3d Manifold

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Big Dog Brewing
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When I built my mashtun manifold, I looked up all the references, and took care to minimise channelling and short circuiting. But I never fly sparge, only batch sparge. So short circuiting is in fact good because the tun drains faster, as long as you still filter the crud out, right? Or wrong?

The existing manifold works well, but flow does slow down when the water level approaches the grain bed and it starts to compact. So, if I did it again, I think I would build a 3D manifold, with drain pipes in the middle of the grain bed as well as at the base.

I know from my day job that it takes a surprisingly little amount of gravel to filter groundwater clean from a pumping bore. So you probably dont need much grain thickness for filtering.

So when a piece of large diam copper pipe fell off the back of a plumbers truck I made the accelerdrainer, as below. Last weekend, after mixing up the batch sparge, I dropped it into the tun. It sits on the bottom with the closed ends about 2 cm from the nearest slotted manifold pipe. I recirculated 6 l to set the grain against the slots, then drained the tun. Only opened the valve half way, got 36 l out in 9 mins. Definitely better performance, no cavitating in the drain tube at the end, similar or better efficiency to previous brews. Also the runnings seemed as clear as usual. If this beer ends up clear, next time I will try draining faster and my brew day will get shorter.

Then I just need a NASA burner and I'll be getting 2 in a day. But can anyone see a problem with a 3D manifold for batch sparging?

accelerdrainer.jpg
 
Not at all GL -- use a SS scrubby if you want as the entire mash drains as a uniform SG.

The things we make :)

Steve
 
Hi GL,
You really only need to sparge as fast as you can boil. If you can boil 36 litres in 9 minutes you are doing well
 
Darren said:
Hi GL,
You really only need to sparge as fast as you can boil. If you can boil 36 litres in 9 minutes you are doing well
True, I guess, unless you run a 2 tier system with no pump and so have to finish sparging before lifting the boiler from tier 1 up to the burner on tier 2. Good thought though, changing that would speed things up.
 

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