Finally going to start making something from all these parts!

[kklowell]

I think I have everything I need to put the brewery together, and planning to start this weekend....even though Christmas will be a bit in the way of that. I do have a question for those with herms setups though...I have my copper coil running through a bucket that maybe holds two gallons, the heater for which is a 1500w element. I'm concerned that water might evaporate off that bucket rather quickly, leading to exposed coils. Does anyone use a less-evaporative fluid...like say cooking oil? Just a thought I had yesterday and figured that I couldn't be the first to think of it, so I wondered what ya'all use. Plain water? Oil? Glycol? Something else?

 

[stlbeer]

You're using the HERMs to keep your mash at the correct temperature so it won't get much more than 155*F. At that temp there won't be enough evaporation to worry about. You could always use a lid to help control the heat loss.

A lot of folks use the water in their HERMs for sparging. I think using cooking oil, while it has better thermal properties than water, will be slow to react to temperature changes, will be hot long after being used to heat your wort, and would be a fire hazard - if you're using an open flame. If any gets into your wort, it could effect head retention of the beer.

 

[outside92129]

Water has a much higher specific heat than most cooking oils, however it's often not used because of higher freezing temps and low boiling temps. But it's perfect for brewing temp ranges. Also cheap and a snap to clean up.