Pressurized Mash Tun???

[smackett]

Has anyone tried to hook up pressurized air to their cooler mash tun to get all the wort out of it to increase efficiency?

 

[techrunner]

i think i see where you are headed with this, but correct me if i'm wrong. use air pressure at the end of the mash, to "squeeze" all the wort from the grain bed. same as me squeezing the crap out of my grain bag, but with less of the burning of fingers. i think you will need to have some sort of a piston that will be stiff and fit your mash tun opening snugly so that the air pressure forces that piston down to squeeze the grains. using air only and nothing to physically squeeze the grains will just dissolve air into the mash, no actually squeeze it. i could see on a cylindrical tun where that could work, but might be pretty tough in a rectangular cooler. i'd say if you have a cylindrical tun with a pretty constant cross section, cut some plastic like a cutting board to shape and lay it on the mash and pressure it up. not sure how much additional wort you would get, but it might be worthwhile. if i didnt biab i might try it just to try it.

 

[smackett]

I have a cylindrical tun. At work we blow out large ion exchange columns with air to empty all the water before placing back on line and i thought it might work the same.

 

[phoenixs4r]

No, but I have thought about vacuum transfer.

Probably lead to a massive stuck sparge, but I did kick the idea around a bit.

 

[wilserbrewer]

Has anyone tried to hook up pressurized air to their cooler mash tun to get all the wort out of it to increase efficiency?

I have found gravity to be darn reliable for emptying the MT...but would love to see pics of your pressurized sytem.

 

[dgez]

Has anyone tried to hook up pressurized air to their cooler mash tun to get all the wort out of it to increase efficiency?

If you're concerned about efficiency, buy an extra pound of base malt...it's less hassle and probably tastier.

 

[pjj2ba]

No, but I have thought about vacuum transfer.

Probably lead to a massive stuck sparge, but I did kick the idea around a bit.

I've discussed both positive pressure and vacuum with a guy who works for a large chromatography company. We both agreed, that bed compression will slow the flow, but that it actually wouldn't take too much pressure to force the sparge water through. The tricky part would be having a tun you could pressurize.

I'm contemplating switching to separate mash and lauter tuns so I can have a lauter tun that really is more of a chromatography column, and is specifically designed just for that job.

 

[phoenixs4r]

If you could get an airtight seal on the vessel you are sucking to, it actually quite an interesting idea for transfers, especially since a lot of folks shy away from the cost of a pump+fittings, but if you could find a cheap, easy way to seal the receiving vessel, most folks could use a shop vac. Again it was one of my random ideas that I'll never do anything with, right up there with a reed switch to turn off my pump with it loses prime.