The Evil Gnome HERMS Brew Rig

No, it's not a crazy trailer setup like beerthirty has, but it's perfect for my needs. The only thing I'm looking to change is to ditch all the vinyl tubing (please don't berate me, I didn't know any better) and replace it with silicone with QDs.

First is the mashing setup. I do my mashing in the kitchen. Here's an overview of the cart and equipment:





My HLT is my old brew kettle that I used when I did extract brewing. I heat up my strike/sparge water as needed.



The stike/sparge water just drains straight into my mash tun. The mash tun has a false bottom I picked up from Northern Brewer.



Ball valve mounted in the mash tun to feed my pump:



Here's my recirculation pump. No, it's not a March Pump. It's a Pondmaster 350. When I first tested it out, it leaked a little through the pump cover (it cracked from the heat). I sealed the cracks with a small bead of silicone and it hasn't dripped a single drop since.



The pump feeds my heat exchanger. Just a little 2 gallon cooler:

Mashing Part 2:

The copper coils just feed straight through the wall near the top. I'd like to find some way to seal it so if anyone has suggestions, let me know:



Here's the inside of the Heat Exchanger. It's a 20 foot length of 3/8" OD copper coil, a 1500W @ 120V heating element and an aquarium airstone for agitating the water:



Here's the agitation pump. I $7 jobber I picked up at PetsMart:



The heat exchanger returns back to the top of the MLT:



The black wire coming out the top is the temperature probe that goes to my Love controller:



This is the Love controller based HERMS control box:



Here is what the bottom of the MLT return looks like:

Boiling is done on the patio with a turkey fryer on a propane burner. I'm sure you all know what that looks like. While I'm boiling, I move the cart outside and set up the rig for chilling. Here's the details of the chilling setup:

My immersion chiller. Just a 20 foot coild of 3/8" OD copper I stole the rib cage design idea from RedIrocZ-28 and added a recirculation inlet and outlet.



Here's an overview of how I set it up for chilling. I fill both the mash tun and the heat exchanger with water and ice. This give me about 40 feet of copper which gives me pretty good performance as long as I don't run out of ice:



The pump to feed the immersion chiller is a submersible I picked up at Harbor Freight. It works fine as long as it doesn't get too hot.



This is where the pump feeds the immersion chiller and the return feed just goes back into the mash tun:

Chilling Part 2:

The inlet for the whirlpool action is at the very bottom. This also allows me to use the whirlpool pump to transfer the wort to my fermenter:



It's a little hard to see, but the whirlpool inlet feeds into the top of the thermowell junction mounted in the lid of my mash tun:





The same pump I used for mashing works to recirculate the whirlpool action:



This feeds into the Heat Exchanger (now filled with ice water):



These are the connections for the whirlpool tubes:



And here's the outlet at the top for the whirlpool action:



Okay. I think that's it. Lots of stolen ideas from this forum and a few I came up with on my own. Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

No offense but my head hurts thinking of setting up an all grain process. I think I'll stick to extract brewing for now.

Looks like a good setup, my only question is the pondmaster pump's heat resistance and food-gradeness (is that a word?)

Looks like you have your process pretty well down though.

opengun said:

No offense but my head hurts thinking of setting up an all grain process. I think I'll stick to extract brewing for now.

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That's a nice rig for sure, but don't let all these nice rigs fool you: AG brewing need not be complex or expensive.

opengun said:

No offense but my head hurts thinking of setting up an all grain process. I think I'll stick to extract brewing for now.

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Don't let it scare you! You can do All Grain in a very simple way too.

Looks like a nice compact HERMS system with all the capabilities without being a mega budget build. It looks like it should be able to do most of the beer styles out there short of those that reach the high OG range with 20+ pounds of malt.

nice setup. I wonder if the pump is food grade also. the only thing that i would add to your rig would be a finish on the stand. it would allow easier clean up since spilled wort is common and you evidently brew inside. That I am jealous of. having to start a brew at 5 am just so you can be back inside by the time its 110* really sucks. Congrats! I have some Mcmasters brass QDs if you are interested.

Laughing_Gnome_Invisible said:

Don't let it scare you! You can do All Grain in a very simple way too.

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Absolutely. All you really need is a HLT, a MLT and a boil kettle. That's all I used on my first few all grain batches.

conpewter said:

Looks like a good setup, my only question is the pondmaster pump's heat resistance and food-gradeness (is that a word?)

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I picked the pump when I saw it used on this page. The food-gradeness does concern me but I figured since it's safe for aquarium and pond use, it shouldn't be pretty safe. I'll try to get confirmation on that, though.

EvilGnome6 said:

I picked the pump when I saw it used on this page. The food-gradeness does concern me but I figured since it's safe for aquarium and pond use, it shouldn't be pretty safe. I'll try to get confirmation on that, though.

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Most pond pumps can probably withstand mashing temperatures (170F) reasonably well, but if you ever decide to pump 212F wort through it...It will fail very quickly.

lamarguy said:

Most pond pumps can probably withstand mashing temperatures (170F) reasonably well, but if you ever decide to pump 212F wort through it...It will fail very quickly.

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The only time it will pump any wort over 170F is at the beginning of chilling and it only takes a few minutes before it drops from 212F to below 170F. So far so good but if it does fail, I'll just spring for a March pump. It would drop right into my rig without any modifications.

where'd you attach the ground for the heat stick in the heat exchanger?

EvilGnome6 said:

The only time it will pump any wort over 170F is at the beginning of chilling and it only takes a few minutes before it drops from 212F to below 170F. So far so good but if it does fail, I'll just spring for a March pump. It would drop right into my rig without any modifications.

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The way your set up I think I'd just run the immersion chiller until temps got down to ~170˚F then kick on the whirlpool

tkone said:

where'd you attach the ground for the heat stick in the heat exchanger?

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It's wedged against the nut of the heating element. Yeah, it's not ideal but I have tested to make sure that I have continuity between the element and the ground plug, before and after a brew session. It's on my list of tasks to fabricate some way to make it more secure.

EvilGnome6 said:

The only time it will pump any wort over 170F is at the beginning of chilling and it only takes a few minutes before it drops from 212F to below 170F. So far so good but if it does fail, I'll just spring for a March pump. It would drop right into my rig without any modifications.

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Expect it to fail soon then. I give it a lifespan of 3 to 5 batches with boiling wort passing through it.

camiller said:

The way your set up I think I'd just run the immersion chiller until temps got down to ~170˚F then kick on the whirlpool

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That's a good tip. I'll try that out on my next brew day. I can use that lag time to run sanitizer through the whirlpool pump and coil, too.

do you have a photo of it wedged into the nut? this is something i'm looking at building, but since i've got a wooden frame like you, and using a plastic cooler, there's not much to attach the ground to.

tkone said:

do you have a photo of it wedged into the nut? this is something i'm looking at building, but since i've got a wooden frame like you, and using a plastic cooler, there's not much to attach the ground to.

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This is how it is right now. Please note that I am not advocating doing it like this and I want to find a better, more permanent solution. I initially tried soldering it to the nut and it fell off, causing a short which tripped my GFCI outlet the moment I plugged it in.





It's a very tight fit and the ground wire won't budge unless I unscrew the hot and neutral leads.