y2jrock60
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- Joined
- Jul 6, 2009
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My buddy and I have been brewing strong for the past 7 months. We started our operation with a cheap 7.5 gallon turkey fryer. It worked great and make some excellent brews. However, about 4 months ago we decided to purchase a Blichman burner and make a keggle so we could start brewing up 10 gallon batches. The keggle has been awesome, no worries about boil over, and the efficiency of our 10 gallon batches is usually higher than what we get with our 5 gallon batches (probably due to the increased amount of sparge water).
However, there are a few problems we've been having with our setup. Transferring large amounts of water has been a pain. Dumping water out though the 12" hole on top of the keggle creates a mess. We decided to purchase a March pump to do the liquid transfers.
I know the outlet of the pump needs to be higher than the input. We mounted the pump with the output facing up and the input down on a leg of our brew stand. I guess the pump needs to be fed water to start pumping, which isn't a problem if you have gravity feeding the pump from the inlet, which is not feasible in our setup. We've been taking a 1/2" auto siphon and attaching it to our input and pushing water up to the pump. When the water reaches the pump we flip it on and it starts moving the water. Is there an easier way to do this, other then feeding the pump with gravity to get it started?
Also, our hose becomes extremely flimsy when transferring our 1668 degree strike water to the mash tun. I don't know if the hose we have is too long or just garbage. I know the pump can handle up to 270 degree temps.
The last issue involves transferring the wort from the keggle to fermenters. The first few times we had to dump the wort out the top of the keggle because hops clogged our 1/2" drain nozzle. We solved that issue by purchasing hop bags. The bags worked the first few times, then it started to become a hassle. We love IPAs and usually hop our beers 6+ times throughout the boil. We don't have 6 hop bags so we have to pull the bags out of the hot wort to add more hops. The string on the bags is usually burning hot and always knots up. Due to that issue we have just been throwing the hops in the keggle without a bag. We don't have a manifold at the bottom of the keggle to do any filtering. We decided to use the pump with the siphon attached to transfer the wort to fermenters. It worked ok, but we ended up with a lot of hop residue from the bottom of the keggle in our fermenters. I know I typed a lot and have asked multiple questions. I'm going to post the questions in a list to make it easier to see what I'm asking. Thanks for your input:rockin:.
1. Is there a way to feed a March Pump besides gravity or using an auto siphon on the input to get it started?
2. The hose on our pump becomes flimsy when transferring strike water. Do we have too much hose or is it just low quality?
3.Do you guys use hop bags or just throw your hops in? If you use bags when do you remove them from the boil pot, after you transfer the wort to the fermenters? We usually have hop bags floating around the bottom, it's kind of a pain to transfer our wort to fermenters with all the bags in there. I'm not sure if it's safe to remove them during cooling or not.
4. How do you guys transfer your wort from a keggle to the fermenters? We have a 1/2" nozzle but no manifold on our keggle. I understand you want to leave behind all of the cold break and trub, but it's hard to do with 6 hop bags and a wort chiller in the middle of your keggle.
However, there are a few problems we've been having with our setup. Transferring large amounts of water has been a pain. Dumping water out though the 12" hole on top of the keggle creates a mess. We decided to purchase a March pump to do the liquid transfers.
I know the outlet of the pump needs to be higher than the input. We mounted the pump with the output facing up and the input down on a leg of our brew stand. I guess the pump needs to be fed water to start pumping, which isn't a problem if you have gravity feeding the pump from the inlet, which is not feasible in our setup. We've been taking a 1/2" auto siphon and attaching it to our input and pushing water up to the pump. When the water reaches the pump we flip it on and it starts moving the water. Is there an easier way to do this, other then feeding the pump with gravity to get it started?
Also, our hose becomes extremely flimsy when transferring our 1668 degree strike water to the mash tun. I don't know if the hose we have is too long or just garbage. I know the pump can handle up to 270 degree temps.
The last issue involves transferring the wort from the keggle to fermenters. The first few times we had to dump the wort out the top of the keggle because hops clogged our 1/2" drain nozzle. We solved that issue by purchasing hop bags. The bags worked the first few times, then it started to become a hassle. We love IPAs and usually hop our beers 6+ times throughout the boil. We don't have 6 hop bags so we have to pull the bags out of the hot wort to add more hops. The string on the bags is usually burning hot and always knots up. Due to that issue we have just been throwing the hops in the keggle without a bag. We don't have a manifold at the bottom of the keggle to do any filtering. We decided to use the pump with the siphon attached to transfer the wort to fermenters. It worked ok, but we ended up with a lot of hop residue from the bottom of the keggle in our fermenters. I know I typed a lot and have asked multiple questions. I'm going to post the questions in a list to make it easier to see what I'm asking. Thanks for your input:rockin:.
1. Is there a way to feed a March Pump besides gravity or using an auto siphon on the input to get it started?
2. The hose on our pump becomes flimsy when transferring strike water. Do we have too much hose or is it just low quality?
3.Do you guys use hop bags or just throw your hops in? If you use bags when do you remove them from the boil pot, after you transfer the wort to the fermenters? We usually have hop bags floating around the bottom, it's kind of a pain to transfer our wort to fermenters with all the bags in there. I'm not sure if it's safe to remove them during cooling or not.
4. How do you guys transfer your wort from a keggle to the fermenters? We have a 1/2" nozzle but no manifold on our keggle. I understand you want to leave behind all of the cold break and trub, but it's hard to do with 6 hop bags and a wort chiller in the middle of your keggle.
