55 Gallon AE Kettle system

Bought a Monster Barley Crusher, 3 roller. I repurposed a base off of an old piece of industrial machinery. This thing weights like 600 lbs. Have a 1/2 HP capacitator start motor and a double pulley reducer. This should be assembled in the next 2 days.

Beginings of the HERMS tank. brewers harware dot com fitting in bottom of tank for the element and brewers hardware dot com thru hull fittings for the water recirc pump. More no weld thru hull fittings and the ss coil are on the way. The other end of the tank is cut out so its open. My HERMS is not circulated thru the HLT. It is its own self contained unit.

More repurposed equipment. I stripped this baby off of the bone pile. I am going to make this into the fume hood for over the boil kettle to keep moisture vented outside. Not necissary in this large building if I just open the doors to the brew room, but it will be better. Doubly so if I decide to use any Natural Gas in the system.

Things get a little funner when we have some brew. ( Is funner a word?)

Started the Mash Tun. Cut the bottom out of a closed head SS drum. Used the 3/4" bung as the drain. Will put a bazooka in it. The top of the drum is the bottom of the kettle now. I saw pics of people that used cutting wheels to seperate the seem of the drum, but we used a plasma cutter then just dressed the edge up some. This is the simple part.

This is the stand for the MLT and the BK. The MLT will tip over for easy empty. Final picture is setting them in place to get a feel for where to put the fume hood.

wadefisher said:

Here is the Crusher/Mill I am ordering soon.
http://www.barleycrusher.com/barleycrushermicro.php
I have a piece of equipment off of our bone pile we have stripped down to mount it on.

Anyone know anything about these?

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After sending 3 emails they did tell me they were not making these at this time. That is why I ended up witht he 'Monster Mill' which I ground my first 20 lb grain last night and it worked like a dream. Quiet and made quick work of it. It seemed like the RPM's they wanted would be slow, but it worked great. The 'Monster Mill' I have is the 3 roller set up. We are making a custom hopper so I can dump in 50lb of grain at a time. The monster was less money also.

Nice to see the pictures of your progress. Best of luck

Beecho said:

Nice to see the pictures of your progress. Best of luck

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I have a 2 week window with myself and a couple guys to work full time on this. So I will be having updates daily.

Boil Kettle is just about done.
Here is the kettle and the ports we added.
1st picture is a close up of the Wort outlet valve hookup.
2nd picture Shows the following ports Center - Wort Outlet; Upper Left - Tangent ( for whirlpooling); Lower left and right are for elements
3rd picture is from inside kettle while doing a leek test. All was good.
4th Picture is from the backside of kettle showing the temp probe, upper middle and last element on the bottom.
All connections are 1 1/2" Sanitary. Pipe size used for moving wort is 3/4"

I seem to have hit a wall finding GFCI protection for 3 phase electric. Anyone with any suggestions. May have to refigure my control panel design for single phase.

have you thought of something like this? GFCI / ELCI - Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters

or the Square D method that utilizes a shunt trip breaker and a GFI module that triggers the breaker?

jtsims21 said:

have you thought of something like this? GFCI / ELCI - Ground Fault Circuit Interrupters

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Yes I looked at these at $600 per circuit.! for the 3 phase ones

jtsims21 said:

or the Square D method that utilizes a shunt trip breaker and a GFI module that triggers the breaker?

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This I need to research what you are refering too.

that will be in that same price range... will it not cost you at least that to use 240V? with the larger gage wiring that you have to run or the transformer to convert 3 phase?

You said per circuit, are you running the tanks on different circuits? One GFCI on the panel supply and some fuses/ breakers in the panel and you should be good or am I missing something else?

Ideal world I would GFCI
1) HLT ( although this is questionable )
2) HERMS, which is a seperate unit in my system
3) Boil Kettle, this to me is a must, live wire to a device with liquid in and on the floor and you must work in close proximity.
My existing wire would allow me to run the HLT and HERMS on 277v
I was running a new 480v to the Boil Kettle.

Here are some pictures of the finished barley crusher.

Excellent work so far!

Is it just you two doing the work? Are you still intending to use 3 phase?

EarthBound said:

Excellent work so far!

Is it just you two doing the work?

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I have a nice pool of employees that have different skills. The fellows sitting on the grinder are my mechanical shop guys.

EarthBound said:

Are you still intending to use 3 phase?

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I have made control units that use 277v Which is 1 phase of a 3 phase circuit. I chose this because of 2 primary reasons.
(1) I have an existing circuit already to our brewery that has enough wire to power 3 30amp circuits. This gives me the 'pre heater', HLT and HERMS power needs.
(2) The controllers I made can easily be switched to 240 or 110 with very little modification. This will allow for good portability if I move or sell the units.

The boil kettle is being run off of 240v single phase. It is easier to get GFCI protection on single phase, so I'm pulling a 120 amp sub panel. Plus I do need 110v for other application in the room so it made sense just to put in the 240v panel and there was plenty of amperage available from it to run the boil kettle.

I have designed and sourced everything for 3 phase 480v controller but do not see the need at this time. I have studied everything on this forum and others and taught myself much on this subject over the last 2 months.

Sounds to me like the convenience of using a 3 phase is irresistible. Regardless of what voltage is being used, I highly recommend GFCI protection for all circuits of the brewery that supply power to a vessel containing liquid. It could save your life...

Are you using 240V elements? You've made the control units, so did you and P-J finalize the schematic? If so, would you mind posting it?

EarthBound said:

Are you using 240V elements? You've made the control units, so did you and P-J finalize the schematic? If so, would you mind posting it?

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Yes to 240 elements.
I used P-J's examples to help me design my own controls. The information he post here on the forums was very helpful. My controls are simple. I really believe in KISS.

Here are some pics of my HLT control. I have one Identical to it to control the HERMS.

This is awesome! Can't wait to see it in action.

smpow said:

This is awesome! Can't wait to see it in action.

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Me too smpow!
Stout tanks think the 3 barrel fermenters will ship in 2 or 3 weeks. I have 2 ss cylondro conicals coming from them. I have 1 plastic conical from US plastics.
I am headed back to PA next week and will be there for 1 month. We should get a lot down over the holidays. This is a slower time for my other business, so we can focus a little more effort on this project.

What kind of brewery are you opening, e.g., distribution-only, taphouse, restaurant-joined?

EarthBound said:

What kind of brewery are you opening, e.g., distribution-only, taphouse, restaurant-joined?

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1st phase is production brewery only. I am testing the waters. I have several establishments already wanting to put us on tap. I would really rather do just wholesale. But most of my research shows that I would be more likely to succeed with a brew-pub. Pennsylvania makes it real easy to have a tap room or self distribute.

You ever go over to Bald Eagle Brewing store?

Place holder!!!!

milldoggy said:

You ever go over to Bald Eagle Brewing store?

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No milldoggy have not been there. You?

I managed to find a rough 3 basin sink for $100. I already have one for the basic washing so I'm turning this one into a keg washer.

Here is the basic idea so far.

No, but I know the guy who owns it. He used to do GIS stuff with us. Real nice guy. Think it is only like an hour from you. Was just wondering.

I like your keg washer plans. Do you really think it necessary to purge with co2 before sanitiation flush? I would think that is a waste of CO2 as it will be pushed out during the sanitation.

onthekeg said:

I like your keg washer plans. Do you really think it necessary to purge with co2 before sanitiation flush? I would think that is a waste of CO2 as it will be pushed out during the sanitation.

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The stages were patterned off of what a lot of micro guys were talking about on probrewer dot com. I think the Co2 helps the acid sanitzer. Co2 is more sanitary so the sooner you get the air out and Co2 in the better.
I know you are not suppose to have Co2 in it in the first steps if you are using caustic cleaners, it actually will neutralize them. If you use an acid cleaning solution then it would be ok on every step. From what I've read; to keep beer stone from forming I should alternate cleaning solutions on some kind of quarterly schedule.

I'm still learning.

Can easily be changed if needed.

milldoggy said:

You ever go over to Bald Eagle Brewing store?

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When I lived in Lewisburg that was my LHBS. Tom the owner is a great guy, and his prices on many things were the same as buying online-- without having to pay shipping!

If you are in the area, check it out!

Here we are making a Heat Exchange Recirculation tank.

We made a coil of stainless by wrapping around a sixtel keg. The coil is then put inside of a Keggle made from a 1/2 brl keg. The mash circulates from the Mash Tun inside the coil, temperature controled water is circulated around inside the kettle. Heat is applied to the keggle from a 4500 watt 277v water heater element controled by a PID.
The the tubing was filled with water and capped. This was suppose to keep it from kinking. We had a little bit of kinking but none that seems to have slowed the through put very much.
They are applying insulation to the Keggle right now. When it is finished I will post a picture.

for future filling with sand will prevent kinking but will take a little more effort to clean out. That is how we have done mandrel bent tubing in the past works great!

Sugar or salt also work, and are water soluble for easy cleaning.

Sorry for such a delay, going to cover a lot of ground here in the next several posts.
Here is the control units being set in.
And the 240 volt single phase 120 amp sub panel.

Here is after we put in the 277 feed and outputs to the units being controlled.
Hot Liquor Tank, Heat Exchanger, and Boil Kettle.
The swithches in the upper left are for the pre heater and the exhaust fan. The switches next to the sub panel are for the pumps.

The Heat Exchanger for temperature control in the Mash Tun

You can see the HLT in the upper left, Heat Exchanger below and Mash Tun on the right hand side. Gravity feeds water from the HLT to the MT. The electrical outlets on the wall behind have been converted to Levitons Water Tight series. This is where the 3 elements for the Boil Kettle get plugged in.

Looking down into the Boil Kettle with the elements in. We are a little concerned with them overlapping. We have test fired numerous times and yet to see any problem. And, No, they do not touch.