Has anyone used this false bottom?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
I have one similar to that and until recently I have been having problems with stuck sparges, and I'm not sure I have it completely worked out.

Try the kind that I think you can get at the plumbing store, I've heard great things about those.
 
I have one similar to that and until recently I have been having problems with stuck sparges, and I'm not sure I have it completely worked out.

Try the kind that I think you can get at the plumbing store, I've heard great things about those.

I'm glad to see it's not just me. :mug::)

EDIT: Rice hulls did help, but only a little.
 
I have used it for about 12 years in a 10 gal rubbermaid round cooler. I use rice hulls so it doesn't get stuck on the recirc as I pump, but as long as the grain bed is loose enough it works well and I've always had great efficiency.
 
I have a 12" domed FB in my 10g cooler, with a silicone gasket sealing it to the sidewall.
fb_gasket_04.jpg
Works great, nothing gets around/under it, and any crumbs that pass through the mesh get lost in the vorlauf.

Any FB will get stuck if the mash is pumped too fast. Even the Blichmann FB I use on my 20g system is not impervious to operator error...

Cheers!
 
I have one similar to that and until recently I have been having problems with stuck sparges, and I'm not sure I have it completely worked out.

Try the kind that I think you can get at the plumbing store, I've heard great things about those.

Some of the Amazon reviews talk about stuck sparges...the elbow is only 3/8", not 1/2". What if it was swapped out?

At that price ($27) I wouldn't mind an easy modification....
 
I have a 12" domed FB in my 10g cooler, with a silicone gasket sealing it to the sidewall.
View attachment 374744
Works great, nothing gets around/under it, and any crumbs that pass through the mesh get lost in the vorlauf.

Any FB will get stuck if the mash is pumped too fast. Even the Blichmann FB I use on my 20g system is not impervious to operator error...

Cheers!
I like that! Where'd you get it?
 
I'm glad to see it's not just me. :mug::)

EDIT: Rice hulls did help, but only a little.

It got a little better for me when I took things apart, looked them over, and put them back together. I think I tweaked something slightly that was just enough to get things going.

I'm not going to count on it being consistent, but it is a start.

rice hulls didn't help much with me either.
 
It got a little better for me when I took things apart, looked them over, and put them back together. I think I tweaked something slightly that was just enough to get things going.

I'm not going to count on it being consistent, but it is a start.

rice hulls didn't help much with me either.

I believe that the shape and opening in the same plane with the screen localizes the suction near the input opening rather than evenly dispersed across the whole screen and as it clogs it spreads out radially. If the suction could be moved lower to the center bottom with a dip tube of sorts it may facilitate evenly distributed suction across the screen.

EDIT: Adding more dead space, perhaps by the method used by the earlier poster, and a makeshift dip tube between the opening and bottom should help even out the pull across the whole screen. JMTC
 
I bought this false bottom, through HomeBrewStuff on Amazon (it's a similar price, plus about 6 dollars shipping) and I ended up modifying it to have a 1/2" elbow barb, using fittings and stuff I got from brewhardware.com. The thing is that new Home Depot coolers I think have a 1/2" ID hole drilled in them (I think this amounts to the hole being 7/8" OD, rather than 3/8"ID and 5/8"OD like it had been). All in all, with shipping from both Amazon and Brewhardware I spent close to what it would have cost to just get a prefab cooler mash tun from my LHBS, but my mash tun is at least now considered "high flow".

I think it works well, Ive only used it once and I've never used a cooler mash tun before so I dont know what a "stuck sparge" looks like, but I was able to mash and sparge pretty easily, and I hit pretty close to the gravity my recipe specified, so I think I have decent efficiency with it.

If I did it over again, though, I would just go ahead and look at something like the conversion kits from BrewHardware since they are basically everything you need, and you dont have to worry about messing with finding new parts, upgrading other things, making sure it all fits together. I think BrewHardware has some decent reviews too, and I think people say the custom false bottom you get from him, that's included in the conversion kit, is a good false bottom.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The kit from BrewHardware is second to none. The true bulkhead fitting alone is worth it's weight in gold. No fiddling with washers and miles of teflon tape!
 
I used one like that for a long time. Would have kept using it but it wouldn't fit the mash tun I switched to.

I ended up building one out of a pizza pan, 6 bucks for the aluminum pan, 1/8th drill bit, nothing but good from it .
 

Latest posts

Back
Top