manual HERMS

beerrab · Feb 21, 2014

I want to do herms on a budget. Manually seems to be the only way and with just one pump. I plan to use my 10 gallon round water cooler as a mash tun and have it raised above the HLT and Brew Kettle.

The HLT will have my emersion wort chiller in it for heat exchange and use my one pump to circulates as necessary to boost temperature. I believe this will work based on my experience using this cooler mash tun for single infusion mashing. Once I hit my target temp it holds for 60 minutes with minimal temperature loss.
Usually 2 to 3 degrease. This means I would not be able to set and forget totally but I would not have to hover over it either. This set up would make it easy to step mash and mash out simply by circulating through the HLT with the appropriate temperature to step my mash up or mash out.

Am I missing something? Does anybody have input why this should or should not work.

beerrab · Apr 6, 2014

My first manual HERMS brew day presented a learning curve. My set up PIC below. I found I needed two loaded propane tanks to make this work faster. My HLT was behind on temperature. I was paying to much attention to the Mash tun. This caused temperature loss in the mash tun. After that I was off and running. I achieved target mash temp again. I found if I checked it in 15 minute intervals I could maintain mash temp. I also found I needed to turn my pump on and off. I used a power strip with a switch for this. I have read that the HLT should be 5 Degrees higher than target mash temperature. this proved to be very slow. I found 10 degrees better for maintaining temperature with manual HERMS and 15 to 20 Degrees for stepping. After all it's a manual HERMS and I have a switch to stop the pump when temperature is reached. I found it worked well. I believe I'll do much better next time around