One barrel system

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hermsfun

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What happens when a group of engineers take brewing too far...?

We have been brewing on a two tier three keg system for quite a while and found that 15 gallons isn't keeping up with everyone's kegerator, so a batch size upgrade started becoming necessary. We elected to use these pots:

Mash tun: 25g
Hot liquor: 20g
Boil Kettle: 45g

The hot liquor tank is also the herms heat exchanger. We have access to a tig welder so we are adding all of the fittings plus thermocouple inserts to each of the vessels. The mash tun is also mounted on a rotating shaft for dumping used grains at the end of the mash.

The boil kettle has a hop filter and whirlpool attachment for use when the pump is circulating through the plate wort chiller.

We mounted the boil kettle and hlt on hinged platforms that rest on electronic load cells for water dispensing and volume measurement. The intent is to get the system running on labview software after we get the hardware up and working manually. We have a bunch of solenoid valves to buy...

More to come....

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looks nice man. i like that mash tun design on the pivot hanging off the edge of the rig. i might have to borrow that....

one question though... if you are looking for 1 barrel, how are you expecting to brew 31 finished gallons in a 25 gallon pot? are you doing double-mash batches?
 
Wow that's really cool. That little burner has enough umph to get the BK boiling?
 
Let me know how your 45gal BK works out. I purchased the same one (I think - Concord) but found it very difficult to weld. My next approach is to silver solder the fittings onto the BK.
 
We did buy all the pots off eBay. The welding wasn't too bad, we have a guy who specializes in thin walled stainless welding so he finished them out. We had one weld that we had to patch up with some material but it wasn't too bad. The ticket was selecting the proper feed rod material. It seemed to like the feed rods with a little more iron in them. We also tried using a hand fed wire that worked pretty well.

Thought on volume was that we would mash at almost full. So around 20 gallons of first runnings. Then we should have up to 18 gallons in sparge water. We're hoping that'll hit 30 something after boil... We are going to mash in with water warmed up in the bk.

I am a little worried about time to boil with the burner... We'll test it and find out.

I added a pic with the hlt. Just got it today

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Forgot to mention we found an awesome/ cheap place for powder coating. They'll throw your stuff in with whatever big bulk order they're doing at the time. Its in Jackson mi if anyone is interested let me know and I will forward you the contact info.
 
The place is called nk designs. Just ask what colors they are running in the next couple weeks and they'll throw you in. Good luck!
 
all that looks ok, just get a sst brush (tooth brush sized) and some bar keepers friend (afterwards to passivate) and your good, my concern is the back side of the last one.
 
The hlt frame is done with the load cell supporting the one side of the pivot.

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hermsfun said:
The hlt frame is done with the load cell supporting the one side of the pivot.

Are you going to rest your kettle on those powder coated square tubes? Reason I ask is I noticed when I build my burner stand, it rests on something similar, the problem I have with it is cooling. While the worth cools the metal stand stays piping hot, which I believe is lengthening my cooling time. Just an observation.
 
Have you tried to flip that MT over loaded? I'm wondering if the added weight will cause too much friction on the 'pins' and make it harder to flip than when empty
 
where did you get the load cell? Or more accurately where can i get one that i can hook up to a avr and use with a 15.5 gal keg? How dose temparatuer effect the strain gauge?
 
We're using the hlt for herms only... We have a chiller that we are going to pump through after boil. Good point though. I am worried about the stand temperature in general. We are going to be adding some shields and maybe a standoff for the hlt tank.
 
The mash run rotates easily now but we are a little worried about how the alignment of the pivots will change with mass. We opted for the large diameter pivots to try and ensure stiffness in the welds and kettle. We'll see.

Load cells are off eBay. We have this one for the hlt and a ring type cell for the bk. we are using a simple amplifier circuit to bump it up to 3 to 5 volts and then from there feeding it into a USB daq module that interprets it over to the computer. From there we are using labview to calibrate the volumes of water.
 
I am worried about the stand temperature in general. We are going to be adding some shields and maybe a standoff for the hlt tank.

thats my main concern after seeing those pics and the nice powdercoating so close to those burners... probably not going to last very long like that.
 
We're going to add some heat shielding to try and duct the exhaust out the sides around the frame rails. Its going to take some fancy sheet metal and stove paint for sure.
 
Mounted the sparge valve last night. It basically will be actuated for sparging only and also has the plumbing for the hlt water filling which is controlled by dishwasher valves down in the electrical box. The hlt and valve will have two barbs to connect them with a flexible silicone tube. More to come

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We made some plumbing progress tonight adding the cold water valve box and counter flow plate chiller. The cold water valves are from surplus center and were 8 bucks each. The garden hose input and waste water out connectors are installed along with the connector waiting for the fuel quick connect fitting. The herms coil is coming along... We found an industrial plumbing supply place that sold 1/2 inch 0.035 wall tube for cheap. We filled the tube with sand and started bending around a bucket. Its looking pretty good, no kinks! We're still working on the heat shields for around the burners... More to come, we need to brew, running low on beer!

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Heat shield being built. Going to resistance weld the stainless sheet together and trim it up a bit.

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Lots of plumbing... The hlt mash tun and bk are done along with running all of the cold water and hard lines. We are using 12V electric ball valves to do all the wort and hot water diverting and some dishwasher valves off of surplus center to run all cold water around. Hopefully we will be hitting up some wiring this weekend. First beer on the schedule is 25 gallons of nut brown!

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Just out of curiosity, how much grain do you plan to mash each batch? I have a 1bbl set up with (3) 40 gal kettles. Also bought mine off ebay. They were advertised as 45 gal, but ended up being 5 gal shy. You should be ok for a full volume boil with a 45 (I can't quite do it with a 40). It'll still be tight though and you'll have to watch like a hawk for boil overs. You HLT will be just big enough probably and will get filled almost to the top with sparge water. I'm not so sure you have a big enough MLT though. The way I have it figured, you won't be able to brew anything over 1.050 OG for a full bbl and that will almost fill the MLT. If you are only planning to do low gravity brews you should be ok, but you won't be able to bump you OG up without sacrificing some batch volume.
 
Nice looking rig! If BBL Brewer is correct, when you want to go for a bigger SG you can mash all your non-base malts with as much base malt as fits, then adjust your SG with DME. Just a suggestion, such a nice setup, and 1.050 is a good drinking beer!
 
The system started out with a smaller batch size in mind but as we started building and working through ordering the pots we kept bumping up volumes. We ran the numbers too and found that we can really only stuck to normal beers at that volume which for us is ok. We've brewed some strong stuff before but we tend to stick to the easy drinking beers. Thanks for the feedback. What grain absorption constant did you use?
 
Flame test went well in the hlt. Heat shield held the powder coat down to 40C while the hlt was boiling. We took pictures with the thermal imager so I'll post those later on...

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Have you guys verified the volume on the 45 gal kettle yet? I'm thinking about selling one of my 40 gal kettles and getting a 45 while they are still available on ebay. I just want to make good and sure that they are 45 before I pull the trigger.
 
I can confirm the ebay Concord 45 gal pots are NOT 45 gallons. They are only 40 gal & even that is pushing it. You engineers sure know how to make a fun & easy brewday complicated lol. I don't think the MT tilts will hold the weight once you have all the saturated grains in there. That's a LOT of weight being supported by a thin gauge pot. Good luck!!
 
Water test... We fired up both burners and ran water around with the valves and pumps. Couple leaks here and there but not too bad.

We did fill the mash tun up nearly full and didn't have issues with collapsing walls (yet). Worse case we would run a support bar across. Haven't verified any volumes yet.

Software is coming along. The control box is switching the SSRs and relays on/off.

Plan on brewing Tuesday...

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