Spine
Well-Known Member
Hello Everyone,
Just thought I would share some photos of my latest brewhouse setup that I am using. I am on an limited budget so I tried to maximize the value in everything I did. I also live in Canada so things are either more expensive here or I blow my budget on shipping costs.
Decision Making:
I started brewing on a turkey fryer burner fueled by propane but I decided to go to to electric for a few reasons. 1) I was spending too much on propane. 2) Brewing in the garage in the winter (with door open) still managed to set off my CO detector inside. 3) I didn't want to buy another burner and tank for HLT heating 4) I didn't have room to store a brewstand in my garage and I was tired of wasting time setting everything up for a brew day. 5) In the event that I want to fully automate a system, it should be a lot easier with electric.
I decided to do an indoor setup in my basement because I had easy access to power (dryer outlet 30A 240VAC), water and a drain line, and room to keep everything setup all of the time. Also with the cold winters it makes it much more nicer to brew indoors
Brew Setup:
Brewstand-
My brewstand is made out of simple spruce 2x4 and 2x6 lumber, screwed together and varnished/stained to give it some protection from any spills and to make clean up easier. My design has very little lumber waste (i.e. a 5ft cut will leave a 3ft cut left over that is used somewhere else. The brewstand is a 3 tier gravity system to save on the costs of a pump. The top tier is 5ft exactly off the ground so looking into the HLT requires a step stool, but is not normally required for a brew day. The bottom tier is the exact height to siphon the boil kettle into a carboy or plastic bucket.
Water Feed-
I took a water feed from my household piping upstream of my water softener and added a shutoff valve to completely isolate my brewhouse when the brew day is over (just in case). I used the PEX piping to go from the house to the brewstand to give a little bit of flexibility and movement (if needed). Once the pex reaches the brew stand, the rest of the piping is all copper and then line splits into two valves, one for the immersion chiller feed and the other to feed the activated carbon filter. I added the activated carbon filter to get rid of all of the chlorine in the city water. Downstream of the filter i have another valve that I use to throttle the flow to about 2L / minute to ensure that the filter is removing all of the chlorine and other nasties.
HLT-
The HLT is a Euro Sanke keg (50L) that has the top removed. The water from the water filter comes up the side and enters the top of the vessel. I just added a sight gauge from bobby_m (thanks!) and added level markings with my brother P-touch labeller to let me know how much volume is in my kettle. I used to have a calibrated spoon but the sight gauge works so much better - one of the better investments so far!. Inside the kettle is a 4500w water heater element. Thanks to the Pol for the ideas on how to install the element. On the electrical side of the water heater I have some 10/3 cable going to it and all of the connections are potted in epoxy. If you do this, make sure you have a good ground connection! 4500w is just about perfect for the HLT. I used to use a weldless bulkhead fitting for the HLT but I was having issues with the siphon not starting all of the time and wanted a way to completely drain the tank so I bought some MAPP gas and some cadmium free braze rod and brazed on a copper fitting onto the bottom of the keggle. After that was brazed and I had confidence in my welding, I then drilled the hole into the keggle from the outside (put the drill bit inside the fitting). After the hole was drilled I then soldered on the rest of the copper. I did the same thing for the boil kettle and looking back I should have done this from the begninning. The braze rod was $30 and I only used about 1/2 of it and the MAPP gas was about $10. So for $40 total I was able to get two fittings brazed on. I spent a lot more for the weldless fittings and now I can do my CIPs much more easier and the vessels will drain completely every time, which is essential if you never want to move vessels and just do CIPs (what I do now). Ideally I should have used a oxy/acetylene torch for the job as the MAPP gas was barely hot enough to do the job.
Mash Tun-
I already posed another article about this, but essentially my cooler was a 48qt walmart special for $20 and I have about another 10-20$ in copper to complete it. No weldless fittings were used. It turns out that copper tubing gives a really nice friction fit with the existing drain. I only do batch sparging so far and with my barley crusher with factory default settings I am able to get about 80-81% efficiency regularly on 1.050ish beers.
Kettle-
Same design as the HLT, except there is no sight glass. I just calibrated my stir spoon and this has been good enough for me so far.
Heat Exchanger-
To cool my wort I use a simple copper immersion chiller that hooks over the side of the boil kettle.
Lighting-
In addition to the range hood light, I bought a fluorescent light on sale for $17 and hung that at the correct height using chains
Exhaust-
Bought a Range hood off Kijiji locally for $10 and wired an extension cord into it that I can plug in to power it. I like being able to unplug it at the end of the day and completely isolate the power from it. The exhaust uses flexible ducting that goes into a piece of plexiglass with a hole cut in it for the flexible ducting. I can place this whole pane into the open window and then close the sliding pane to make a perfect seal. When I am done I remove the plexiglass and close the window. I didn't want to permanently modify my house for this
Drain-
For the drain for the system (boil kettle and IC) I have 1.5" ABS piping running from the brewstand to my floor drain.
Power-
I bought a "dryer repair kit" which is essentially a 6' cord with a dryer plug on the end. From there I go to a junction box which then connects to about 10m of 10/3 SJOOW cable to the brewstand power distribution junction box. When I want to brew I simply unplug the dryer and plug my brewstand in. At the end of the session I am able to completely isolate the system from power. It also saved me from permanently modifying my house
Control System-
The 240VAC comes from the dryer plug into another junction box mounted on the side of the brew stand. In there the power feeds (in parallel) two 40A SSRs which then go to each heating element (4500w HLT and 4500w BK). The control signals (what activates the SSRS) leave the junciton box on some cat3 cable (phone cable) through a connector to my Arduino. I use the Arduino microcontroller to run most of my system. With some simple push buttons and an LCD screen and the Ardunio controller I control the heating elements. The HLT has a temperature probe connected to the Arduino (using 2wire) to allow me to heat the strike or sparge water in the HLT to the exact temperature without going over.
The heating elements use PWM for control, or pulse-width-modulation. The logic I have written is very simple. For every 1 second, the heating element can be "on" for none, a portion or the whole time. If I tell the boil kettle to boil at 50% power, it is essentially switching the element on only for the first half second every second. The HLT works the same way except instead of using a power setpoint it uses a temperature setpoint and automatically adjusts the power to keep the hot liquor at the desired temperature.
The LCD screen has a mini menu structure that I can scroll through using the pushbuttons to enable/disable elements, buzzers, etc. My menu structure is the following:
KETTLE MENU
Enable
Power Level
HLT MENU (1/2)
Temperature
Enable
Setpoint
HLT MENU (2/2)
Priority
Beep at SP
It's super basic but it allows me to do the following:
Kettle:
Enable/disable heating
Adjust boiling power (I find that 60-70% is perfect for 6gal batches for proper DMS removal, could possibly go lower)
HLT:
Show me the current temperature
Enable/disable heating
Set the temperature that I want the water to heat to
Enable buzzer to go off when the HLT has reached it's setpoint (so I can do something else)
Set the priority of the elements (to BK or HLT).
Now the only important thing here is that with a dryer outlet I cannot run two 4500W elements at full power, so I added the ability to give priority to one element or the other. What this simply means is that if the HLT has priority and is requiring 60% power, it will be on for the first 0.6s out of the 1s cycle and the boil kettle can only get 0.4s remaining or 40%. This feature is needed if you want to start heating strike water for another batch when a first batch is boiling or if you want to start preheating the first runnings while you are keeping the sparge water at temperature.
Just thought I would share some photos of my latest brewhouse setup that I am using. I am on an limited budget so I tried to maximize the value in everything I did. I also live in Canada so things are either more expensive here or I blow my budget on shipping costs.
Decision Making:
I started brewing on a turkey fryer burner fueled by propane but I decided to go to to electric for a few reasons. 1) I was spending too much on propane. 2) Brewing in the garage in the winter (with door open) still managed to set off my CO detector inside. 3) I didn't want to buy another burner and tank for HLT heating 4) I didn't have room to store a brewstand in my garage and I was tired of wasting time setting everything up for a brew day. 5) In the event that I want to fully automate a system, it should be a lot easier with electric.
I decided to do an indoor setup in my basement because I had easy access to power (dryer outlet 30A 240VAC), water and a drain line, and room to keep everything setup all of the time. Also with the cold winters it makes it much more nicer to brew indoors
Brew Setup:
Brewstand-
My brewstand is made out of simple spruce 2x4 and 2x6 lumber, screwed together and varnished/stained to give it some protection from any spills and to make clean up easier. My design has very little lumber waste (i.e. a 5ft cut will leave a 3ft cut left over that is used somewhere else. The brewstand is a 3 tier gravity system to save on the costs of a pump. The top tier is 5ft exactly off the ground so looking into the HLT requires a step stool, but is not normally required for a brew day. The bottom tier is the exact height to siphon the boil kettle into a carboy or plastic bucket.
Water Feed-
I took a water feed from my household piping upstream of my water softener and added a shutoff valve to completely isolate my brewhouse when the brew day is over (just in case). I used the PEX piping to go from the house to the brewstand to give a little bit of flexibility and movement (if needed). Once the pex reaches the brew stand, the rest of the piping is all copper and then line splits into two valves, one for the immersion chiller feed and the other to feed the activated carbon filter. I added the activated carbon filter to get rid of all of the chlorine in the city water. Downstream of the filter i have another valve that I use to throttle the flow to about 2L / minute to ensure that the filter is removing all of the chlorine and other nasties.
HLT-
The HLT is a Euro Sanke keg (50L) that has the top removed. The water from the water filter comes up the side and enters the top of the vessel. I just added a sight gauge from bobby_m (thanks!) and added level markings with my brother P-touch labeller to let me know how much volume is in my kettle. I used to have a calibrated spoon but the sight gauge works so much better - one of the better investments so far!. Inside the kettle is a 4500w water heater element. Thanks to the Pol for the ideas on how to install the element. On the electrical side of the water heater I have some 10/3 cable going to it and all of the connections are potted in epoxy. If you do this, make sure you have a good ground connection! 4500w is just about perfect for the HLT. I used to use a weldless bulkhead fitting for the HLT but I was having issues with the siphon not starting all of the time and wanted a way to completely drain the tank so I bought some MAPP gas and some cadmium free braze rod and brazed on a copper fitting onto the bottom of the keggle. After that was brazed and I had confidence in my welding, I then drilled the hole into the keggle from the outside (put the drill bit inside the fitting). After the hole was drilled I then soldered on the rest of the copper. I did the same thing for the boil kettle and looking back I should have done this from the begninning. The braze rod was $30 and I only used about 1/2 of it and the MAPP gas was about $10. So for $40 total I was able to get two fittings brazed on. I spent a lot more for the weldless fittings and now I can do my CIPs much more easier and the vessels will drain completely every time, which is essential if you never want to move vessels and just do CIPs (what I do now). Ideally I should have used a oxy/acetylene torch for the job as the MAPP gas was barely hot enough to do the job.
Mash Tun-
I already posed another article about this, but essentially my cooler was a 48qt walmart special for $20 and I have about another 10-20$ in copper to complete it. No weldless fittings were used. It turns out that copper tubing gives a really nice friction fit with the existing drain. I only do batch sparging so far and with my barley crusher with factory default settings I am able to get about 80-81% efficiency regularly on 1.050ish beers.
Kettle-
Same design as the HLT, except there is no sight glass. I just calibrated my stir spoon and this has been good enough for me so far.
Heat Exchanger-
To cool my wort I use a simple copper immersion chiller that hooks over the side of the boil kettle.
Lighting-
In addition to the range hood light, I bought a fluorescent light on sale for $17 and hung that at the correct height using chains
Exhaust-
Bought a Range hood off Kijiji locally for $10 and wired an extension cord into it that I can plug in to power it. I like being able to unplug it at the end of the day and completely isolate the power from it. The exhaust uses flexible ducting that goes into a piece of plexiglass with a hole cut in it for the flexible ducting. I can place this whole pane into the open window and then close the sliding pane to make a perfect seal. When I am done I remove the plexiglass and close the window. I didn't want to permanently modify my house for this
Drain-
For the drain for the system (boil kettle and IC) I have 1.5" ABS piping running from the brewstand to my floor drain.
Power-
I bought a "dryer repair kit" which is essentially a 6' cord with a dryer plug on the end. From there I go to a junction box which then connects to about 10m of 10/3 SJOOW cable to the brewstand power distribution junction box. When I want to brew I simply unplug the dryer and plug my brewstand in. At the end of the session I am able to completely isolate the system from power. It also saved me from permanently modifying my house
Control System-
The 240VAC comes from the dryer plug into another junction box mounted on the side of the brew stand. In there the power feeds (in parallel) two 40A SSRs which then go to each heating element (4500w HLT and 4500w BK). The control signals (what activates the SSRS) leave the junciton box on some cat3 cable (phone cable) through a connector to my Arduino. I use the Arduino microcontroller to run most of my system. With some simple push buttons and an LCD screen and the Ardunio controller I control the heating elements. The HLT has a temperature probe connected to the Arduino (using 2wire) to allow me to heat the strike or sparge water in the HLT to the exact temperature without going over.
The heating elements use PWM for control, or pulse-width-modulation. The logic I have written is very simple. For every 1 second, the heating element can be "on" for none, a portion or the whole time. If I tell the boil kettle to boil at 50% power, it is essentially switching the element on only for the first half second every second. The HLT works the same way except instead of using a power setpoint it uses a temperature setpoint and automatically adjusts the power to keep the hot liquor at the desired temperature.
The LCD screen has a mini menu structure that I can scroll through using the pushbuttons to enable/disable elements, buzzers, etc. My menu structure is the following:
KETTLE MENU
Enable
Power Level
HLT MENU (1/2)
Temperature
Enable
Setpoint
HLT MENU (2/2)
Priority
Beep at SP
It's super basic but it allows me to do the following:
Kettle:
Enable/disable heating
Adjust boiling power (I find that 60-70% is perfect for 6gal batches for proper DMS removal, could possibly go lower)
HLT:
Show me the current temperature
Enable/disable heating
Set the temperature that I want the water to heat to
Enable buzzer to go off when the HLT has reached it's setpoint (so I can do something else)
Set the priority of the elements (to BK or HLT).
Now the only important thing here is that with a dryer outlet I cannot run two 4500W elements at full power, so I added the ability to give priority to one element or the other. What this simply means is that if the HLT has priority and is requiring 60% power, it will be on for the first 0.6s out of the 1s cycle and the boil kettle can only get 0.4s remaining or 40%. This feature is needed if you want to start heating strike water for another batch when a first batch is boiling or if you want to start preheating the first runnings while you are keeping the sparge water at temperature.
