I got a wort pump. What do I do with it?

[grafvonbarnez]

Hello all, I'm new here and pretty new to homebrewing in general. I started less than two months ago and only just bottled my second batch last weekend. I've only ever brewed with extracts and steeped grain.

But to get to my question, I recently acquired a March 809 pump essentially for free from a generous friend of mine. (The friend that got me into homebrewing, unsurprisingly). He had some sort of accident, I'm guessing a spilled brew pot, and managed to short out the wiring on it. As is my wont I told him I'd take a look at it, got waylaid by some work projects, and didn't get to it for two weeks. By then he had bought a new one and told me, "If you can fix it, it's yours." All it needed was a new power cord, so now I've got a wort pump. Problem is, what the heck do I do with it?

I've looked into some fancy brewing systems (HERMS, RIMS) but they're way out of my league at this point. I've been reading up on all grain brewing and it doesn't really seem that hard with sufficient preparation, and is definitely something I would like to try to get into at some point. I'm pretty limited on budget and equipment at this point though. So far all I have is: a plastic bucket fermenter which doesn't seal all that well, a plastic bottling bucket, 2 6 gallon and 1 five gallon glass carboys, an 8 gallon brew pot, a large propane burner, and a large 3/8" copper immersion chiller. Besides the plastic buckets that came with the brewing kit I bought when I started, everything was stuff I had or bodged together/got for free.

Is there some way I can combine this stuff with the pump and jury rig an easy way to do all grain brewing without too much outlay?

It's great to be able to join such a large and knowledgable community, and thanks a lot in advance!

 

[microbusbrewery]

You could use it to whirlpool chill for now. That wouldn't cost much to set up since you already have an immersion chiller. Check out Jamil Z's site for details (mrmalty.com) . Or...send it to me...I'll even reimburse you for the cost of the new cord.

 

[RM-MN]

Is there some way I can combine this stuff with the pump and jury rig an easy way to do all grain brewing without too much outlay?

Search out the term, "BIAB". You could be all grain brewing this evening. I don't know what you would do with the pump though.

 

[TopherM]

I got a wort pump. What do I do with it?

Pump wort?

 

[DrunkleJon]

You can use it for transferral of wort through a chiller (CFC/Plate) to the fermenter, or even cobble together a MLT out of a cooler and braid or false bottom and fly sparge/transfer that way. just think that any time you need to transport liquid a from container 1 to container 2 you can use it.

 

[austinb]

Definitely use this as your excuse to go all grain. I used to do a makeshift gravity fed all grain system that was definitely quite hazardous so my brew pump was a great piece of safety equipment so I do longer have to keep my mash tun sitting on a small table on top of another unstable table.

You can DIY yourself a decent all grain system really cheap.

Make a mash/lauter tun with an ice chest off of Craigslist or from a garage sale. Put a 1/2 valve in it and on the inside of the mash tun use a stainless mesh bag connected with a hose clamp to a small pipe nipple which is somehow connected to the valve. Basically this will allow the wort to drain out but not the grain.

Make a hot liquor tank out of those blue food grade barrels, you can usually find a 10-20 gallon one on Craigslist for cheap. They are HDPE which is food grade well beyond the maximum of 180 degree water you will hold in there.

Outfit your kettle with a valve and convert your immersion chiller to a counterflow like I did and use the pump to move the beer through it to the carboy.

You really only need the mash tun to start with all grain but all these other things will make brewing easier when you find the time and money to make them. And you can outfit them with 1/2 inch fittings and quick disconnects to use your pump to move liquids back and forth. One more thing make sure the tubing for your pump can handle boiling liquids...vinyl cannot.

 

[kh54s10]

Pump wort?

Knew someone would beat me to this.

 

[dgr]

Recirculate BIAB

 

[grafvonbarnez]

Thanks for all the responses, everyone!

Took me about an hour to rig up a pipe and bracket to whirlpool my brew pot. Tested it with just water and it works great! I'll have to get better/safer tubing to actually use it with wort though. I would definitely not want to drink anything that came out of what I used to test it. I assume the kind of silicone tubing they sell on morebeer.com is the stuff you want to use for wort?

On building a mash tun, would one of those large Gatorade coolers work? They're about 10 gal, IIRC, and there's one in the back of my garage. (The big kind that football coaches get dumped on them when they win.)

I got a sort-of-idea that I doodled out quickly at work for something like an almost HERMS set up. Use my homemade immersion chiller backwards to pump mash water through a large pot of water heated over a propane burner to do temperature rests. Then, once that's done, move the inlet hose from the spigot of the mash tun to the spigot of the heated pot and adjust the flow with a valve to do a continuous sparge. Does that sound feasible? I could probably get it cobbled together with not too much difficulty.

I drew some crude diagrams, if that helps. Beware: I'm not an artist and my handwriting is atrocious.

http://imgur.com/a/sljXh

 

[austinb]

Yes the 10 gallon cooler will work just fine for 5 gallon batches. That temperature rest contraption thingy you were taking about sounds too complicated. With a cooler it should hold the desired temperature for the duration of each rest so you only need to add Some boiling water to step it up to the next temperature rest. Honestly though with modern highly modified (that doesn't mean genetically modified) malted barley multiple temperature rests are unnecessary and one rest between 150-158 depending on how much residual sugars you want is all you need to so. I only do single rest mashes and my beers usually turn out great (and if not its not due to my mash temp schedule).