Conical brew kettle / HLT / MLT

[86turbodsl]

Investigating design options for a new system i plan to build.

I am definitely doing electric, probably a 50A system, will be a stacked
3 tier with a tippy for the MLT. I want to do clean in place. I have a bad back and don't wish to lift anything during a brew day beyond the pail with spent grain. Hard plumbed with a bottom pump for recirc is the current thought.

I wanted to look at bottom draining for the cip. Would it make sense to use conical kettles for this? I don't really care if something isn't commerically available. I have enough tools and resources to make basically anything i want fairly cheap.

I have heard about whirlpooling and haven't investigated it that thoroughly. Is that desirable? What about debris in the boil kettle? If i do bottom drain, can that be an issue?

What's the current wisdom on this subject and what is desirable with the cost is no object crowd?

 

[Bowtiebrewery]

While being super cool, I think a bottom drain on a conical filter will not work as intended unless its a fairly large port. Now.. a conical type kettle would make sense if you intended to rack from a pre-determined position on the side of the cone.

The thought being that you would recirculate your wort and precipitate all the break material out and into the cone of the kettle, then rack off the side for clear and clean cool wort to your fermenters...

Then you would use the bottom drain (I'd recommend a fairly large vale like 1" or something along those lines) to remove break, and hops... You will still need to bend over what I would imagine would be a considerably tall setup to clean it though...

 

[JoshuaW]

You dont really need it to be that drastic, just domed and it will drain fine. Something like a sanke keg, but upside down (I think I may have even seen this design).

The system I am trying to sell right now has bottom draining kettles, but it doesnt have a mechanism for straining. I would consider adding a basket filter or something to catch larger debris, then a hopback device packed with rice hulls to catch anything else, or something like that. My pump is large enough that it can handle anything but large debris, then you could let the trub settle out in an the conical fermentor, where you could just dump it after 12 hours or so.

 

[86turbodsl]

Who really cares if the trub and break waste ends up in the fermenter? It all comes out of the trub in the siphon off, unless you're collecting yeast right? Or is there potential for off flavors due to the electric elements? I had planned on ULWD elements such as the wavy one everyone uses.

(edit)
Ok, more reading on chemistry and now i get it. You're trying to get rid of the hot trub too. So a side port for everything but the last bit of trub, then a bottom port to get rid of the waste hot trub?