Great video, thanks for sharing. Some questions:
1. How long is the sparge cycle and does it do any rinsing or just drain to the boiling chamber?
I think the sparge was half an hour or so, but I will check. It was a cool way to do it, you have the grain in the bag on the right chamber, and the water in the left that I would normally pour over the grains after draining off my first wort. The machine looks like it cycles it all through a few times to get to its final boil volume, which then sits in the left chamber at the end. I was in the kitchen working at the time it did it, but I will watch it more closely next time.
2. Do the hops end up getting released into the boil? It looked from the video like they were and were responsible for the mess, but you described them as having water flushed through them when you filled the hop containers so want to confirm.
I will be honest, i wasn't impressed with the mess, but I think that will be fixed by calibration and doing less that 23l batches. I think if i stick to 20l it will be better...but I will experiment. This brew was a pre-programmed recipe and a supplied kit that came with the system.
3. What is the chilling method? Immersion using the water supply you hooked up to it?
The hooked up water supply. I liked this feature but not sure how much water it used. There are options to run the brew with and without the hose being attached, but i havent looked into that yet. I assume that if you dont attach a hose you must do a manual chill?
4. What was cleaning the boil side like? Personally I take shortcuts sanitising my boil kettle because it is pure hot side (I drain straight to fermenter through a CF chiller) - I imagine if you were chilling in the boil kettle and leaving the chilled wort in the unit until you get home from work, you'd want to irradicate every spec of contamination from that lid vent, lest it harbour infection.
Again, this was messy, due to the boil over. i will see how it goes on the second run. In a perfect world, you run the cycle to drain all excess wort, then it refills for a sponging, drains, then it refills for a clean with sodium perc or whatever it is. My shed blew a fuse at the last step, so i need to make sure I dont have too much plugged into one fuse when I do the clean.
Thanks again, I loved the video.
Cheers mate
