density, (which would be EXTRA fun in a rectangular cooler, as you'd have 90 degree bends and Ts to deal with....).

Incidentally, the same thing is done all the time in other places. For example, a correctly designed "pipe type" bbq grill burner, (like in Webers), will have decreasing hole diameter as you move farther from the gas introduction point, so you don't have uneven flames along the pipe. If you look at oven plenums in industrial drying ovens, you'll find pipe diameter decreases as you move farther from the air introduction point as well, (there are different fluid dynamic reasons for these two examples, but the principle is the same).
:mug:
 
Thanks for all the helpful advice.
For the reference of anyone else building this, here's a photo of the finished inside connection:
CIMG0332.JPG

To separate the braid from the inner hose, you can't just pull them apart. The trick for me was to pull the entire length of the hose, gripping different points along it and slowly working the braid off.
Thanks again.
 
my first AG beer i did i had insane efficiency. i brewed one on sunday and it was terrible. I think i may have just read why. i did one large batch sparge on this one and did two or three on the previous one. the soap explaination makes total sense and i think that is what destroyed my efficiency this time.
 
arturo7 said:
Damn! Why didn't I think/hear of this a couple years ago?
Click to expand...

Search "zapap". Basic idea is you drill a crapton of small holes in the bottom of a primary bucket, then place it inside the bottling bucket. The holes act as a false bottom. Problems I found with this when I tried it were: 1 gallon dead space under "false bottom" means you have to overcalculate your strike water by 1 gal to get correct water/grist ratio....meaning you have even less water left over for sparging, and 2) since you have 1 gal deadspace, you effectively have a 4 gal MLT, which isn't that big.

After I tried the zapap, I did something similar to the OP, where I stuck a cork into the bottling bucket spigot, drilled it out, stuck a copper tube into the hole, and zip tied a braid onto the copper tube. Worked much better.
 
I think your setup will work fine. My only complaint is the sloppy hole drilling your did on the outside. No excuse now a days :)
 
arturo7 said:
Damn! Why didn't I think/hear of this a couple years ago?
Click to expand...

Hey! You haven't been reading your palmer and papazian! Two demerits! ;)

http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter17-2.html

The original (at least the most popularized) home lautering system was probably the bucket-in-a-bucket false bottom championed by Charlie Papazian in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing (1984).
Click to expand...

I almost ended up building this set up, as it's pretty macguyver-ish. For someone that already bought a kit that comes with a bottling bucket, all you really need is another ale pail and a small enough drill bit. A grain bag might be a good idea too.

Now I know that people say to never mix the "hot side" and the "cold side" of things, but as long as you disassemble and sanitize the bottling bucket afterwards, it should be fine. Of course I've never actually done it, so that's just a WAG.
 
MacBruver said:
Hey! You haven't been reading your palmer and papazian! Two demerits! ;)

http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter17-2.html



I almost ended up building this set up, as it's pretty macguyver-ish. For someone that already bought a kit that comes with a bottling bucket, all you really need is another ale pail and a small enough drill bit. A grain bag might be a good idea too.

Now I know that people say to never mix the "hot side" and the "cold side" of things, but as long as you disassemble and sanitize the bottling bucket afterwards, it should be fine. Of course I've never actually done it, so that's just a WAG.
Click to expand...

I knew that the bucket-in-bucket, or "zapap" was from papazian, but I just now realized that "zapap" is "papaz(ian)" backwards. :drunk:
 
Bobby_M said:
Batch sparging efficiency is mostly affected by crush and how much dead space you have in your tun so my advice to the OP is to either have a small piece of copper tubing shoved into the stopper that curves down and along the bottom or tilt the tun towards the drain by shoving a 2x4 under the other side.
Click to expand...

Even when the mash tun is almost full I have found the grain bed will hold its consistency and not fall out the top.
Iphone005.jpg
 

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