first brew day went well! still need to dial in the system and get used to it. sight glass gave us some trouble cuz it seems to only max out at 15 gals of water, anything more then it will start leaking from the top. i do wish the kettle had volume markings so we can nix the sight glass. maybe we can add that some day - will need to figure out measurements.
we used the beersmith profile that's on their website for a 12 gal batch. it called for 16 gals total for 25 gals of grain and i held back one gal to sparge. but i messed up and accidentally added 2 gals total at sparge, but that actually got us close to the pre-boil vol of 14 gal lol. had less wort dripping out after mash than i excepted, maybe need to leave it dripping longer or raise the basket slower. SS brewtech manifold worked like a dream, pump was at full speed and we hit our pre-boil OG right on the money.
we did have some issues figuring out the right % for the boil at as the system kept going from 210 degrees to 211.8 and never touching 212. I had to set target temp to 212.5 and element to 65-70% to get a decent boil. Once I added the wort chillers and start recirculating the wort through the pump at 15m, I boosted the cruise% to 75% to get a nice boil to sanitize everything.
we ended up a little under 12 gals, about 5.75ish into each fermenter. will need to figure out how to account for hop absorption when i remove my hop spider and fiddle with my volume calculations.
all in all, i think the whole day took us about 6 hours from start to finish since everything was new to us plus we had a 30 min whirlpool. cleaning up took longer than we expected due to so. many. parts. will figure out an effective routine over time.
BTW - what is the best way to clean the element? we did a pbw cycle with warm water circulating through pump to clean everything, but should i turn on the element and run a hotter cleaning cycle? would that work and what temp should we aim at/how long to cycle? element did great with no scorching, but still had trub/gunk on it at the end of the day.
the sight of this at the end of the day is worth a long brew day.