Husky's New 3V Brewery

[husky]

That seems like a while to cool husky. What is the temp of the water going into the jacket? Beautiful pics btw.

There are three things working against good cooling
- Stainless steel not a good conductor of heat
- 2mm thick wall of the pot
- 22 degree cooling water temp(the bottom gauge in the attached pic)

Getting below 80 degrees is my main priority, it gets here quickly as the temp difference between wort and cooling water is high. I will play around with other cooling methods to get to pitching temp quicker. I like the fact its only a tap that I need to turn on and it will sit there recirculate and cool all in the same sterile environment. No heat exchangers to clean just drain water from the jacket at the end of the run.

 

[husky]

Possibly the best day brewery building ever today. Boxing day test on in the shed, drinking beers, wiring up control panel. Really enjoyed the electrical side of this project, always good to learn something new. Turns out my father in law is awesome at electrical design. I drafted what I wanted and he went away and modified it to be more 'industrial'. Got rid of all my ebay cheapie components and replaced with good quality parts and changed everything to 24VDC, just need to sort out some 24V PID controllers as I am currently re using my old 240V versions.
Pics of todays progress. Hopefully finished wiring tomorrow with some minor tidy up items to be done at a later stage.

 

[brewermp]

Possibly the best day brewery building ever today. Boxing day test on in the shed, drinking beers, wiring up control panel. Really enjoyed the electrical side of this project, always good to learn something new. Turns out my father in law is awesome at electrical design. I drafted what I wanted and he went away and modified it to be more 'industrial'. Got rid of all my ebay cheapie components and replaced with good quality parts and changed everything to 24VDC, just need to sort out some 24V PID controllers as I am currently re using my old 240V versions.
Pics of todays progress. Hopefully finished wiring tomorrow with some minor tidy up items to be done at a later stage.

That is a pimping setup!

 

[_HOME_BREW_WALLACE_]

Great work Husky!

 

[husky]

Temporarily powered up for testing, waiting on a new 40A power supply to the shed which should be a couple of days away. Still need to tidy a few things up and order some junction boxes but 99% complete. I told the father in law I enjoyed building it and would likely do another to replace this at some stage and he says he will help me wire it 'properly' LOL, I was super happy with how this turned out but apparently can be done better somehow!

 

[husky]

It's Alive!!!!
Spent the day yesterday heating and cooling water testing thinks and calculating heating rates etc before I decided to crush some old grains and make a mock batch to use for starter wort.
To start the day I had a Keg King element go bang! so only running one element in the HLT made the heat up a bit slower. I will be looking to get some similar ones made that are a better quality. This is the second one that has gone on me and you can see why from the pics!
Summary points below:

• 3kg JW ale 1kg JW light crystal 1 kg JW wheat milled up and thrown in mash tun using 0.9mm roller gap. These are old grains maybe 2-3 years old. Also threw in 40g cascade @50 to test out hop spider
• Figured out the auber ramp soak PID controller which made mashing easy. Dis 50 degrees 30 mins 67 degrees 45 mins 75 degrees 10 mins. Really happy with the controller
• Need a better wort return system which was already on the to do list
• Had a crack at fly sparging. Basically sparged until I reached target volume in kettle, seems the best way to do it
• Only got 63 % end of boil efficiency - 23L @ 1.042 end of boil from 5kg grains. Much lower than the 80% I used to get from BIAB. Suspecy poor sparge efficiency due to no sparge arm.
• Boiled off 5.8L and started with 29L in the boil. This is a 20% boil off rate per hour. Too high as I was aiming for around 12%. Much harder to regulate gas, electric elements used to give very consistent results. May change to electric kettle in future
• 60 minute boil at this rate used 1.5kg LPG ~ 73MJ. To evaporate 5.8L water should require 13MJ. This means only 17% of the gas energy goes into the boil! Seems low
• Ended up with 23L wort which I used for starters to revitalise some very old wyeast packs. Still had 15L left in a cube so I threw in an old pack of US05 to see what happens. The grain bill was derived around old grain I had lying around so I don't think it will be tasty but it forced me to get the fermenting fridge up and running again.
• Hop spider did not work as expected. A lot of hop escaped. Needs a rethink
• Recirc at end of cooling was not as effective as I had hoped, need to review the outlet design to stop it from sucking debris into the pump
• Clean up took longer than BIAB as there is an extra vessel however being hose down made it easy enough with a hose and a scourer. Dismantled some pipework and water flushed others, should be ample but time will tell.
• RIMS worked really well with no burn on

Overall very happy just need to sort some minor issues and keep using it to dial in the numbers to some brewing software. I was targeting 1.053 gravity based on what I had entered into beersmith and only got 1.042 so I need to do some research there. I have only ever done BIAB previously so Im sure there are some volume figures that need adjusting somewhere.

Took some video too but will need to find somewhere to host them first and then link here.

 

[Dan Pratt]

That's an impressive rig, cant believe its not electric

 

[husky]

That's an impressive rig, cant believe its not electric

It will be as soon as I can find an immersion element that I'm happy with. Don't want permanent elements since I want to be able to whirlpool. The control panel is wired to allow 4400W in the kettle one day.

 

[jonnir]

When you find a suitable one be sure to let us know! I'm keeping my eye out as well!

 

[husky]

A quick vid of mashing recirc


[media]

http://youtu.be/ksxHOm3aoJs
[/media]

 

[Camo6]

A true thing of beauty...until you get to that wort return! :lol:

Seriously mate, that rig is something else. Well done.

 

[husky]

A true thing of beauty...until you get to that wort return! :lol:

Seriously mate, that rig is something else. Well done.

Thanks mate, its been a hard slog over a couple of years but its not far off now. Funny though, after being back on the brew forums a bit it seems a lot of people are going from 3V back to 1V systems just as I have finally gone the other way. The more equipment the better I rekon! Not like it takes that much longer to clean.

 

[husky]

Just downloaded bsmith 2 and set up an equipment profile which predicts 1.043 for the gravity and I got 1.042 so efficiency is back to 75% into fermenter which is equal to my BIAB days!

Short clip of my attempted fly sparging below. I like this method!

[media]http://youtu.be/IF-uMqAylXo[/media]

 

[Dan Pratt]

It will be as soon as I can find an immersion element that I'm happy with. Don't want permanent elements since I want to be able to whirlpool. The control panel is wired to allow 4400W in the kettle one day.

Blichman boil coils? Look them up, I was going to suggest Kal and the Electric Brewery but you have checked that out already.

Also, why was there a return hose into the mash tun during the sparge/lauter??

 

[razz]

It looks like it went ok at the end of the sparge mate, but the early part of it looked like it was all going down the left hand side. Why the recirced wort when sparging from HLT?

 

[husky]

edit: deleted duplicate post

 

[husky]

It looks like it went ok at the end of the sparge mate, but the early part of it looked like it was all going down the left hand side. Why the recirced wort when sparging from HLT?

Blichman boil coils? Look them up, I was going to suggest Kal and the Electric Brewery but you have checked that out already.

Also, why was there a return hose into the mash tun during the sparge/lauter??

Forgot to close the valve to the RIMS at the start of the sparge hence at the start there was a bit of recirc back from the rims and through the silocone wort return line. You can see as soon as I realised that the wort flow into the kettle has stopped and was going to the MT I changed the valve over. There was a lot going on and trying to video it as well! There are a lot of procedural differences I need to get used to since BIAB days but its a lot more fun!

Razz, just looking up that old vienna lager recipe too. Missus has been asking for it for a couple of years now!

 

[husky]

Bit of an update, have upgraded the HLT(LHS vessel) with the longer term plan to make this suitable for larger batches(60L +). I have started a new 1V brewery for regular small batches. The new HLT is 100L jacketed and has a level switch to only allow power to the heater elements once covered with water. I have also grown sick of blowing the standard KK 2200W elements so I had some made, they are the same 2200W but 50% longer to reduce power density a bit.
Have also had an element rolled up for the kettle to go all electric!

 

[Crusty]

Lost for words husky. A very nice setup mate.... :beerbang:

 

[husky]

Have been asked by a few for some more detail on the controller so here it is, hopefully it makes sense and can help out some others. I know it took me a god six months studying the electric brewery and other websites to get my head around all things electrical. Turns out its quite simple but does take some time to understand what's going on. Mine is loosely based on the electric brewery however simplified where possible as I did not want alarms or to switch between different heating elements.

Wiring diagram - This was my take on the electric brewery to perform all the functions that I wanted. I gave this to my father in law to review as he is good with all things electrical.

View attachment 20141210 - Control Box Wiring Diagram Layout 240V Coils.pdf

The following drawings were generated by my father in law after making some changes. I also went with 24V everywhere possible. They make sense to me now but I had to get up to speed with wiring diagrams pretty quick. These are what I used to wire my controller

View attachment 1000-4002_A01 - Control Panel Control Circuits.pdf

View attachment 1000-4001_A01 - Control Panel Power Circuits.pdf

Soon to be updated with a level switch in the HLT to ensure there is water over elements before power can be applied as well as an electric element in the kettle(bye bye gas) and some form of controller to regulate the amount of power sent to the element.