Sanity check: First All Grain Setup

[sleepspeaking]

I did a trail setup of my new equipment tonight in preparation for my first all grain brew day (hopefully occurring this week). It seems a bit sketchy but I think it should work. Need to play with the spacing a bit.

Any advice is welcome.

My concerns are:

1) maintaining the temperature in these coolers (both > than 10 gal) when I'm only doing 5 gal. I do plan to preheat both coolers. But I don't have a good sparge plan. Leaning towards fly sparging but I've got no sparge arm built. Still figuring that out.

2) How to stabilize the the top cooler. (No one wants a surprise 150° shower)

3) And i guess the middle isn't too stable either... Any one have experience with using the side shelf of a cheap BBQ pit? Will that hold 3-5 gallons plus the 10-15 lbs of grain?


I still have a 3 piece ball valve laying around that i planned add to the kettle, but I'm doing ice baths . And tubing I have yet to cut to length. Any suggestions/warnings there?

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[brewbama]

I built an El cheapo table out of 4x4(s), 2x4(s), and deck plank (1x6). Until then, or you build a more stable three tier, batch sparge on the ground.

I recommend you heat your strike water, pour it in the mash tun, dough in, mash for one hour. At about the 45 min mark heat your batch sparge water and store it in the other cooler on the ground. Put the mash tun on a chair, Vorlauf, and lauter the mash tun into the boil kettle completely. Then dump all the batch sparge water over the grain bed. Stir, vorlauf, lauter and start your boil.

I allow one gal absorption for 10# of grain so most recipes call for 4.5 gal strike and 3.5 gal sparge to get me a 7 gal boil. I boil off between 1 and 1.5 gal and give a half gal or so to trub for 5 gal in the fermenter after cooling.

I hope this helps. Ditch that latter and side table before you get hurt.

 

[specharka]

I did a trail setup of my new equipment tonight in preparation for my first all grain brew day (hopefully occurring this week). It seems a bit sketchy but I think it should work. Need to play with the spacing a bit.

Any advice is welcome.

My concerns are:

1) maintaining the temperature in these coolers (both > than 10 gal) when I'm only doing 5 gal. I do plan to preheat both coolers. But I don't have a good sparge plan. Leaning towards fly sparging but I've got no sparge arm built. Still figuring that out.

2) How to stabilize the the top cooler. (No one wants a surprise 150° shower)

3) And i guess the middle isn't too stable either... Any one have experience with using the side shelf of a cheap BBQ pit? Will that hold 3-5 gallons plus the 10-15 lbs of grain?


I still have a 3 piece ball valve laying around that i planned add to the kettle, but I'm doing ice baths . And tubing I have yet to cut to length. Any suggestions/warnings there?

1) You don't need to preheat the mash tun / HLT. Just put your charge of water in a few degrees north of your target strike / sparge water temp. Let the water temp come down and wait to dough in. You will hit the right mash temp every time. Igloo coolers are insulated well enough to lose only about a degree per hour.

2) DON'T DO THAT. The bottom of your HLT simply has to be above the liquid level in your mash tun to encourage the water to flow. Any head above that is excessive.

3) Counter -> Chair -> Floor works for me.

 

[pvpeacock]

No need to fly sparge. Just batch sparge. After the mash, drain the mash tun into the kettle as shown. Then put the mash tun on the ground and the HLT on the BBQ shelf and pour in your batch sparge water ( 1 or two sparges) to get to your pre-boil volumes. After you add the sparge water, just lift the mash tun up onto the BBQ shelf and drain into the kettle again.

If I were you, I would buy some camlock fittings and use them instead of the barbs on your ball valves. Put male fittings on the ball valves and put a female fitting on your silicon hose(s). Very easy to connect and disconnect and then thow it into a bucket of starsan inbetween.

 

[cjbalough]

( take this advise for what it is as I am just starting all grain - but have done a few partial mash batches) As others said K.I.S.S. no need to make it complicated. Use the drink cooler to mash, batch sparge from the other one. If you want to use the BBQ shelf, make sure the weight on the shelf is balanced with some weight on the apposite one.....for my setup right now I don't have a special HLT. I'm just heating water in either my 10 gal boil kettle or my old 5gal kettle. While mashing, heat water in a kettle....after mashing, collect wort into the other kettle, then batch sparge to get boil volume. No fancy gravity stands and no hot water up over my head.

 

[sleepspeaking]

Second attempt at the setup. The only trouble is now I won't be able to heat the wort as I'm sparging. I'll look into some cam locks for the hoses. I guess I could always drain the first runnings and then the first sparge. Fill the mash worth the second sparge and swap the blue and orange coolers. Then begin to heat the wort while I'm draining the second sparge.

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[brewbama]

Looks a hell of a lot safer.

 

[sleepspeaking]

I built an El cheapo table out of 4x4(s), 2x4(s), and deck plank (1x6).

I hope this helps. Ditch that latter and side table before you get hurt.

I guess i could make up a tall & sturdy platform. Probably should add that to the to do list.

I'll try to tone down the red neck factor in my brew planning.

 

[brewbama]

I guess i could make up a tall & sturdy platform. Probably should add that to the to do list.

I'll try to tone down the red neck factor in my brew planning.

Oh my set up is ghetto/redneck....but it's stable and no hot shower hazards.

 

[kh54s10]

This is my setup, though I have turned it around so the BK is next to the sink for cooling:

And I do suggest that you preheat your coolers. It make deciding what temperature to heat the strike water to much easier. Especially in your HLT. If you did not preheat the water will cool quickly to an unknown degree.

 

[RM-MN]

It's been found that there is very little difference in efficiency between hot water sparge and cold water sparge. It would be much safer to sparge with cold or room temperature water. If you are doing it that way and batch sparging, you don't need the third tier, just a bucket to pour the water from.:fro:

 

[Izzie1701]

I would not trust the bbq table. Those things are flimsy as hell and that's going to be a ton of weight on it. Most of them actually have a warning on them. Mins says 10lbs max.

 

[sleepspeaking]

If I were you, I would buy some camlock fittings and use them instead of the barbs on your ball valves. Put male fittings on the ball valves and put a female fitting on your silicon hose(s). Very easy to connect and disconnect and then thow it into a bucket of starsan inbetween.

So camlock fittings just for ease of use and sanitary benefits?

This is my setup, though I have turned it around so the BK is next to the sink for cooling:
And I do suggest that you preheat your coolers. It make deciding what temperature to heat the strike water to much easier. Especially in your HLT. If you did not preheat the water will cool quickly to an unknown degree.

I like your setup! As for the preheat, what is your method? I plan a 10-15min half full soak at about 5° north of target temps. Then dump that back to the BK and to reheat if needed before doughing in.

It's been found that there is very little difference in efficiency between hot water sparge and cold water sparge. It would be much safer to sparge with cold or room temperature water. If you are doing it that way and batch sparging, you don't need the third tier, just a bucket to pour the water from.:fro:

I agree it would be safer. But after consulting the Google Machine I'm finding very little favorable information on cold water sparging. Are you sparging with cold water? If so what efficiency numbers have you seen?

 

[pvpeacock]

Camlocks are easier to connect and disconnect than a hose barb. I use the same hose/camlock to tranfer hot water from the kettle to the mash tun, to drain the wort from the mash tun back to the kettle, to transfer hot water from the HLT to the mash tun for batch sparging, to drain the mash tun to the kettle after sparging and, finally, to drain the kettle to the fermenter after boiling. Oh, and I use the same hose/camlock to transfer the beer from my conical fermenters to kegs. No pulling hoses off the barb, no need for clamps, no leaks. Easy Peasy.

 

[kh54s10]

I like your setup! As for the preheat, what is your method? I plan a 10-15min half full soak at about 5° north of target temps. Then dump that back to the BK and to reheat if needed before doughing in.

To preheat the 10 gallon water cooler mash tun I add about a gallon of water from my HLT at about 140 degrees, that gives the tun about 10 minutes to warm up while the strike water continues to heat. I then just dump it in the sink and start the mash. This warms up the tun enough so that it does not lower the strike water temperature too much.

If I were to heat 5 degrees hotter than strike temperature I would then have to wait for the strike temperature to drop, either in the HLT or the mash tun adding a fairly significant time to the brewday.