Setting up a pump on a mash tun

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Mike@M

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I have a 10 gal water cooler mash tun with a false bottom that I’ve used for years with gravity flow.
Now that I’m getting older I’m adding pumps to my system. My question is will the false bottom in the mash tun be sufficient to use with a pump or do I need to add a bazooka screen or similar?
 
False bottom should be fine. I would *not* add anything else that could potentially clog (it would also be one more thing to clean).

IF a piece of grain gets past your false bottom, it will flow through your pump and out wherever you are pumping, which generally won't be a problem. If a screen gets clogged, your pump will worsen the situation and you'll get channeling or a stuck sparge.

Depending on your setup, it's probably a good idea to use your pump below full-force so as to not compact the grain bed or cause a stuck sparge situation.

Are you recirculating the mash, or just pumping from mash to boil kettle when it's time?
 
I’m just going to be pumping the wort to the boil kettle. I know when I vorlauf with gravity I get quite a few grains for a little while and was just concerned I might clog the pump.
 
You should be alright. I use my pump for vorlaufing and (when the wort clears) transfer to my boil kettle. Like mentioned, you may get the occasional piece of grain through the pump, but it won't hurt anything. One brew day, I had a situation where a HUGE amount of grain got through and my pump, a Chugger, never bogged down.

That was a hectic day, but the beer (oatmeal stout) still turned out pretty good.
 
I have been using a 3 vessel setup for about 12 years. Over the years I’ve graduated from a cooler HLT, MLT, and boil kettle to all 15 gal stainless vessels.
My brew stand is higher than my BK & allows me to gravity feed into my BK but I do use a pump for transfer of my strike water to my MLT and for pumping wort for chilling and whirlpooling.
I still Vorlauf manually after the mash and sparge. This allows me to drain the MLT without concerns of creating a vacuum or stuck sparge.
Definitely use a valve on your output to control the flow rate.
 
From my mash tun I drain into a converted quarter barrel that has an elbow on the bottom that leads to a pump/valve. Inside the quarter barrel vessel is a 300 mesh basket. The wort gets filtered there so there's no chance of junk passing into the pump. This also acts as an accumulator that I can recirc back into the tun but normally pumps into the brew kettle. I also use this setup to pump from the boil kettle through a plate chiller into the fermenter. In the boil kettle I still do a whirlpool but again, any junk will get filtered before the plate chiller. It's another piece of equipment to clean but it works great for my style of brewing.
 
Much like @OakIslandBrewery I use a gravity fed 1 gallon plastic bucket with a sieve in it as a grant that I connect the pump to so I won’t pull directly on the grain bed. You have to be mindful of the level of wort so it doesn’t overflow or run dry. Some day I will figure out how to control that (or maybe just get a bigger bucket 😬). It is the small plastic bucket under the MT in the photo.
 

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Much like @OakIslandBrewery I use a gravity fed 1 gallon plastic bucket with a sieve in it as a grant that I connect the pump to so I won’t pull directly on the grain bed. You have to be mindful of the level of wort so it doesn’t overflow or run dry. Some day I will figure out how to control that (or maybe just get a bigger bucket 😬). It is the small plastic bucket under the MT in the photo.
Tobin, do you have any trouble getting the pump primed? Or does that particular pump not require priming?
 
Much like @OakIslandBrewery I use a gravity fed 1 gallon plastic bucket with a sieve in it as a grant that I connect the pump to so I won’t pull directly on the grain bed. You have to be mindful of the level of wort so it doesn’t overflow or run dry. Some day I will figure out how to control that (or maybe just get a bigger bucket 😬). It is the small plastic bucket under the MT in the photo.
Nice setup!
 
Tobin, do you have any trouble getting the pump primed? Or does that particular pump not require priming?
Set up below everything it is very easy to prime and usually stays primed for the whole brew. We initially had it placed higher up and it was definitely giving us problems!
 
If you use a hop screen basket, put this in your boil kettle and then drain your wort into/through this, it catches all the big stuff that may get past your false bottom. Clean before using for hops.
 
If you use a hop screen basket, put this in your boil kettle and then drain your wort into/through this, it catches all the big stuff that may get past your false bottom. Clean before using for hops.
Not sure who you are addressing this to or if I missing something from another post. In my application the basket I have I originally had built to fit inside my brew kettle. The problem I found is that during the boil the kettle would rock/shake during a vigorous boil. So my solution was to install this basket inside of a converted quarter barrel as I describe above. It works fine for my system.
 
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