Would you rather...

[sictransit701]

If you could upgrade just one thing, would you upgrade your mash tun to do a recirculating mash, or would you upgrade your boil kettle to be able to whirlpool and chill with a pump. This is my dilemma, of course. I want to upgrade, but don’t know what I want yet. I’ve heard recirculating mash can help improve beer, but some of y’all have warned me against it. I recently posted a 2 kettle rims idea with cooler mash tun gravity draining the wort to boil kettle and adding heat by propane burner and then pumping back to mash tun. That got shot down by many of y’all. Having to “babysit” the temp and fiddle with flow rate constantly. I thought 2 kettle rims were popular and an upgrade? Not sure what to do.

 

[SouthBounds]

I chose to upgrade my kettle to a pump and plate chiller first. Saves me an hour each brewday.

 

[Rob2010SS]

My 2 cents - go with the kettle upgrade for whirlpool and pump. Recirculating mash is nice and has some benefits but quite frankly, I'm with everyone else in regards to maintaining and monitoring that temp would be a pain in the ass. I'm sure there are some people that do it but I use that hour mash time for so much other prep work that if I had to monitor that temp, it would add so much time to the day. I'd save the recirculating mash upgrade for when you can buy or build a system that will help with that.

 

[Hwk-I-St8]

Kettle RIMS (your 2 vessel recirculating mash system) is a pretty nice rig, but to do it right would be way more expensive than simply adding whirlpool capability. You can do that pretty cheaply by adding a pump (which you'd need for a recirculating system anyway) a hose (for flow return to the kettle) and a SS whirlpool cane from someplace like brewhardware.com.

I whirlpool with one of these so that I didn't have to alter my kettle. Total cost was about $105 ($90 for a chugger pump on sale and $15 for the WP return).

To do K-RIMS right, you really want a way to sample temperature and use that to manage your heat source. You can gravity feed one way (generally to the kettle) but you need a pump to return. Ideally, you want something like an automated sparge arm on the return to balance the flows in/out of the MT.

Going with the WP will give you some of the pieces to migrate to K-RIMS in the future. I think whirlpooling will improve your beer more by giving you faster and more consistent chilling and better utilization of post-boil hop additions.

 

[IslandLizard]

Add whirlpool and recirculated chilling, hands down.

Consider using a CFC rather than a plate chiller.
Plate chillers need proper pre-filtering. Once you've pulled your hair out 10 times trying to do that in as many different ways, you'll find out that bagging all your kettle hops is only answer.