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Got my ward's lab report today, and am trying to determine adjustments for a 15 gallon batch clone of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. My HLT holds 24 gallons, so I've used Beersmith2 to calculate the additions for this volume of water. My tap water (from Chesterfield County, Virginia) has: pH...

+1 on PID depth. Make sure you aren't mounting them over top of the contactors on your backplate/DIN rails.

really nice approach so far! You're going to love building and using this thing.

I am just getting into water chemistry now. Bought a pH meter and sent a sample of my tap off to Ward's for analysis... so I hope to have a better answer starting with my next brew session. Usually, I brew dark beers, and have been happy with the flavors by simply filtering and using campden...

My $0.02 is that spacing the coils even slightly will increase the surface area and improve your temp ramp times. Having said that, think about the batch sizes you will likely brew , and whether you will need to "top off" your HLT after you start sparging, in order to keep the coil fully...

I use 3 25g kettles (each are 20"x20"). +1 to sizing the HLT so you don't have to top off with sparge water... btw, I've found that it's not the recipe which determines the amount of top off water, it's the height of the HERMS coil. In a similar manner, think through the element wattage for...

ahhh... your rheostat is the knob on the bottom... should have guessed that.

+1 bobby I looked at your pics earlier, and saw what looks like a regular household light switch, which is what prompted my comment. Is your dpst the on the bottom middle of your control panel face? Either way, I would be hesitant to route 220v to something I was going to touch. Would still...

I don't believe you have a 220V dpst switch currently. I would recommend that you use your lights witch to control the 120V coil on a 40A contactor (both legs) and then send one leg to the ssr as you have shown in the diagram.

+1 for making a tincture with vodka. Just bottled a really nice gingerbread stout with 1 cup of vodka, 8 cinnamon sticks (crushed), 3 madagascar vanilla beans and 3 oz. of diced fresh ginger. This was for 10 gallons. Split, scrape and chop the vanilla beans... add tincture to bottling bucket or...

My $0.02 would be to mount it on the wall (use a TV arm)... your brewing buddies will all be over at your place a lot more after you get your system up and running anyhow. :ban:

Ended up getting 4oz of vodka tincture, split evenly between each of my 5 gallon carboys of beer. Bottled a couple of 12oz'ers so I can check flavor and carb levels in a few weeks, before I give most of this away over the holidays. Thanks again for your advice guys... this was a fun beer to make.

Hoppo - please do post video of your first brew day!

Brewed up 10 gallons last weekend, had a nice primary ferment this week, and am ready to rack to secondary and add spices. Couple of questions: 1) How much ginger? 2 tsp per 5 gal? ground or chopped? 2) One vanilla bean per 5 gal? scrape out the bean? 3) Three whole cinnamon sticks per 5...

You've got a single coil instead of two (one herms and one IC/CFC/plate). I thought about doing this on my build, but didn't want to risk denaturing and didn't need the ability to ramp fast. I typically do a one temp mash though.

+1 on making it an IC

Clean it up and sell it on ebay. Looks like you could get around $150-200 for it. I'd take that $$$ and buy a convoluted counterflow chiller from morebeer.com

I'd like to get a free one of these... would help supercharge my immersion chiller for that last 30* that seems to take FOREVER during a summer brew. hook this up to your pump and recirc with an immersion chiller in the BK (assuming you are using one of those prior to this sweet gift), and...

Build it yourself, hoppo! I'm on batch 6 of the new system and I wouldn't change a thing... because I designed it specifically for my process. You can build a great panel for $1500. Ebrewsupply was one of the main vendors I used. They have good prices on individual components - their kits don't...

Any updates, fellas?