New HERMS Finally Fired Up

Finally got the new system up and running today on a Russian Imperial Stout.


During the recirculation, the removable table top with the mash tun and pump are at the level of the sparge tank. The copper coil heat exchanger is in the sparge tank.












When the mash is too cool, I heat the sparge tank. When it is too hot, I raise the coil out of the sparge water.



After the recirculation, the pump/mash tun table is moved to a flip out platform at ground level. The sparge runs by gravity to the grain bed and the pump fills the brew kettle at the upper left. The QDs that were connected to the input and output of the copper coil during the mash are joined together for filling the brew kettle. When it is full, the sparge tank is moved away and the brew kettle slides over to the burner. After the boil, the hot wort runs through the CFC on the under side of the table.

Nice system!

How's the beer lookin?

Bearcat Brewmeister said:

...When the mash is too cool, I heat the sparge tank. When it is too hot, I raise the coil out of the sparge water.....

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How well were you able to control the temps doing this, keep it close to your mash temp for one hour? Sounds like work!

I would like to build a HERMS system but would want to do it all Elec so it can automatically control the temps.

One part I haven't grasped is the sparge with HERMS. I've always batched sparge so I'm coming with that mindset. Your Heat Exchanger contains enough water to fly sparge with right? Do you measure this exactly or just make sure you have enough to keep the grain bed covered in water during the sparge until you fill your boil kettle with the correct pre-boil volume?

MikeG said:

How well were you able to control the temps doing this, keep it close to your mash temp for one hour? Sounds like work!

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Not too bad - about +/- 1F with checking on it every 10 minutes. The hard part was not overshooting. As long as I got the sparge water to about 165, the mash held temerature fairly well. I did have to pull the coil completely out once for about 5 minutes when I got the sparge tank to 170 and the mash was getting over 1 degree over target.

MikeG said:

One part I haven't grasped is the sparge with HERMS. I've always batched sparge so I'm coming with that mindset. Your Heat Exchanger contains enough water to fly sparge with right? Do you measure this exactly or just make sure you have enough to keep the grain bed covered in water during the sparge until you fill your boil kettle with the correct pre-boil volume?

Click to expand...

Yes, there is about enough water in there to keep the coil almost fully submerged (not sure if the water level is visible in the pic of the coil). No big deal though that some was sticking up as I can just keep the sparge tank a few degrees warmer to compensate.