Js's Herms Brewery

[James Squire]

Hi all,

Well, I'm back after a 6 month break from the brewing scene and now that I'm back I intend on being bigger and better than ever! Whilst I wasn't actually brewing the last few months, I sure did a lot of thinking about brewing and as a result I've wound up with a new brewery project on my hands. I have decided to build myself a HERMS setup! :beerbang:

The grand plan is to have a single tier brewery with HLT, MLT, standalone Heat Exchanger and a Kettle and drive it all from a software interface. I already had the HLT and Kettle from my old setup but my old esky mash tun made way for my new 50L false-bottomed keg version. The Heat Exchanger I built using a 20L S/S stock pot, about 4m of copper pipe and an electric heating element from a $14 Safeway kettle. The HLT and HEX are both electric heating but the Kettle is gas fired.

The brewframe is now complete and as you can see I chose to "borrow" Franko's design (Thanks for the dimensions mate) and apply it to my frame using 40mm RHS.

Here's a few pics of how I've gone so far:

The frame:


With the 3 vessels in position:


All painted up:


HEX:


There's still plenty of work to go but I've got a wait until christmas before SWMBO gives me my new March pump, finally I'm going to become a 'real brewer!' B) The plumbing is coming up shortly and at the moment I'm looking into interface gear for the control side of things. With a bit of luck she might be ready to brew on boxing day.

Thanks for having a look and thankyou to all the people who's brewery's inspired my layout, look forward to hearing what everyone thinks.

Cheers and beers,

JS.

 

[Franko]

Nice work
like what you've done with it

franko

 

[Zizzle]

So it's well after christmas, did santa deliver on the promise of a march pump? Have you given it a run yet?

 

[James Squire]

So it's well after christmas, did santa deliver on the promise of a march pump? Have you given it a run yet?

Sorry for being so slack with the responses/updates but yep, Santa delivered as promised. I've run a few batches through over the last couple of months and all is well. I still have a few changes to make but I'm at least in a position where I can control the brewery from software and brew a good beer. I'm brewing again this weekend (finally) so I'll make sure to take some photo's and post some updates.

Thanks for the interest,

JS.

 

[James Squire]

Just a quick update on the brewery after today's brew. As you can see the brewery is still not complete but it is up and running regardless.

Anyway, here's the pics from today's English Bitter Brewday.



Note that the Laptop will soon have a tray to sit on



Here is the brains of the operation (still not mounted). Very simple really, a Relay Card being switched from the Parallel Port of the laptop to control the Mains Power to the HLT element, HEX element and the March Pump. There is also a simple Serial interface circuit for digital temp measurement using a DS1820 sensor.



My current brewing software thanks to Zwickel and Alex.



And the mash on the go. Mmmmm, EKG Bitter....

Lots of work still to go but I'm happy with how things are going so far. Still lots of tweaking to do but that's half the fun.

Next on the cards is Mains Switches for the control box and incorporating my MKIII Mashmaster Chiller into the frame. Then a water filter setup and solenoid valve for HLT filling. After that I can begin work on my own software package to include HLT temp control, level sensing....etc. Once you start you can't stop huh?

Cheers

JS

 

[Tony]

Hey...... that thing does not resemble francos brew rig at all.

Yours makes beer!!!

hehe

looks great.....keep it up.

cheers

 

[mika]

A laptop with a parallel port...now there's a rarity. All the latest ones I've looked at have just have USB and then you'd have to use an adaptor plug and I have seen those having issues and losing functionality.

Nice looking rig though...

 

[Tony]

My laptop has a serial port!

But it was specially ordered and i do PLC work for a living.

They dont come standard but you can get them.

cheers

 

[Franko]

Hey...... that thing does not resemble francos brew rig at all.

Yours makes beer!!!

hehe

looks great.....keep it up.

cheers

Yeah nice one Tony. lol :lol:

Had a bit of a accident at work and have had a bad back for about 9 months now but we'll get there eventually


Franko

 

[Franko]

james Squire,
love what you've done with your brewery mate.
I'm thinking also about the laptop option how much is involved setting it up

Franko

 

[ausdb]

On the laptop note look around for a used Dell "corporate series" laptop such as a Latitude D610. I have one for a work puter and it has both a serial port and parallel port, the serial gets used all the time hooking up to whiz-bang aircon systems. The parallel comes in handy so I can make us of an old laser printer I scored! The new D630 I get in a few weeks also has one so they are still around.

 

[James Squire]

A laptop with a parallel port...now there's a rarity. All the latest ones I've looked at have just have USB and then you'd have to use an adaptor plug and I have seen those having issues and losing functionality.

Nice looking rig though...

Hi Mika,

I had to dig out an old Pentium 2 clunker to use as a dedicated laptop for the rig for exactly that reason. There are parallel to USB adaptors but I hear also that they have problems running the relay cards from them. There are also USB relay cards (which i could have used with my other laptop), however the software that Zwickel and Alex were kind enough to pass on is setup to run the relay card from the parallel port. Quickest and easiest way to get brewing was to use a Parallel Relay Card from the oldschool laptop!

Cheers.

 

[James Squire]

Hi Franko,

Thanks mate.

Not too much involved in getting setup with the Laptop. As I just mentioned to Mika, the software was done by someone else and the easiest way for me to get going was to setup the hardware to work with the software. So I bought a relay card from www.oceancontrols.com.au (no affil) and got some DS1820 digitemp sensor samples from Maxim. I built the serial interface circuit from here - martybugs website and with a little bit of looming I was away.

It really is quite simple.

Cheers.

JS