Can someone help me understand the Brutus system?

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Elysium

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I am trying to make my own setup and this Brutus20 looks pretty okay.

I only wanna use 2 pots....heat the water in one, add the malts, mash in it. Drain the liquid into the second pot and boil it there. Then using a pump and a plate chiller, the liquid would end up in the fermentor.

Now...I simply dont understand two things:

1, how does this recirculation mashing work? Let's say I wanna mash with 10 gallons of water...then 5 goes into each pot and I start heating the water and once I have reached mash temp I dough in and start recirculating the liquid from one pot to another?

2, what does it exactly do? Recirculation gives me more control over the temperature?
 
You can start off in the kettle, heat the water to strike temp while recirculating through the cooler until every thing is at strike temperature,
Close the outlet valve on the cooler and alow it to fill to strike volume then mash in.

Set your controller to mash temp, open the cooler valve and start recirculating when the wort clears close the valve and switch off the pump.

At the end of the mash set your controller to mash out temperature, open the outlet valve on the cooler and start recirculating.

When you are done with that turn off the pump and let the cooler drain into the kettle, save a little time by starting to heat to the boil.

There you go simple :) you recirculated to clear the wort or change temperature and because the Mash Tun is a cooler you don't need to recirculate all the time as it should hold the temperature.

When your recirculating you need to keep an eye on the level of liquid in both pots.

Atb....... Aamcle
 
1. If you want to mash with 10, you would mash with 10. The brutus 20 system is basically a sparge method. Mash as usual, once your mashing is done you begin draining your sparge water to your mash tun, and draining your mash tun into your sparge pot. Continue this cross-recirculation until you believe you have a consistent gravity throughout, which leads to number 2

2. What you're gaining is consistency. Eventually the gravity of all the liquid in the system will equalize, once you're at that point stop draining from the sparge pot, which now becomes your boil kettle, and you're ready to go. You basically avoid poor sparging. You will lose some efficiency since you're equalizing the gravity throughout and never actually rinse the grains clean, but many people agree being consistent is more important than the difference in efficiency. Especially since a little base grain will cost very little.
 
You can start off in the kettle, heat the water to strike temp while recirculating through the cooler until every thing is at strike temperature,
Close the outlet valve on the cooler and alow it to fill to strike volume then mash in.

Set your controller to mash temp, open the cooler valve and start recirculating when the wort clears close the valve and switch off the pump.

At the end of the mash set your controller to mash out temperature, open the outlet valve on the cooler and start recirculating.

When you are done with that turn off the pump and let the cooler drain into the kettle, save a little time by starting to heat to the boil.

There you go simple :) you recirculated to clear the wort or change temperature and because the Mash Tun is a cooler you don't need to recirculate all the time as it should hold the temperature.

When your recirculating you need to keep an eye on the level of liquid in both pots.

Atb....... Aamcle

Hey Atb

Thanks for the info. Makes a lot more sense now.....it is used to expend the same temperature all over the system.

Now......I still need info... :p What can I use for temp control (what kind of a simple control panel can I put together)?
 
1. If you want to mash with 10, you would mash with 10. The brutus 20 system is basically a sparge method. Mash as usual, once your mashing is done you begin draining your sparge water to your mash tun, and draining your mash tun into your sparge pot. Continue this cross-recirculation until you believe you have a consistent gravity throughout, which leads to number 2

2. What you're gaining is consistency. Eventually the gravity of all the liquid in the system will equalize, once you're at that point stop draining from the sparge pot, which now becomes your boil kettle, and you're ready to go. You basically avoid poor sparging. You will lose some efficiency since you're equalizing the gravity throughout and never actually rinse the grains clean, but many people agree being consistent is more important than the difference in efficiency. Especially since a little base grain will cost very little.

Hey King

Just a question (so that I could understand your comment correctly): There is no water circulation during the mash? Is it only applied after the mash to do the sparging?
 
If you're doing what the original is doing, that's correct.

Thanks for the reply. I assume (from reading the previous comments) the pump is on before the dough-in to properly dispense the heat in the mash pot, right?
 
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