Welcome back fair readers! There are probably only two of you, but hey there could be hundreds right? Right. So here is the skinny. We held a top level meeting amongst the head brewers of Midnight Brewing Co and concluded that it was time to start investing in some more equipment. As such, I am here to describe to you the wonders of our initial purchases and a little about why we made them.
First is a false bottom for the mash/lauter tun (5 gallon Gatorade cooler). Up until now we have been using various braided hose from Home Depot normally reserved for home plumbing like connecting water from your copper pipes to your sink or toilet. This was fairly easy (good) and cheap (better), but it had its downsides as B Brewer touched on. The polymer braid was easily crushed by the grains and was essentially ineffective. I could get into the flow dynamics of why you want even draining of wort from the grain bed for best extraction and such but that’s above my head. Needless to say we were essentially drawing wort from just one small part of the whole grain bed which is inefficient. The stainless steel braid fared somewhat better but was clogged in our Stout 3.0 brew. And so that brings us to False Bottoms.
Fortunately for all of us a genius of an entrepreneur out there came up with a solution to our problem. A pre-made false bottom that you can buy in various sizes so that it fits your particular cooler (read: mash/lauter tun). We bought ours from Mountain Homebrew. I have not run into anyone else that is using this particular false bottom so I am not sure what to expect as far as efficiency. Only one way to find out!
Next is our new 20BBL fermenter.
Here you can see B brewer installing this beut on the premises. Originally listed at $6,500 we talked the guys over at North American Brewing Services down to a cool $6,000 even... Okay so that's not really B brewer and we didn't buy this fermenter but wouldn't that have made for a great blog post?
Alright, so we haven't bought anything else quite yet. We are thinking of trying to improve our immersion wort chiller to decrease the amount of time we spend cooling the wort which sits now at 30-45 minutes. We originally used 1/4" copper tubing and only about 20 feet of it too which when coiled up does not amount to much vertically. In essence the coils collect on the bottom of the kettle and since the last time I checked hot things rise and cool things sink (go science!) we end up having nice chilled wort at the bottom of the kettle but the top remains scaldingly hot for quite some time.
Two things we can do. #1 More cowbell! Basically just get some more tubing and make the whole thing longer while at the same time weaving some heavy duty copper wire between the coils so that it will stand up and not collapse on itself. #2 Switch to a larger diameter tubing. Larger diameter tubing means that there will be more surface area of the coil in contact with the hot wort and as such more heat transfer.
Both methods can be only carried so far. Problem #1 At a certain point in a long tube the cooling water will have reached the same temperature as the hot wort and so any further length of tubing that hot water has to travel is simply a waste of time/tubing/money(the worst of the three).
Problem #2 You can get a tube that is too large so that the heat transfer through the copper pipe is only to the outer diameter of the column of cooling water. Again, inefficient and a waste of resources/money (there's the M word again).
We are going to go with method #1 and invest in some more copper tubing and construct it so the height of the coils is relatively equal to the height of our normal ending boil volume. Notes later on how much we improve.
To end... I really don't have any more words for you intrepid brewers so stop reading my mindless, meandering, message and get yourself a homebrew. Cheers!
First is a false bottom for the mash/lauter tun (5 gallon Gatorade cooler). Up until now we have been using various braided hose from Home Depot normally reserved for home plumbing like connecting water from your copper pipes to your sink or toilet. This was fairly easy (good) and cheap (better), but it had its downsides as B Brewer touched on. The polymer braid was easily crushed by the grains and was essentially ineffective. I could get into the flow dynamics of why you want even draining of wort from the grain bed for best extraction and such but that’s above my head. Needless to say we were essentially drawing wort from just one small part of the whole grain bed which is inefficient. The stainless steel braid fared somewhat better but was clogged in our Stout 3.0 brew. And so that brings us to False Bottoms.
Fortunately for all of us a genius of an entrepreneur out there came up with a solution to our problem. A pre-made false bottom that you can buy in various sizes so that it fits your particular cooler (read: mash/lauter tun). We bought ours from Mountain Homebrew. I have not run into anyone else that is using this particular false bottom so I am not sure what to expect as far as efficiency. Only one way to find out!Next is our new 20BBL fermenter.
Here you can see B brewer installing this beut on the premises. Originally listed at $6,500 we talked the guys over at North American Brewing Services down to a cool $6,000 even... Okay so that's not really B brewer and we didn't buy this fermenter but wouldn't that have made for a great blog post?Alright, so we haven't bought anything else quite yet. We are thinking of trying to improve our immersion wort chiller to decrease the amount of time we spend cooling the wort which sits now at 30-45 minutes. We originally used 1/4" copper tubing and only about 20 feet of it too which when coiled up does not amount to much vertically. In essence the coils collect on the bottom of the kettle and since the last time I checked hot things rise and cool things sink (go science!) we end up having nice chilled wort at the bottom of the kettle but the top remains scaldingly hot for quite some time.
Two things we can do. #1 More cowbell! Basically just get some more tubing and make the whole thing longer while at the same time weaving some heavy duty copper wire between the coils so that it will stand up and not collapse on itself. #2 Switch to a larger diameter tubing. Larger diameter tubing means that there will be more surface area of the coil in contact with the hot wort and as such more heat transfer.
Both methods can be only carried so far. Problem #1 At a certain point in a long tube the cooling water will have reached the same temperature as the hot wort and so any further length of tubing that hot water has to travel is simply a waste of time/tubing/money(the worst of the three).
Problem #2 You can get a tube that is too large so that the heat transfer through the copper pipe is only to the outer diameter of the column of cooling water. Again, inefficient and a waste of resources/money (there's the M word again).
We are going to go with method #1 and invest in some more copper tubing and construct it so the height of the coils is relatively equal to the height of our normal ending boil volume. Notes later on how much we improve.
To end... I really don't have any more words for you intrepid brewers so stop reading my mindless, meandering, message and get yourself a homebrew. Cheers!
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