rookies first attempt at automation

[clay9_24]

Hi all,

I have been reading posts on homebrewtalk.com for quite awhile now. I have not made many posts of my own. But I bet that I have spent three to four hours a day reading how you all have done stuff while building my own setup. It was complete awhile ago and now I feel like sharing.

I have only been brewing myself for a little over a year band I enjoy the piss out of it. I built a pretty decent automated brewery myself and just wanted to share some pictures. It was part of our sr design project for college so everything was built on the cheap so try not to judge.

I have since dismantled the beast and have started over from scratch now that I have learned from one simple setup.

Much appreciation to the community here for asking and answering questions that solved a lot of our issues.

 

[Walker]

rookie?

I was expecting a large "mouse trap" machine with hamster wheels and boots attached to sticks kicking things and sh!t.

 

[Walker]

BTW: why did you use such small kettles?

 

[gregger]

THAT is used to make beer??? Can it also build short-range nuclear warheads?

 

[oregoncurtis]

Interesting I also had a senior project related to brewing in which we built a malter. What was the budget on your project?

 

[o4_srt]

Nice job, I like it a lot. Doesn't look cheap in the least bit.

Was thinking of doing the same thing for my sr design project


If I need it to graduate, swmbo can't complain

 

[Mike3701]

Your no rookie, care to explain how it works?

 

[kladue]

Interesting system, it appears to be an electric HERMS system with an AB plc, and one of the better looking panel builds seen on here.

 

[kegtoe]

BTW: why did you use such small kettles?

thats what i was thinking

 

[Espi]

if that's rookie, i am pretty much screwed. Punch me in the face, my little RIMS setup is a POS.

 

[clay9_24]

I greatly appreciate the compliments. It was pretty complicated but we built it to prove a concept. I assure you there are a hundred little things that need to be changed that drive me insane and that is why I dismantled it and am working on the next one.

As to the size of the tanks I found a guy selling surplus 16ga 4 x 12 sheets of stainless steel on CL and bought three. The mash tun is way taller than it needed to be but it still works. I designed the mash tun to be the largest possible to be made out of a full sheet of stainless then had it rolled and welded it together.

The boiler was a large of our work. it is a double jacketed boiler. The jacket volume was used to heat water to strike temp, boil, and sanitize. We had it worked out to use a portion of the high temp jacket water for the strike water so that batches could be ran in sequence.

the corny keg is just what i had around that we put a coil inside and used it as a herms system. Pretty simple and worked pretty good. that large volume of water at the right temp kept the duty cycle of the heating element pretty dang low.

alot of things appear oddly pieced together because they were. We were college students and did not see any shame in sending out loads of request for donations, samples, price deals, etc. So our stuff was all great quality, donated or discounted, but not matching.

We could do a full barrel every 3 hours capacity(roughly it proved itself and as soon as we finished the class we were so burned out that the control systems never got that perfect polish they need to run amazingly)

All our valves ( 3-ways, ball, and NO) were air operated, our heat exchanger was regulated by proportional control to optimize cooling, the touch panel would do every brewing calculation that could be found in reference books. Hops were automatically added, cleaning was automatic , basically the only thing you had to do was load the grain and then watch it closely.

The coolest thing ever was starting a batch and playing darts for hours till it was time to put it away!

some more pics:

http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash1/27057_745785557772_17131041_40788251_1898457_n.jpg

ok i know our holes are way big in our mash tun false bottom. Our idea was (weather good or bad) to be able to change the hole size. We had two or three different sheets of perforated plastic sheet with different hole patters in them that we could switch out just by changing which one we laid on top of the stainless support.

ok also we got the cops called on us by our uppity neighbor lady. she thought we were terrorist building a bomb or something. trust me she is a typical old hag with nothing to do but heckle college guys. we never shared any of our beer with her.

we named our creation dorthy 3. if you have ever seen twister it kinda looks like it. not real funny but we didn't sleep much that semester either.

 

[carrotmalt]

Cool project! Do you have a pic/explanation of the automatic hop addition apparatus?

 

[Quaffer]

That is one of the biggest senior project I've seen. I think most people (non-brewers) do not appreciate just how much work it was to put this together. You even made your own pots from sheet metal, jacketed nonetheless. Very impressive!

 

[pickles]

This is awesome! What is the copper coil that sticks straight up in the air for?

 

[mlyday]

This is awesome! What is the copper coil that sticks straight up in the air for?

Im guessing its a flux capacitor, it allow this contraption to make aged beer in just a few hours.

 

[Monster Mash]

This is awesome! What is the copper coil that sticks straight up in the air for?

Looks like a condenser to me, what that would be doing on a "brewery" I have no idea....

 

[camiller]

Looks like a condenser to me, what that would be doing on a "brewery" I have no idea....

I'm guessing that coiling it is purely decorative. Probably to let steam release to keep from getting too much pressure in the jacket of the mash tun.

 

[android]

holy ****... that thing is stellar!

 

[clay9_24]

the coild was half decoration half condenser. it was just a scrap piece we had laying around. adding it cut the boil off volume in the jacket down a bit.

Mostly we added it so it would look more threatening. Our neighbors were terrified of us.

 

[clay9_24]

Cool project! Do you have a pic/explanation of the automatic hop addition apparatus?

you can somewhat see them in this picture. We had a lid on our boiler(loosely) and three 1 inch valves mounted on the lid with a 6 inch or so tube of pipe to hold the hops(not shown in this picture but you can see where they go). when it was time to add the hops, the valve opened. pellets dropped in the boiler pretty easy.

ideally we would have used ball valves but at around 800 bucks a piece to automate, the angle seat valves passed the hops just fine for us.

 

[lumpher]

if that is a "rookie setup", i might as well retire from brewing and start drinking keystone light. i'd trade my entire setup and 1 of my cars for that...

 

[mountainman13]

Frickin awesome!

 

[clay9_24]

if that is a "rookie setup", i might as well retire from brewing and start drinking keystone light. i'd trade my entire setup and 1 of my cars for that...

what kind of car are we talking about here?

I appreciate the compliment and am currently working on a second system that will make this one look like dirt. it is amazing how much easier it is to build something nice when I am out of school and have a decent job to fund this crazy hobby of mine.

 

[anycrew]

Can you post a close up of the Flux capacitor?

 

[kladue]

Not bad for a first attempt at automation, what is goal with new system design?

 

[clay9_24]

Cleaner: all tri clamp, welded stainless, CIP, and just generally shinyer.

Easier: revised software, better PID control, better overall matching of equipment.

Bigger: the exact same controls for a 5 gallon batch work for 10 gallon. So why not build a multiple barrel system?

Fun: I am not the crazy recipe guru that the guys i brew with are. I am an engineer and building designing the thing is most the fun for me.

 

[GlenF]

Rookie of the Year!

Did you say what the volume of the Boil Kettle was?

 

[clay9_24]

Rookie of the Year!

Did you say what the volume of the Boil Kettle was?

mash tun 137 gal the boiler 60 gal the jacket/hlt was 120 gal. Heating it was slooooow. Next system is being designed to add steam but I know very little about steam. That is what I am trying to learn from hbt!

 

[EarthBound]

Fun: I am not the crazy recipe guru that the guys i brew with are. I am an engineer and building designing the thing is most the fun for me.

I'm right there with ya buddy!

Excellent work, btw...

 

[kladue]

The commercial breweries use high pressure (100 Psi) to get needed temperature delta and energy transfer for heating, this is not what I would suggest for folks without steam experience to try and build a steam heated system.
Having designed and built flash boiler powered water and wort heating brew systems, the safety and control requirements are quite a bit more complicated than direct firing would be. Direct fired gas heating would be the easiest and safest method to implement for this sized brew system, no chance for a pressurized steam mishap.