Hunter's Basement E-Brewery Build

Wow those conicals are nice! I didn't pull the trigger on one as I have no way to cool it and it wouldn't be as convenient getting it in/out of my fermenting fridge. Plenty of bling though.


Almost Famous Brewing Company

The Stout Fermenters do look nice, I need to do a bit more research before I decide one way or the other on them. At this point, they seem like a solid value though.



Update on the Brewery 2/20.
Auto Tuning the PIDS (Auber SYL-2352):

Yesterday evening I filled the HLT up as if I were going to do a full batch run. HLT filled with cold water all the way up (14ish gallons) and then fired up the panel. I must have overlooked the proper AutoTuning setting to start the process, because before I knew it I was at 150 degrees set temp and the AT wasn't running. So I dumped 60% of the hot water, refilled with chilled water again and fired the AutoTuning process up. This time, the kettle ramped to set temp with the Tuning indicator flashing, then started to rapidly cycle the element, causing the kettle to heat almost 15 degrees beyond the SV. I cancelled the process and did a sanity check on my settings. I think that failed because the RTD fluctuated high to SV, then quickly back to a slightly lower temperature (1 degree) and then back. This threw the tuning for a loop and ultimate caused that run to fail.

What I found was that the Filter setting on my PID was still at the default (0). Changed the filter setting to smooth the RTD input to (5) or 25%, and then dumped the water and started for a third time. Finally, hit my set temp, element cycled off correctly and the kettle repeated a SV-> Slight Cool ->SV ramp a couple of times. It took about 10 minutes once the SV had been reached for AutoTuning to finish.

Note for anyone seeing odd behavior, you may need to add some smoothing in your SYL's Filter setting. I completely overlooked this when I first read the instructional PDF.

Boil Kettle Auto Tuning:

After I finished testing the HLT, I moved the heated water over to the Boil Kettle to run an auto tuning routine on the BK. It was already fairly late, so I copied my PID Setup from HLT -> BK and began firing the element with AT running. With an SV (Set Value) of 212, the Kettle climbed up to 208, then 210, then 211... But ran for over 20 minutes in AutoTuning without ever making it to 212 (and it wasn't the same behavior as before, where the element was clearly being cycled). This time, the element was on 100%, but the temp just couldn't seem to hit that last degree.

I ended up canceling Auto Tune on the BK because it was about 1am, and realistically, I'll be running it mostly in Manual mode for boil for this weekends brew, but I would like to determine why I couldn't get that last degree. My ThermoWorks probe was reading 211/212 on the dot, and the pid was reading 211, so I don't have a major offset issue here as far as the RTD is reading. I may adjust the offset up 1 full degree and run it again. Ambient temperatures were around 64 degrees in the basement, exhaust fan on full. The only other thing that stood out was that the BK was sitting DIRECTLY on the Steel Table, which I'm certain was acting as a huge heatsink for that large thermal mass. (EDIT: See comments below for the likely reasons!)

Anyway, a few worthwhile notes from yesterday. More troubleshooting tonight before running on Saturday! Feel free to ask if anything looks odd. I took an 8 minute video of the AT on the BK and discussing the process, which I may upload to youtube (it's a bit dry, but I can throw it up if anyone is interested).

I didn't think the BK needed to be auto tuned since it will be ran manually. Are you planning on keeping it at 100% the whole time you boil? From what I gather, once it starts to boil you can turn it down to around 80% manually to avoid too much boil off and too aggressive of a boil.

@heffe

You are exactly right, I don't intend for the BK to be run in Automatic mode during the actual boil. Once I hit the boil, I will switch over to Manual and run it at a reduced power to prevent boil overs and maintain a nice calm rolling boil.

I think after discussing it with my brother/fellow brewer, that it may well just be a slight anomaly in the boil temperature reading. I will run AT again, but with an SV at 208. What I think happened is that while the water was clearly violently boiling, my RTD was reading a hair low resulting in a failure to reach a state where the control logic could actually learn the characteristics of the BK. A slightly lower SV should let me get a successful AT, and a slight temperature offset adjustment will likely fix the 1 degree readout issue as compared to the ThermoWorks probe.

Just curious if an altitude adjustment for boiling temperature is needed. If you are near Oakland Southwest Airport, the field elevation is 926'. The boiling temperature adjusted for elevation is 210.358F.

If you at a rolling boil at 211 then it will never increase temperature beyond that unless you seal a lid on top with weights and turn it into a pressure cooker. Either you need to adjust for altitude or your probe needs calibration. Also the amount of heat required to go from 208 to 209 is a lot less than going from 211 to a boil at 212. This nonlinearity can through off your tuning loop causing temperature steps below boiling to overshoot. Redoing it with a SV of 208 will give better results. I typically run in PID mode up to 208 then I switch to manual mode to bring it to a boil. This way I can be doing other things and not worry about a boil over. Once I get to boiling I throttle back to 60-70%.

@gwren @crane,

You guys nailed it down, we figured that it may have been related to this after talking a bit more about it this morning. I'll get another AT run in tonight with some adjustments and a lower SV and it should be good to go.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Heffe53 said:

I didn't think the BK needed to be auto tuned since it will be ran manually.

Click to expand...

I auto tuned mine so that I could walk away from the kettle while heating to boil. What I do is set it the PID for 205. I can set an alarm to let me know when 205 is reached, or just come back and switch it back to manual when I'm done doing whatever I had to do, like make a run to the LHBS. The BK will not boil over because it is only at 205. I don't always do this, but it's nice to be able to sometimes.

Another reason to autotune is if you ever do extract with specialty grain batches. You can hold your steep temperature on the nose because of the autotune. And really it doesn't take very much effort to do, so you might as well do it.

I friggin love using PIDs (I have a Kal clone panel). Every time I see that fuzzy logic in action I want to giggle like a school girl It makes me want to build a panel to control my fermentation chambers....just for the geek factor of it. The STC-1000s do a fine job though.

Great job on the build, now come to the east coast and do my build.

OK you guys sold me on autotuning the boil kettle. @wreed, where you at? I just finished building pretty much the same panel.

I am in Northern NJ. I was partially joking, I have been wanting to do an electrical brew system but don't have the space yet. I plan on being in a house in a year with a basement that will become my brewing station and that will be when I start looking into this more! I subscribed because Hunter's system is identical to what I want to build and amazed at how clean and professional it looks!

Welp, the First Brew Day was a small disaster unfortunately! A picture of me crushing the ill-fated grains.



Read on:

We setup our mill at .042 on the gap, and ground our 14lbs of 2-Row and 3lbs of Caramel 20L. We skipped grinding the 1lb of Corn and 1lb of Flaked oats as we knew those were already good to add to the mash.

Once we had the HLT up to 152 degrees, we hooked up the necessary hoses and transferred over the water to the mash-tun (8gals, roughly) at a 1.65qt/lb ratio of water. Then we scooped in the grains (2-row and Caramel 20L first) until all 17lbs were in. The temps dropped down to about 144 F with all of the grain added. We poured the 2 lbs of additions (1lb corn, 1lb oats) on top of the mash, and opened all valves and turned on the pump. It began recirculating with the hose sitting on top of the grains for about 5 minutes, then we watched the level gauge drop and sure enough the mash jammed. We stirred it up and reset the hoses in the Mash Tun, but unfortunately, the Mash was stuck hard again.

We fought for about 15 minutes with the mash stirring and resetting to try and break free of the stuck mash, but alas the blichmann false bottom was jammed up good. I'm not sure what we failed to do here, but unfortunately, we had to abort with 19lbs of grain in the tun. Huge bummer!

Anybody have any ideas where we went wrong? I know we crushed the grains a bit larger than the standard .037 (we used .042 by feeler gauges) and the mash temp dropped off pretty suddenly when added grain (about 10 degrees), but otherwise I'm not sure what happened... Any thoughts or questions about the mash that I could answer to understand how we can get this batch going again tomorrow would be helpful. Homebrew shop opens bright and early, so I'm headed down to refill my grains and roll this one again.

hunter306 said:

Welp, the First Brew Day was a small disaster unfortunately!

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Wow, that's a bummer
I have had problems in putting my flaked grains in on top of the mash. They form a kind of cap on the mash, you drain more and more from under that cap and end up compressing the grain bed and getting a stuck mash. That is my theory on what happened to you. Although, if that was it I would think that stirring it all up would have solved it.
I have never had a stuck mash that I couldn't unstick either by stirring or by blowing air or running water up through the bottom of the grain bed and then running off/recirculating more slowly than I was before. I have the normal perforated stainless false bottom and not the Blichmann kind so that may play a role, but from what I hear those Blichmann FBs are supposed to be really good. Did you try reducing your flow to see if that would help? You might also get some rice hulls while you are at the LHBS tomorrow so you can stir some in if it happens again. You could also try grinding a little courser. I use .45 on my 3 roller monster mill and it works great with my system. I run my pumps full open with no problem. Hopefully someone with your FB can chime in with some good info for you. Good luck!

Setesh said:

Did you try reducing your flow to see if that would help?

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This is my first thought. The one time I had a big grain bill and left my pump wide open I got cavitation and lost my prime. (I BIAB, so no real stuck mashes, but...) Basically the grain bill was big enough that open pump sucked all the grains down tight and compressed against walls of my kettle.

Maybe start slower on the pump, don't worry about getting that 144 back up to temp quickly, just get the circulation going first and let the grains settle without getting sucked down.

Thanks for the thoughts Setesh.

When we stirred it the first time, the bed was definitely severely compressed like you mentioned. Stirring it the first time and reducing the valve opening by about a 1/3 definitely helped for about 5 more minutes. Then the same thing happened.

We tried stirring it again, to much less success this time around, and reduced the opening of the pump output valve to just a little over a 1/4 (read: significantly slower). This worked for 2 minutes or so, then the same thing.

Finally, we tried closing the valve to barely a trickle and stirring, but we couldn't even keep the liquid flowing in the hose to the inlet on the pump. So we figured we were in trouble. We removed the hose from the output and sure enough, it was stopped dead in the tracks, I had a trickle from my valve. The entire false bottom was empty of liquid.

I suspect it was the AMOUNT of oats and corn maize that I used in the absence of Rice Hulls. It looks like at max, I should have used .5 lbs of Oats or Corn (or combined) to prevent stuck mash without hulls. With hulls, I may have gotten better results.

I definitely like the idea of circulating the water BACK up through the mash bed by pumping into the output of the tun. I'll keep that in the bag of tricks, we were getting kinda frustrated at that point so I think we overlooked some other obvious troubleshooting steps.

I'm planning on keeping some rice hulls in the inventory from now on though, they appear to be the key to sticky situations like this.

You should try the reduced flow. Basically just open your mash tun outflow valve just pass cracked. Have the HERMS coil and mash full open and the wort valve back into the MT cracked to match the flow. The slower rate should help with the stuck mash. Rice hulls will too. As for the temp drop, you should heat your strike water up to about 10 higher than what your mash temp is going to be. The grains will reduce the temperature (as you saw) and you will be adding water to the HLT anyways so you won't have to worry about it being too hot.

Sorry had a brain fart. The mash tun valve needs to be full open to keep the pump primed. You need to control the flow at the output side of the pump.

Thanks guys,

Tomorrow I'm going to do a few things:

-Start my recirculation at 1/3 of the valve open, rather than full bore.
-Cut down the sticky bits (oats and corn) and sub in a bit more 2-row and Caramel
-Add some Rice Hulls to the mash tun as well

I'll be back reporting here for sure. Super bummer to have the first brew day go bad, but I think it was a really good learning experience. We definitely overlooked some really obvious things here that could have save throwing out 19lbs of grain! The animals in the back yard are going to love us... =D

hunter306 said:

Spent some time finishing the plumbing and finishing the clean-up/wet area of the ebrewery this afternoon. Also got the new wort chiller in from MoreBeer.com and it looks really nice, getting excited to run a batch (hopefully soon!).

A few pictures of the progress.

Water filter with Cam-Lock disconnect, Wort Chiller cold water connection:

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Not sure if you are aware, but if you are using a carbon filter in that housing for chlorine removal, about the maximum flow rate you can achieve with that size of filter (9.75" x 2.5" ish) is 1 GPM. Stepping up to a 9.75" x 4.5" ish filter housing, you can achieve 3 GPM with some filters.

My process is to thoroughly stir the grains to eliminate dough balls with the pump off first, then start the pump with the output valve completely shut off and gradually open the valve to build a good grain bed. This takes up to 5 minutes, at which time I let the RIMS heater come on to maintain mash temperature. If I let the RIMS heater come on while there is minimal flow I get sugars sticking to the element and almost scorching. Once the flow rate is up the wort doesn't overheat.

hunter306 said:

Thanks for the thoughts Setesh.
I suspect it was the AMOUNT of oats and corn maize that I used in the absence of Rice Hulls. It looks like at max, I should have used .5 lbs of Oats or Corn (or combined) to prevent stuck mash without hulls. With hulls, I may have gotten better results.

Click to expand...

This may be a rule for your system. Maybe the Blichmann false bottoms design is really strong for crushed grain but really weak for flaked grain? I did some searching and came across this thread:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/blichmann-false-bottom-plugged-289216/

It looks like the Blichmann false bottome may be subject to this "plugged" condition where even stirring won't free it up. Even when only base grains are used. In post 4, gluepot was seemingly able to solve the problem by putting a screen over his false bottom. Another thing that stuck out to me was using a higher liquor to grist ratio. 1.25qt/lb or more. The extra water will help float the grain bed and let it settle on it's own instead of compact under its own weight. I also have to add 3/4 gallon to account for the HERMS coil and hoses.
I also think going with a courser crush might help a lot. Do you mind posting a pic of your crush for us?

You may have already read this, page 9 is what you are interested in:
http://www.blichmannengineering.com/sites/default/files/BoilerMakerManual.pdf

Setesh said:

In post 4, gluepot was seemingly able to solve the problem by putting a screen over his false bottom.

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The more I think about this the more I don't see the point in it. I suppose it could help, but I bet a courser crush is much more likely to succeed, and be much easier to deal with. You would have to be very careful indeed to not disturb this screen when stirring the mash. This sounds like a 'security blanket' kind of thing to me. It could make you feel better, but I'm not sure it would help.

What i have found to work well in my Blichmann, is my mill set at .032, and I add a pound of rice hulls to the grist. Once I am done milling my grain, I add the hulls on top, so that they go into the tun first. Then I stir everything real well. Hope that helps you.

PS, I varied greatly on my mill gap setting before finding the happy zone for my setup. YMMV, but if I gapped at .040, I had whole kernels. At one time, I gapped all the way down to .022 or so, and my Mash Eff was mid to low 60's. With it set at .032, I did three batches back to back to back on Friday, and had 78%, 75%, and 78% Mash EFF

Just fired up the system with another 19lbs of grain. I re-gapped the mill as I think we were over-crushing the 2-row and Crystal yesterday. I'm much happier with the appearance of it today.

We're going a slight bit less on the Oats and Corn, and I have a bag of Rice Hulls ready to toss in too.

Updates to come!

calebstringer said:

I varied greatly on my mill gap setting before finding the happy zone for my setup. YMMV, but if I gapped at .040, I had whole kernels. At one time, I gapped all the way down to .022 or so, and my Mash Eff was mid to low 60's. With it set at .032, I did three batches back to back to back on Friday, and had 78%, 75%, and 78% Mash EFF

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It's interesting how different mills behave. With the barley crusher a gap of .38 would let some grains through barely touched. On my new monster mill it pulverizes at .38...lots of shredded husks and powder. At .45 it was a lot better, but I noticed my efficiency didn't go down. I used .50 for my batch today (ordinary bitter) and got an almost perfect crush out of it. Hulls intact and grain broken into several pieces. I still got 93.3% measured efficiency too, but that is mostly down to the recirculation IMO. I haven't noticed much difference in efficiency from my crush since I moved to EHERMS. So interesting how each setup is so different.

So how did it go Hunter?

Setesh said:

It's interesting how different mills behave. With the barley crusher a gap of .38 would let some grains through barely touched. On my new monster mill it pulverizes at .38...lots of shredded husks and powder. At .45 it was a lot better, but I noticed my efficiency didn't go down. I used .50 for my batch today (ordinary bitter) and got an almost perfect crush out of it. Hulls intact and grain broken into several pieces. I still got 93.3% measured efficiency too, but that is mostly down to the recirculation IMO. I haven't noticed much difference in efficiency from my crush since I moved to EHERMS. So interesting how each setup is so different.

So how did it go Hunter?

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I have a Monster Mill 3 roller. At .40 I had a lot of grain go through untouched. Ya that is very odd.

I have no idea how you get 90%+ eff.... thats amazing.

I re-gapped the Cereal Killer to .46 (which sounds huge!!) but seemed to give me a nice cracked grain with the husks still in decent shape. We found at .42 it was essentially shredding the husks.

A couple of notes, we started mash re-circulation very, very slowly and worked our way up to about 30% open valve. I probably could have opened it up further, but we weren't having trouble maintaining temperatures by this point so we left it running. With that mash done for 90 minutes, we then sparged for 85 minutes (targeted 90, didn't quite make it) up to 11.7gal in the boil kettle.

Boil for 60 minutes and into the fermenters. One thing I was quite surprised by was the amount of left over liquid in the boil kettle with the hop-blocking screen I bought from Kal's shop. I expected the dip tube would get more of the actual liquid as we weren't running the pumps at full open. We slowed them down significantly, to try and improve the pickup but ultimate it probably left a good 1gal in the bottom of the kettle.



So it looks like I managed roughly 81% efficiency on the first time around with a OG of 1.053 at pitching time. Cereal Killer gap set at .046. That was with 15lb 2-Row, 3lb Crystal 20L, and .5lb Corn, .5lb Oats, and .25oz of Rice Hulls.

calebstringer said:

I have a Monster Mill 3 roller. At .40 I had a lot of grain go through untouched. Ya that is very odd.

I have no idea how you get 90%+ eff.... thats amazing.

Click to expand...

I'm surprised you had anything get through scott free at .40. I think there are probably different revisions of the monster mills. The default setting from the factory on mine was .45, and that setting worked OK for me, but the crush I got at .40 was just demolished. I've read a lot of comments where people need a tight crush on their MM, and the only thing I can think is that they make them differently now, or maybe the quality control is really bad and they very a lot from mill to mill?

As far as the efficiency goes, I was amazed when I read that Kal was getting 95% efficiency, but I get really close to that with converted kegs, and I don't even fly sparge. It definitely depends on the grain bill though, at least for me. When I did a 7% ABV cascadian dark ale I only got 83%.

I'm glad it turned out for you this time! :rockin:

Once the mash started circulating, I knew we were in better shape and I was able to breathe a little, hahah.

My next conundrum is figuring out how to filter out the extra junk in the finished wort from the boil kettle. We used all pelleted hops this time around and no hop bags, so next time I may bag them just to avoid the extra gunk that got transferred to the fermenter.

hunter306 said:

My next conundrum is figuring out how to filter out the extra junk in the finished wort from the boil kettle. We used all pelleted hops this time around and no hop bags, so next time I may bag them just to avoid the extra gunk that got transferred to the fermenter.

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You can always let it sit for 20-30 minutes then use a racking cant to pull from the top. That's what I did before I modified my dip tube to pull from higher in the kettle. Now I make 6.5 gallon batches and leave a gallon behind. I get 5.5 gallons of clear wort into the fermentor, and 5 gallons into the keg. Works great for me. The bigger the batch that you make the less the loss as a percentage of the whole.

Congrats on the successful brew Hunter. I soloed a 10 gallon batch today with keggles. Couldn't get the mash to pump through and then I realized I forgot to open one of the HERMS valves. Stupid me. I used a refractometer worth automatic temperature adjusting and according to the Brewers friend calculator achieved 95% efficiency. I don't know if this was a fluke or what but I was satisfied greatly with panel as well as the whole process. If anyone needs some extra motivation to go electric and ditch propane this thread should provide.

That is some beautiful work Hunter, both the basement construction and the brewery. I'm curious whether you have been keeping track with how many hours you have invested in this project so far?

hunter306 said:

Once the mash started circulating, I knew we were in better shape and I was able to breathe a little, hahah.

My next conundrum is figuring out how to filter out the extra junk in the finished wort from the boil kettle. We used all pelleted hops this time around and no hop bags, so next time I may bag them just to avoid the extra gunk that got transferred to the fermenter.

Click to expand...

We just run everything from the boil kettle through a mesh strainer into the fermenter. No filter nor false bottom necessary, and we figure we need to aerate the wort, anyway.

hunter306 said:

One thing I was quite surprised by was the amount of left over liquid in the boil kettle with the hop-blocking screen I bought from Kal's shop. I expected the dip tube would get more of the actual liquid as we weren't running the pumps at full open. We slowed them down significantly, to try and improve the pickup but ultimate it probably left a good 1gal in the bottom of the kettle.

Click to expand...

I also have the hop strainer that Kal uses but I'm using it on a keggle. I have found that you need to keep scraping the hops off the top of it to keep wort flowing into it otherwise it will start pulling air and the dip tube will loose the syphon. When that happens I will leave about a gallon behind. Otherwise I only leave behind a few cups.

Trippel-A said:

We just run everything from the boil kettle through a mesh strainer into the fermenter. No filter nor false bottom necessary, and we figure we need to aerate the wort, anyway.

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I have found that method to keep hops out but not the cold break. What you can do is add an extra step. Fill your carboy up to the top. Wait about 30 minutes or so until all the junk settles, then rack into another carboy and stop when you start picking up trub. This is what I do with lagers and batches where I am going to re-pitch the yeast. It results in a completely clear wort. The yeast cake you get from this method is absolutely perfect, and great for re-pitching. There are people who argue that you need the hot break for the nutrients it has, but according to Chris White and Jamil Z there is plenty of hot break left in solution to provide the necessary nutrients.

I don't understand the big deal about separating out the hops when there will be a ton of cold break anyway. Both Dave Miller and Gordon Strong recommend separating the trub from the wort prior to fermentation.

The boil kettle (with lid attached) is sterile after the boil. Why not chill back into the boil kettle, leave the wort sit for 4 to 8 hours to leave the trub settle and then rack into the fermenter and pitch ?

Some good thoughts, I think next time around we'll be running it into a Conical anyway, so I'll let cold break settle, dump off the trub and then pitch. Already went this far, may as well get the conical rocking too

Here's a pic of the beer fermenting this afternoon, got some nice clean smelling activity from both airlocks. The Wyeast 1056 starter seems to have taken right off:

Glad you got it worked out!


Almost Famous Brewing Company