Progress over the weekend... We got the 80Gallon tanks out of storage. My Brother In-law is cleaning them and letting them sit with a mild bleach solution. One will go in the heated shop, and one in the 37F cooler. I finished the reverse flow wort chiller. It is 20' of 3/8ths Cu tubing with a 1/2 inch garden hose through two PVC tees over the top of the copper. We live in Washington where water is cheap and cold. I will throttle the flow and crank up the garden hose so that one cycle through the chiller will get to 90F from boiling.
I was looking at putting the heating elements through the bottom of the barrels. That will require 4 barrel pipe fittings. I had 2 of them floating around but can't find them. The other option is to put the heating elements in a water tight electrical box, attach the pump plumbing, and dump that in the hot wort. This worries me greatly but solves a couple of problems. I need to do two mashes to get to 80Gallons. I can pull the pump and heating manifold out of the barrel after sparging and pumping the barrel dry. There would be no equipment in the way of removing the spent grains. It also frees the equipment to work with any mash tun container. it just hangs over the side of the container into the wort.
There is a smell of CocaCola (R) in the tanks but nothing else. They were rinsed and dried when we first got them last year but not really heavily cleaned. I really want to get it as clean as possible. I did a batch of a lightly hopped pale ale one time after doing Rootbeer with the kids in a 5gal Corney Keg. It tasted really strong of Wintergreen.
I got a blue, food grade plastic water barrel and cut the top off. The local metal supply shop had a stainless steel screen (4ftx2ft for $40 yikes). I have 3 heating elements, and am picking up a pump today. The one I'm looking at is 120VAC, 18Gal/min centrifugal type. It will be 1.5 inch Schedule 40 PVC running the re-circulation and flowing over the heating elements with a ball valve to meter the flow over the mash.
18Gal per minute seems like a lot, but the Grainfather design is a 5 Gallon mash tun and flows 1G/min re-circulation over the mash. 55 Gallons is 10 times the volume. Also, I need to flow a bunch of wort over the heating elements to keep them from scorching the wort. The plan is 5 gallons per minute over the 45 ish gallons of mash and the rest over the heating elements.
Oh, I have a buddy that grew a couple rows of cascade hops. He has about 20 gallons of the stuff. I'm not sure the recipe that we will make. I'm open to suggestions. Something like Alaskan Amber is the target. Gambrinus is the malt supplier I will use. Here is their website:
http://www.gambrinusmalting.com/ . They have a local warehouse where they stock most of their products.
With work commitments and what is left to finish hardware wise, the Brew date is looking like Nov 5 or 6.