My Electric Brew Setup

[jonurban]

Hello All,

I was hoping for a little feedback regarding the all grain electric brewery setup I'm working on.

At this point I don't want to use pumps, I'm interested in utilizing electric elements to control the temperatures of of mash tun keggle and hot liquid sparge kettle. I'd like to manually vourloft.

For those of you who use electric keggles or electric kettles, does anyone do so with out using bags? Any tips?

I'd like to try to position my element high enough that I can still utilize a grain bed mash tun.

Any advice is greatly appreciated, as I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I am worried about scorching grains, I may have to embrace using grian bags but that would change my process, and I'm less comfortable with that.

My intended setup

 

[AnOldUR]

hmmmm . . . that looks a lot like my system.
You spying on me?

 

[WAORGANY]

Hello All,

I was hoping for a little feedback regarding the all grain electric brewery setup I'm working on.

At this point I don't want to use pumps, I'm interested in utilizing electric elements to control the temperatures of of mash tun keggle and hot liquid sparge kettle. I'd like to manually vourloft.

For those of you who use electric keggles or electric kettles, does anyone do so with out using bags? Any tips?

I'd like to try to position my element high enough that I can still utilize a grain bed mash tun.

Any advice is greatly appreciated, as I don't want to reinvent the wheel, but I am worried about scorching grains, I may have to embrace using grian bags but that would change my process, and I'm less comfortable with that.

My intended setup

I don't think that you would want to have a heating element in your MLT? Most people only use elements in their HLT and BK.

 

[AnOldUR]

Most people only use elements in their HLT and BK.

 

[jonurban]

AnOldUr, i'm spying on you now... just saw the pic of your setup, that's exactly what I have in mind. are you still using the 3000 watt element, any advice for the element controllers?

 

[AnOldUR]

There's a lot of love on this board for automated systems. My set up is mostly manually controlled.

Not sure what picture you saw with a 3000W element, but I have this OCD problem and keep changing things. After years of experimenting, I still don't have all the bugs worked out of the mash process, but very close. Mostly wanting to decrease the time it takes to step temperature without scorching. Intermediate steps or holding temperature work well. Going from Sacc to Mash Out is slower than I'd like, but I'm still holding back. Last brewday was very promising.

Would a conventional RIMS or HERMS be easier? Sure, but what fun would that be? If it were just about the beer you could buy it. The challenge of using a different process and making it work is just as much of the reason I brew as the final product.