Awesome build, and equally, if not more impressive write up!
I am thinking about doing this quite seriously. I am not a good carpenter and thought about doing the stand out of metal, perhaps using the frames available for the conicals. I was also thinking about possibly condensing the stand, and the side cart into one assembly, or optionally, just put casters on the individual conical frames and skip the stand, mounting plumbing on a wall.
The cart is pretty easy to make actually. The worst part is the countertops, but I used those because that's what I have in the rest of the garage.
Other than that, it's all 2x4s held together with kreg screws. The only tools you'd need is a miter saw (circular saw works in a pinch), kreg jig, and a drill/driver combo. Add in a jig saw for the counter and you're good to go.
I put the stand on a second cart as otherwise I'd need longer than an 8ft 2x4 which wouldn't fit in the car, and I'd have to figure something else out for the counters. MDF would work pretty well though.
I have several questions if you please. .
At the height your racking arms are, I assume that is above the level of a standard ball lock keg?
Also, can you fit a standard 5 gal pail beneath the dump valve at the height the conicals rest in the stand?
I use pin lock kegs, and the racking arm is above that. I'll have to check with one of my old ball locks later on. I usually just attach a silicone hose with a camlock on one end to the racking arm and enough hose to reach the bottom of the keg. Open it up and rack off the beer.
To dump all the trub after I rack the beer off, I put a 5 gallon bucket from lowes/home depot under the dump valve and open it. works great.
These two questions are probably the most critical. I don't know how the height would be for these, if I used the metal stands instead, if the heights would be correct as-is. Are you happy with the height of the top of the conicals for working with the lids, etc? If I modify, it seems going higher might facilitate combining the two carts into one, but only if the working height doesn't become to difficult.
The height actually works out pretty well. It's high enough to facilitate dumping in to regular buckets and racking off to kegs, but low enough that I can look in to the conical to check if it's been cleaned. The counter itself is roughly at regular kitchen countertop height.
Do you notice any issues of rolling the cart with all the casters? If I wanted to roll my stand from a walkout basement onto a patio for some reason, there is a 1" lip of concrete and also smaller metal threshold that I might have difficulty with.
I haven't had to move it much since I put it in place, but it's pretty easy to roll around. If you have to go over a lip, you might want to make a small ramp just to make it easier on yourself (you're talking about lifting 30 gallons of liquid after all), but pushing it around shouldn't be an issue.
How are you filling the fermenters? I would need a VERY long piece of silicone hose to pump from the brew stand directly through chiller and into the conical, depending on where I put the conical stand. (What is the combined length and width of the two carts ?) I might need to use a pail as an intermediary. I don't know if the march pump could pull off a long run of say 25 -35 feet.
At the moment I've been using a carboy that I just dump in to the fermenter. I need to move one of the pumps to facilitate pumping directly in to them. I do already have the tri-clover fittings on the lid for that to work though.
My long term plans are to get it so the beer never touches outside air once it has been cooled. Been working on other projects at the moment though. I've been planning on hooking up a triclover air stone to the bottom of the conical for oxygenation, and pumping the wort directly in via the lid. The only other thing I need to work on is getting the yeast in to the conical. I was thinking of using a tri-clover reducer as a funnel that I could hook up to the lid once the wort has been transferred and oxygenated, but again, that's a project for a later date.
Where do you rest or store the chiller coils when opening the fermenter without loosening the air tight fittings ? Do they stand upright on the base coil? Haven't read the web page on these yet, but was wondering if its covered in there about how to adjust the depth of how far into the wort they will extend.
The coils are permanently attached to the lid. So, they come out with the lid when you remove it. There's a picture on the website if you want to take a look. They're at a depth that you should be able to ferment a 5 gallon batch without any trouble. They come within an inch or two of the racking arm.
I think you touched on this already, but could you elaborate please. If doing ales and lagers simultaneously, how has the performance been in terms of temp regulation without overshoot/undershoot?
So far, so good actually. Once I figured out the driver board issue, they've been within a degree or so of the set point. You can adjust the hysteresis however high you want for a temp swing. Right now I'm actually out of kegerator space. So, I've been lagering in a couple of the conicals while I wait for free space to show up. At the moment I have a vienna lager at ~40 degrees, an alt that's fermenting at 60 degrees, and an oktoberfest fermenting at ~50 degrees. No problems as of yet.
Do you know what the max temp the plastic conicals can tolerate? 140°? I've been having issues with my plate chiller, and seems it'd be easier to just chill it to what I can manage then use the glycol fermenter to handle the rest.
Not 100% sure, but it's MDPE. There should be some info on it out there. I run hot tap water + pbw through it to clean regularly though. So, in the 120s I haven't seen any issues.
I'd definitely run the wort through a chiller first before transferring to the conicals though. That's a ton of heat to take out and you risk raising the temp of the glycol much higher than normal. For the glycol, that's not a huge issue, but if you have another conical need to be cooled at the same time, you could end up heating your wort, which wouldn't be a good thing.
Normally though, I chill my wort to somewhere in the 80s and transfer it to the conicals. I'll oxygenate and turn on the chill cycle set to pitch temp. 5-10 minutes later it'll be in the mid 40s for a lager. So, pitch the yeast and set the conical to fermentation temp. Then you're good to go.
How easy is it to control flow, such as for dumping yeast, from those butterfly valves, without going full blast. Do these work like a ball valve except with a plate instead? What is the benefit over a standard ball valve?
The reason I went with a ball valve for the racking port is that it's a lot easier to control flow. The downside is you need to take it apart to clean it. Butterfly valves are CIP though. So, that's what I used for the dump valve. The 1.5" dump valve can dump a ton of liquid quickly. So, if you're using that to harvest yeast, you can either use the sight glass method that others use in the main plastic conical thread, or just hook a 1/2" hose up to it when you're dumping. The hose has enough restriction on it that you can control the flow pretty easily.
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