My new homemade Micro Brewery

[joeybeer]

Firebird,
Thanks for the clarification. I'm not used to putting all the water in at one time and recirculating everything at once. Makes since in a way. Guess my limiting factor for that is the size of my keg. Seems when I do a 10 gallon batch, my keggle is full of grain and just 7 gallons or so of strike water. It looks oat-mealish. If i were to add more water( enough to make 13 gallons in the boil) it would overflow. Your plastic kettle doesn't look all that big. What am I missing? Could you describe how your process works. Guess, I'm looking for the steps of brewing that you use. Ex: fill the vessel with 20 gals of water, heat to 155, add grain, ricirc for 1 hour, pull grain out while recircing and bringing temp up,etc.. The water part is throwing me off.
Thanks,
Snake10

I'd love to hear this too, but don't worry about converting to US units, just post your brew schedule in your normal units... If we give a damn, we'll do the conversion ourselves . Thanks so much for the info !!

 

[firebird400]

I am limited by the size of my primary fermenting buckets, they are 33 liters (8.73 gal.) but most likely only hold about 28 liters (7.4 gal.) during full-on fermentation.

The plastic drum housing the system is a 60 liter drum (will hold 16 gal.)

I start with 37 liters (9.8 gal.) in the drum and heat that to my dough-in temp using electric power or hot tap water trough the copper piping. Us here in Iceland have unlimited hot tap water at around 80°c (176°f)

When I start with 9.8 gal. I end up with about 7.4 gal. in primary fermenter.

I then pour my milled grain into the inner stainless bucket having the recirculation pump going and the blades turning and start to dough-in.

I then simply elevate the temp during the mash to get all the steps I want, and I can have as a complex schedule as I want.
I either use a 4 or 5 step mash schedule but I will get into that later, I believe I am doing things a bit different there as well.

After mash-out I use a ceiling mounted winch to raise the inner drum out of the wort, I then stop the blades turning allowing the grain to settle forming a filter of sort. Continuing to pump the wort up on to the grain bed untill I see that it no longer flows freely through it. This catches alot of the fine material out of the wort.

I then place the recirculation pipe through a hole in the top of the plastic drum in order to keep everything moving around the heating elements in the bottom and start heating to reach boil.
During the time the wort is heating up from mash-out temp to a boil the grain drains back into the outer drum and that fluid then gets boiled as well.

I then place the inner drum on top of a shallow sterile bucket allowing it to drain even more. If I have used some boiled and cooled water to "rinse" the grain the fluid that collects in this bucket is of a lower gravity and can be used to adjust pre-boil gravity.

I then simply start adding the hops I wish to use to a bag I hang from the side, I could if I wanted just place them in the liquid since them would get filtered away when transferring to the fermenter but this way is less messy.

Then I cool the wort by running ice cold tap water through the cooling spiral in the bottom.

I then close of the tap on the recirculation pump and open the one that goes from the filter and pump everything to the primary fermenting bucket.

 

[Snake10]

Firebird,
Thanks for the write up. I can now visualize what you are doing. Its almost like what guys here call" brew in a bag". Where they simply put their grain in a bag, steep it, then pull it out, boil the wort, ferment. I like your advanced concept better. The mechanics of it make it appealing for a DIY'er. I might just have to make one these. One last question:What is the highest gravity beer you have made so far? Also,You should submit your design to Brew your own magazine. Its really neat and the simple.
Snake10

 

[firebird400]

1.061, fermented down to 1.008
Tasted great
I have not been trying to hit high numbers, it was more of a mistake then anything.
I will have to look into the magazine idea, have not seen it for myself.

 

[Snake10]

Firebird,
Thanks for the info. You have rekindled my desire to use my small brain to build something new. If I build one I will for sure, post pics.
Snake10

 

[firebird400]

Great

Go for it.

Look forward to seeing your version of it

 

[cyclonite]

Wow, what an ingenious system - nice job Firebird!!!

I love how compact the entire system is!

 

[firebird400]

Thank you

 

[rico567]

Extraordinary, quite extraordinary. I hope that you, sir, are an engineer, or the field has lost a great contributor.

 

[firebird400]

Hehe thank you.

No I am not an engineer, I am a construction contractor so building things comes naturally

 

[FirstStateBrewer]

Firebird, I am also very impressed with your design! The use of tea kettle heating element coils is very unique. I found one at the following link: http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/208050663/stainless_steel_water_kettle_heating_element.html Is that what you are using?

 

[ArcLight]

The ingenuity of homebrewers never ceases to amaze me. As a fellow diy'er, I have found a hobby that I feel at hime with.
.

+1


I'm a computer programmer and will most likely never make any DIY equipment, but I am impressed with the efforts of many of the posters on the forum. You are a clever bunch.


I'd love to try Firebirds system.


Now if you need help with Excel macros, or designing databases, or financial modeling, well, that I can help with

 

[firebird400]

I must say that I have since then abandoned the use of those elements and opted for two larger elements.

I found that the surface temp got to high with those elements and connecting them in series cut back the power to much.

The larger elements did cost about twice what the smaller elements did (they are from super cheap kettles) but I now use them as a bottle disinfection and cleaning barrel.

I´ll try to post pics soon