Happiness is.....

Using your new brewing scuplture for the first time!

I used my new setup yesterday for the first time ever. SWMBO got me a 3 roller Crankandstein mill for Christmas, and that thing was absolutely awesome. The base was scavenged from an aborted attempt at a bar, so it's kind of ugly. Works good though. The hopper holds about 25 lbs of grain.

The brewing sculpture itself is a 2 tier with a pump. Mash tun is on top, with HLT and Kettle on bottom. The mash tun is a 70 quart coleman xtreme with an expanded metal false bottom. The nut holding the ball valve sticks up quite a bit, so I had to trim the screen a little bit to make room for it. I've never seen a sparge run this easy before. Some of that was probably because the Crankandstein does such a nice job of leaving the husks intact.

I plumbed the pump so that I could used quick connects to pump from any part of the brewery into another. So, the pump has female connectors, while all the other parts have male. The inlet of the pump is the short tube on top, while the outlet can be throttled by a ball valve. The location of the outlet also allows me to drain the pump so it doesn't freeze.

Gas for the burners is controlled by two ball valves. They're a little touchy, so I find it easier to use the regulator if I'm only using one burner, which is most of the time. The burners are 170,000 BTU units, and they get the wort boiling in no time.

My sparge manifold isn't shown in these pics - it was added the night before I brewed. I need to redo it with smaller holes, since the water just dribbles out instead of spraying.

I am ecstatic about how well this worked. Yesterday was the easiest brew day I've ever had. Having a nice brewing sculpture with a pump makes things so much easier. My old setup consisted of cinder blocks and my garage workbench, so I feel spoiled now. I intend to add a control panel with a switch to control the pump so I don't have to pull the plug to stop it. Also, I want to add a float switch to the mash tun so I can automatically control the level of sparge water.

It was 30 degrees in my garage with the burners running, and in a 90 minute mash my mash tun only lost 3 degrees.

The best part was that my efficiency worked out to 82%. I'm sure a lot of that was due to the mill, but I think my mash tun is pretty darn slick, too