I did a full dry run of my system today to check how it all works and where I am lacking, it went pretty well but for a few things.
I boiled around 40L in my HLT keg and drained the water on to the 500g of crushed grain that I had on hand from testing my mill (No I did not use coco pops)
. So far so good.
I know the water should not be boiling but this was just a practice and I wanted to see how much heat my esky lost during an hour.
As I have a pick up tube dipping right down to the bottom of the concave keg bottom is sucks up all but about 100ml of the boiled water.
I left the "mash" sitting in the esky while I run through in my head the process if this was a real brew day, I would be refilling the HLT with sparge water and heating it to sparge temps and occasionally stirring the mash.
After approx an hour I attached a hose to the MLT output and let it flow in to the kettle, it went without incident. The SS braided filter held everything back as it is supposed to. this is where I had my first suprise.
The esky held back just over 3L of water. The outlet for the tap on the esky is about 3 inches up from the bottom but it has a large base area, about the same size base as a 50L keg - it is a 63L job - so that is why it held so much. I did not expect it to be 3L though. :blink:
I then brought the liquid to the boil in the kettle and placed my IC in there just to go through the motions and this was another problem area, the coils are probably too tall, only the bottom half of the chiller was under the surface of the liquid so maybe some work to "despring" the coil apart from that it cooled pretty quickly to the mid thirties but it failed to get much lower although I did not give it more than about 10 minutes though . I will add a pre chiller for brewday's.
Finally I drained the kettle into a simulated fermenter, a bucket and found that I lose another 3 litres at the bottom of the kettle. I have a 1/2 inch pick up tube with a SS scrubby pad on the end going off at an angle to the side of the fermenter to avoid picking up crap after whirlpooling so this was another suprise 3L loss.
What I calculated was on brewday I am going to lose 1L per kilo of grain so that is around 5L for a 5K batch plus the 6L I lost today takes us up to eleven and that is before I factor anything for evaporation.
By my calculations I will need to start the boil with 30L to have any hope of a 23L batch, after losing 3 to the troob and 4? to evaporation is this close to normal/average?
After losing another litre on bottling day that means 22L to bottle.h34r:
I boiled around 40L in my HLT keg and drained the water on to the 500g of crushed grain that I had on hand from testing my mill (No I did not use coco pops)
. So far so good.I know the water should not be boiling but this was just a practice and I wanted to see how much heat my esky lost during an hour.
As I have a pick up tube dipping right down to the bottom of the concave keg bottom is sucks up all but about 100ml of the boiled water.
I left the "mash" sitting in the esky while I run through in my head the process if this was a real brew day, I would be refilling the HLT with sparge water and heating it to sparge temps and occasionally stirring the mash.
After approx an hour I attached a hose to the MLT output and let it flow in to the kettle, it went without incident. The SS braided filter held everything back as it is supposed to. this is where I had my first suprise.
The esky held back just over 3L of water. The outlet for the tap on the esky is about 3 inches up from the bottom but it has a large base area, about the same size base as a 50L keg - it is a 63L job - so that is why it held so much. I did not expect it to be 3L though. :blink:
I then brought the liquid to the boil in the kettle and placed my IC in there just to go through the motions and this was another problem area, the coils are probably too tall, only the bottom half of the chiller was under the surface of the liquid so maybe some work to "despring" the coil apart from that it cooled pretty quickly to the mid thirties but it failed to get much lower although I did not give it more than about 10 minutes though . I will add a pre chiller for brewday's.
Finally I drained the kettle into a simulated fermenter, a bucket and found that I lose another 3 litres at the bottom of the kettle. I have a 1/2 inch pick up tube with a SS scrubby pad on the end going off at an angle to the side of the fermenter to avoid picking up crap after whirlpooling so this was another suprise 3L loss.
What I calculated was on brewday I am going to lose 1L per kilo of grain so that is around 5L for a 5K batch plus the 6L I lost today takes us up to eleven and that is before I factor anything for evaporation.
By my calculations I will need to start the boil with 30L to have any hope of a 23L batch, after losing 3 to the troob and 4? to evaporation is this close to normal/average?
After losing another litre on bottling day that means 22L to bottle.
h34r:
