Morebeer's new bottom drain brew kettles

[cfrazier77]

I saw today that more beer has new bottom drain kettles on legs like Spike has. These look interesting, especially a jacketed boil kettle. I wonder how they will turn out.

https://www.morebeer.com/products/brewbuilt-bottom-drain-kettle-hlt-10-gallon-1.html

 

[Bobby_M]

I'll be doing some evaluating on them soon.

 

[Deadalus]

First time I have seen a cooling jacket on a BK. Is that common commercially?

The wattage seems weak. Last time I replaced my element on my keggle, I was interested in a slingblade. What I saw offered then I also thought was weak. I think perhaps it's the design. My element is 5500W and the majority of the time I brew 6 gallon batches. It's a fast ramp up!

SlingBlade Specs

• 240 Volt
• L6-30 plug
• 20 Amp breaker required for 10 & 15 gal element
• 30 Amp breaker required for 20 & 30 gal element
  • 50-gallon kettle requires 2 x 30 amp circuits
  • Includes 2 x 5750 Watt elements
• Wattage:
  • 10 gal - 3750 Watts
  • 15 gal - 4500 Watts
  • 20 gal - 5000 Watts
  • 30 gal - 5750 Watts

 

[Deadalus]

Also, what would cool this? There's a rule of thumb not you use your glycol chiller above 100-110. Wort is going to be boiling.

 

[Indian_villager]

Also, what would cool this? There's a rule of thumb not you use your glycol chiller above 100-110. Wort is going to be boiling.

Agreed. I think the cooling jacket is a bit of a jank addition. On a BK at this scale even insulation in that jacket is jank.

 

[Bobby_M]

The wattage seems weak. Last time I replaced my element on my keggle, I was interested in a slingblade.

The slingblade elements have been setup like that for years and it tracks with what Blichmann does with the boil coils. Sure, more power is more better. When I build systems with slingblades, I cheat a bit and cram the next size up into the pots, e.g. the 5000 goes into the 15 with a little radius manipulation and the 5750 goes in the 20s.

The main reason it's not a deal breaker is that heating 13 gallons of strike water on 4500w to 160F takes 38 minutes and on 5500 it's 31 minutes. 7 minute difference. About the same amount when ramping to a boil. If you're running this as a 3 vessel system, 7 minutes of heat time is the least of your brew day worries.

 

[Bobby_M]

Also, what would cool this? There's a rule of thumb not you use your glycol chiller above 100-110. Wort is going to be boiling.

The jacket isn't for glycol, it's for tap water. Whether it's effective or not remains to be seen. BrewHa's BIAC system chills the same way. I believe the premise is that it's good enough to get wort to 100F where you can move it to your CF for glycol to take over (much more effectively).

 

[Bassman2003]

I like the product innovation. I would like to see if there are any strategies for getting clear wort out the kettle using the bottom drain. Like a 1/2" protrusion pipe extension that would suck in above the trub level and could be removed when you want to fully drain everything.

 

[Bobby_M]

I like the product innovation. I would like to see if there are any strategies for getting clear wort out the kettle using the bottom drain. Like a 1/2" protrusion pipe extension that would suck in above the trub level and could be removed when you want to fully drain everything.

If it's going into a conical anyway, the wort can be dirty and dumped after reaching pitching temps.

 

[Deadalus]

The slingblade elements have been setup like that for years and it tracks with what Blichmann does with the boil coils. Sure, more power is more better. When I build systems with slingblades, I cheat a bit and cram the next size up into the pots, e.g. the 5000 goes into the 15 with a little radius manipulation and the 5750 goes in the 20s.

The main reason it's not a deal breaker is that heating 13 gallons of strike water on 4500w to 160F takes 38 minutes and on 5500 it's 31 minutes. 7 minute difference. About the same amount when ramping to a boil. If you're running this as a 3 vessel system, 7 minutes of heat time is the least of your brew day worries.

2x7=14 minutes. I'll take that repeating time over the course of the product life back. A little hotter than 160 for some mash temps and another 40+ degrees for a boil. With times dependent on specific batch sizes and equipment. Probably 80-90% of the time I am brewing 6 gallons. But 15 minutes is worth having. I do multitask, so perhaps not lost but I don't want the hobby to be work.

Between the 4500 and their 5750 however, the length difference is only 2.75 inches. But for electric, installing a 240V 20 amp line vs a 30 isn't really different in cost, it's mostly the labor cost there, with the labor not being particularly different for either. And the material used for the element is bendable and probably the same across sizes, just longer. They could arc the slingblade a little further but vary the curve for a few pot sizes, instead of dropping the wattage as the intended pot size drops. Right now, the prices listed goes up $10 a size class. Which is somewhat artificial. I get it costs some to differentiate, but does the wattage really need to change too? I wasn't going to drop my wattage to move my element from the middle to the side and pay more! And perhaps the boilcoil can't increase wattage since it's a circle (go wavy?), but they charge even more and hook up with their own special plug so you need the cord too!

Reading the OP, I originally thought it might be steam, and following the link the jacket made me think glycol since it looks similar to a jacketed conical. Water makes sense though. You wouldn't have to deal with cleaning the chiller and some would find that useful. It would save me almost 0 time as I CIP my CFC, which is necessary for my HERMS coil anyway. Probably does need a whirlpool going, so a pump would help a lot. Then how fast does it chill and how that might fit into a specific brew rig and protocols will vary. I do think it could be desirable vs an IC or a PC as far as cleaning and against a CFC, no worries about what you can't see inside the tubing.

Yes indeed, dropping from 100 is quick with a glycol chiller. I drop down to about around 100F with my perpetual chiller and transfer. Before I was cleaning up this past weekend, the wort was already at pitching temp (68F). And the week before, the same and it was 10 gallons and steam beer temp (60F). For me, I didn't use any water to chill. I was at about 105F with the pepertual chiller, which could be improved slightl, but by the time I switched hoses and transferred it was under 100. I'd say from fermenter mass absorbing heat.

 

[Bassman2003]

If it's going into a conical anyway, the wort can be dirty and dumped after reaching pitching temps.

I guess if you get the bling with your boil kettle, it stands to reason you would own a high dollar conical as well!

 

[Bobby_M]

I guess if you get the bling with your boil kettle, it stands to reason you would own a high dollar conical as well!

I think as a brand, they think in ecosystems. They figure you'll go all bottom drain on the hot side and then the X3 conicals on the cold side.

 

[wickedbeernut]

I like the product innovation. I would like to see if there are any strategies for getting clear wort out the kettle using the bottom drain. Like a 1/2" protrusion pipe extension that would suck in above the trub level and could be removed when you want to fully drain everything.

I'm not sure how much innovation there is. BrewBuilt reverse-engineered the Spike Brewing "Tank" kettles (domed bottom, splayed legs, mashtun door, ...) in much the same way BrewBuilt reverse-engineered the Brewtools F-series unitanks with the BrewBuilt X3-series. The BrewBuilt boil kettle jacket is certainly novel. Looking forward to @Bobby_M's evaluation.

I can't believe you transfer wort from the BrewBuilt boil kettle to the fermenter via the bottom drain. I assume a pickup tube is inserted through the tri-clamp port on the side of the boil kettle near the bottom. This is how the Spike boil kettle works.

 

[Bobby_M]

I can't believe you transfer wort from the BrewBuilt boil kettle to the fermenter via the bottom drain. I assume a pickup tube is inserted through the tri-clamp port on the side of the boil kettle near the bottom. This is how the Spike boil kettle works.

No, it looks like it has a rotating pickup arm on the front wall. If you mistakenly were to look at the HLT you don't find the same port there but that's just water so no problem using the bottom for that.

 

[wickedbeernut]

No, it looks like it has a rotating pickup arm on the front wall. If you mistakenly were to look at the HLT you don't find the same port there but that's just water so no problem using the bottom for that.

And a similar situation with the mash tun. Recirculating during the mash ensures minimal grain in the domed bottom. The bottom drain can be used during the sparge to transfer the wort to the boil kettle.

The domed bottoms and bottom drains, along with the mash tun door and CIP balls, really shine when it comes to cleaning.

The bottom drains of my Spike Trio Tank kettles are plumbed to 1.5” tri-clamp wall drains. I’m in the process of plumbing my BrewBuilt X3 unitank bottom drains to 1.5” tri-clamp wall drains via the 1.5” tri-clamp double-sided bulkheads you just shipped me.

 

[Bassman2003]

This is why I mentioned if they had a little insert that would raise the exit pipe level up a bit to leave any sediment behind. But that applies more to the use as a boil kettle than a mash tun. And if you care about clear wort. I would assume they do not. So the bottom drain design excels in cleaning for the most part. If I was shopping around I would save $800 and just get a normal kettle as cleaning is easy as one can drain most of the cleaning water away before lifting the lightweight kettle. But I understand the draw for some.

 

[Bobby_M]

I was dubious on the benefits of a bottom drain kettle until I had one. Now every time I demo a system that doesn't have one and I have to heave it over to my sink for cleaning, it gets further cemented into the "why did I wait so long" books.

I'm not saying the kettles on legs, whether BB or Spike, are worth the added price. I'm just saying, all else equal, if you're custom building/buying a kettle that is getting ports put on it, you might as well have one of them be through the bottom if possible. I sell bottom drains probably twice as often as side drains at this point.

 

[Bassman2003]

I have a bottom drain HLT and love it. But like you said, it is just water. I almost think the kettle design should be closer to a conical so all of the sediment could be "dropped" after a rest and nothing but clear wort would be left behind. But we seem to make do with whatever equipment we have in the end.

 

[wickedbeernut]

After having owned a Spike 15G bottom drain Trio system, I would never go back to a flat bottom system. There is the matter of cost. The Spike system is over $12K, but well worth it in my opinion. It'll be interesting to see how much an equivalent BrewBuilt bottom drain system costs.

There's no issue with sediment in the boil kettle. Both the Spike and BrewBuilt boil kettles have a whirlpool port. Once the whirlpool is complete, you rotate the racking arm to sit just above the trub.

 

[Indian_villager]

I was dubious on the benefits of a bottom drain kettle until I had one. Now every time I demo a system that doesn't have one and I have to heave it over to my sink for cleaning, it gets further cemented into the "why did I wait so long" books.

I'm not saying the kettles on legs, whether BB or Spike, are worth the added price. I'm just saying, all else equal, if you're custom building/buying a kettle that is getting ports put on it, you might as well have one of them be through the bottom if possible. I sell bottom drains probably twice as often as side drains at this point.

You know I've always thought people were sawing the wrong end off of keggles.

 

[Closet Fermenter]

You know I've always thought people were sawing the wrong end off of keggles.

Exactly! I met some guys who took the bottoms out of their sanke kegs to make their keggles; it was a great setup and made so much sense.

 

[CobraVin]

The slingblade elements have been setup like that for years and it tracks with what Blichmann does with the boil coils. Sure, more power is more better. When I build systems with slingblades, I cheat a bit and cram the next size up into the pots, e.g. the 5000 goes into the 15 with a little radius manipulation and the 5750 goes in the 20s.

The main reason it's not a deal breaker is that heating 13 gallons of strike water on 4500w to 160F takes 38 minutes and on 5500 it's 31 minutes. 7 minute difference. About the same amount when ramping to a boil. If you're running this as a 3 vessel system, 7 minutes of heat time is the least of your brew day worries.

Hey Bobby, why is the sling blade included in this setup instead of a normal element? Isn't either going to sit under a false bottom in most biab or basket setups? Looking forward to checking that and the spike 15 gal bottom drain out at the shop soon, my Spike Solo 20 might be up for sale soon.

 

[Bobby_M]

Hey Bobby, why is the sling blade included in this setup instead of a normal element? Isn't either going to sit under a false bottom in most biab or basket setups? Looking forward to checking that and the spike 15 gal bottom drain out at the shop soon, my Spike Solo 20 might be up for sale soon.

My guess is that Brewbuilt (moreflavor) only stocks and sells slingblade elements to keep things simple. It doesn't matter much to me what you end up with. If you buy the kettle from me, I can swap it for a ripple if you would rather that. In a case of a BIAB usage, perhaps the biggest benefit to a slingblade is the ability to drop an immersion chiller directly on the bottom of the kettle getting you 2-3" deeper in the wort.

 

[ScrewyBrewer]

Agreed. I think the cooling jacket is a bit of a jank addition. On a BK at this scale even insulation in that jacket is jank.

Not much different than cooling wort down by setting a kettle in a sink with cold water, as you will need to stir the wort to speed up the heat transfer.

 

[Broken Crow]

You know I've always thought people were sawing the wrong end off of keggles.

Exactly! I met some guys who took the bottoms out of their sanke kegs to make their keggles; it was a great setup and made so much sense.

You highlight what I see to be a huge problem with this. As a keggle-builder, there's a couple issues that need to be addressed; I'm OK with dumping a lot of trub in the fermenter, but with a center drain, you have to dump ALL of it in. With keg, owing to the structure, you're limited on element placement hieght and temp stratification becomes an issue.. My own keggle with the top cut out, has a diptube that reaches to the center so as not to waste any wort, and since all the trub will be concentrated there, I use a 10"x10" square 'pillow-filter' that has a couple SS wire inner supports to keep it from collapsing..because it is square it will never rest flat against the keggle surface and even when the top is loaded down, it can draw from the underside and it works great but: There's always a couple gallons below the heating element and even when the topside begins to boil, I can open the ball valve and it takes well over a gallon of cold water coming out before it gets hot... I need to run continuous recirculation and to do that with a center drain, you'd need a filter or a side pickup and just ignore the concave middle.
IMHO; Bottom-drain in the middle of a concaved kettle is 100% non-starter. Bobby has it right with putting the bottom drain off to the side. This sounds like a nice idea on paper that will make for a lot of unhappy customers.
..just my 2-cents.

 

[Bobby_M]

When I was comparing the HLT vs BK version of the brewbuilt specifically as to the possibility of building my eBIAB rigs, I concluded either one would be fine.

First, even if you took the center drain as the pump input for recirculation of the mash and put the whirlpooled output back into the front port, you can still change over to the whirlpool port for the final draining to the fermenter. To this point, that's exactly what I do in my own kettle even though my bottom drain is highly offset to the front and would only pickup a small amount of trub.

What I'm not so sure about is how tolerant the pump would be to processing hot side hop debris on highly hopped beers. My guess is that the boil kettle build would win for that situation since you can pick up on the front and send that into the tangential whirlpool return.

If you absolutely had no choice to drain the last wort from the center bottom, this insert would probably leave the chunkiest stuff behind if you leave it sticking up a bit. Then when you CIP, you pull the whole thing out.

Another possible angle...

 

[FogHTX]

When I was comparing the HLT vs BK version of the brewbuilt specifically as to the possibility of building my eBIAB rigs, I concluded either one would be fine.

First, even if you took the center drain as the pump input for recirculation of the mash and put the whirlpooled output back into the front port, you can still change over to the whirlpool port for the final draining to the fermenter. To this point, that's exactly what I do in my own kettle even though my bottom drain is highly offset to the front and would only pickup a small amount of trub.

Bobby- I've found your Spike version to be pretty much ideal where the center drain is only used for cleaning with the front pickup tube used for recirc input to the pump. There's almost no clear wort remaining. There's about 1.3L that the pickup doesn't reach between the center of the dish and the drain elbow, but that's usually pretty dense hop debris.

 

[Indian_villager]

You highlight what I see to be a huge problem with this. As a keggle-builder, there's a couple issues that need to be addressed; I'm OK with dumping a lot of trub in the fermenter, but with a center drain, you have to dump ALL of it in. With keg, owing to the structure, you're limited on element placement hieght and temp stratification becomes an issue.. My own keggle with the top cut out, has a diptube that reaches to the center so as not to waste any wort, and since all the trub will be concentrated there, I use a 10"x10" square 'pillow-filter' that has a couple SS wire inner supports to keep it from collapsing..because it is square it will never rest flat against the keggle surface and even when the top is loaded down, it can draw from the underside and it works great but: There's always a couple gallons below the heating element and even when the topside begins to boil, I can open the ball valve and it takes well over a gallon of cold water coming out before it gets hot... I need to run continuous recirculation and to do that with a center drain, you'd need a filter or a side pickup and just ignore the concave middle.
IMHO; Bottom-drain in the middle of a concaved kettle is 100% non-starter. Bobby has it right with putting the bottom drain off to the side. This sounds like a nice idea on paper that will make for a lot of unhappy customers.
..just my 2-cents.

I'm not suggesting that the bottom dump be used for everything. I think it would be great for recirculating and cleaning. I agree with @Bobby_M that highly hopped beers would make this interesting depending on pump choice. I still think a side pick up for the transfer out would be a better answer. Or you could put a tee on the bottom drain where the straight down could be used to dump trub out of the kettle first and the side tap connects to your pump. Either way, you are open to a lot more options to tinker around.

There exist people in the world who just want to buy something polished and have it just work, then there are the rest of us who are willing to tinker around and accept that choice comes with headaches and frustrations of plans not going as we had hoped, but then we dust ourselves off and iterate.

 

[Bobby_M]

I'm not suggesting that the bottom dump be used for everything. I think it would be great for recirculating and cleaning. I agree with @Bobby_M that highly hopped beers would make this interesting depending on pump choice. I still think a side pick up for the transfer out would be a better answer. Or you could put a tee on the bottom drain where the straight down could be used to dump trub out of the kettle first and the side tap connects to your pump. Either way, you are open to a lot more options to tinker around.

There exist people in the world who just want to buy something polished and have it just work, then there are the rest of us who are willing to tinker around and accept that choice comes with headaches and frustrations of plans not going as we had hoped, but then we dust ourselves off and iterate.

The boil kettle apparently has the front pickup but the HLT is using it for the temp probe. Given the TIG abilities here at the shop, I'd just weld a new ferrule in for the temp probe and repurpose the front port for a pickup if desired.

 

[Broken Crow]

I'm not suggesting that the bottom dump be used for everything. I think it would be great for recirculating and cleaning. I agree with @Bobby_M that highly hopped beers would make this interesting depending on pump choice. I still think a side pick up for the transfer out would be a better answer. Or you could put a tee on the bottom drain where the straight down could be used to dump trub out of the kettle first and the side tap connects to your pump. Either way, you are open to a lot more options to tinker around.

There exist people in the world who just want to buy something polished and have it just work, then there are the rest of us who are willing to tinker around and accept that choice comes with headaches and frustrations of plans not going as we had hoped, but then we dust ourselves off and iterate.

Thanks for that... I'm not just 'willing' to tinker...I love tinkering, I just wish I had more money to buy stuff to tinker with.
I probably have a bias owing to lack of experience with an electric kettle, other than my concave-bottomed keggle. I like your tee idea, but I'm still concerned about the amount of trub that might pass through to the pump if recirculating through it... Though a side-pickup seems best for at least recirculating, if not draining as well, the concave bottom leaves me concerned for its lack of circulation. Great for cleaning sure, but maybe I'm just not fully grokking recirc dynamics... (and this is likely with me for neurological reasons, but this thread seems a great place to bring it up.) Like I mentioned with my keggle, the temps in the bottom were downright cold without recirculating. The first I ever saw of a bottom draining kettle was Bobby's with the drain off to the side, well before Spike came out with ones with the drain in the middle. If I want a bottom drain, I'd think Bobby has the superior design as with recirc and maybe a simple trub-dam, going commando on hops and then recirculating through a CFC should be just fine, but I don't see that as a possiblity with the drain in the center.
I guess I'm just struggling to see how this kettle can just be used without devising workarounds.