Welcome to your new home Brew Magic!
Yeah, I noticed it was pretty damn expensive...I have a cheapo therminator, the Shirron. I love the damn thing. I couldn't believe I saw rolling hot wort drop into the bucket at 62* within minutes....Plate Chillers rule!!!
Yeah I love being able to chill in minutes rather than an hour or more with the immersion. Still have the issue of hot break and trub going into the fermenter using a plate chiller. Next project will be a hop back that should alleviate this problem...well at least in beers that hop aroma is present. We will see how the false bottom in the brew kettle works for straining some of this out.
If you are a do-it-yourselfer, here's an easy fix to filter out hops and hot break prior to the chiller. I've brewed about 6 batches with it and it works wonderfully well with my homemade counter flow wort chiller. Not sure how such a homemade device would look, aesthetically speaking, if used with a masterpiece such as the Brew Magic, though. Cheers!
The hop stopper! I've been thinking about one of those for a long time. Glad to hear of your success with it. If the false bottom is inadequate I may just go that route. Thanks.
andrew jensen wrote:
The hop stopper! I've been thinking about one of those for a long time. Glad to hear of your success with it. If the false bottom is inadequate I may just go that route. Thanks.
If you are using whole hops then the false bottom should work well. But if you use pellets, you won't get much seperation.
brewchez wrote:
[If you are using whole hops then the false bottom should work well. But if you use pellets, you won't get much seperation.
I have been avoiding pellets like they are poison pills. Whole hops are so much better as a filter bed, even with my hopstopper I get a much clearer transfer, and drain every last ounce out of my kettle. Kind of a give and take, they absorb more, but my siphon stays till the end. For some reason with pellets, I lose the siphon with my pickup tube when there is still a decent amount (gallon or so) of wort left.
It's kind of a trade off...I usually prefer whole hops as well for the same reason. However, whole hops have lots of downsides to them as well such as retaining freshness and AA's, utilization and equal distribution of those AA's. I'm sure you've at on time used a half ounce of something and then when using the next half noticed how much more lupulin is left in the last half. It makes it that much harder to get precise measurements for IBU's.
I also love whole hops. I just think they are so much easier to work with. I was cheap for my kettle filter. I took a couple of old SS strainers, cut out the screen to size and clamped them to the inside stub of from the ball valve. Looks like a cheapo Bazooka Screen...works like a charm, easy to clean, and a lot cheaper than most other solutions I was looking at..
Ok got some pics from the first brew day. Everything went fairly smooth. Might take a time or two to get used to flow rates and cleaning processes but all in all it went really well and hit all my numbers on the money. Oh, those burners kick ass...might be just a little too good. I was happily boiling along at about the same roiling boil that I got with my camp chef and decided I wanted a little bit more of a vigorous boil. Needless to say I had a little bit of a boil over but not too bad.
Backfilling the mash
Circulation during mash
Maintaining mash temp within a 1/2 degree
Enjoying a beer while brewing
Filling kettle
Chilling
Filling carboys
Left over trub
Ahh, nice clean keggles getting their virgin scorch marks, I f'en love it!
So a couple questions. Looks like a fly sparge setup, what is the runoff rate for your volume? How much can you comfortably runoff? How hard is it to clean/dump your spent grains from the tun? Is the recirc a HERMS or RIMS element? How jealous am I?
thirsty wrote:
Ahh, nice clean keggles getting their virgin scorch marks, I f'en love it!
So a couple questions. Looks like a fly sparge setup, what is the runoff rate for your volume? How much can you comfortably runoff? How hard is it to clean/dump your spent grains from the tun? Is the recirc a HERMS or RIMS element? How jealous am I?
I know a part of me wanted to get out the emery cloth and buff out the scorch marks but meh it adds character.
The runoff was where I have a little room for improvement. I did a 13 gallon boil but could push it a bit higher if I wanted. I was about 17 minutes in and had already run off approximately 6 gallons when I figured I had better slow it down a bit. Ended up running off 13 gallons in just over an hour...way too fast at first and then a bit slow at the end trying to compensate for it. Still managed to hit 75% efficiency so not bad.
It is a RIMS system, which was great for maintaing temps but really couldn't rely on it for bringing the whole mash up to mash out unless you had a lot of time to kill. It might work better when I get a feel for how fast to flow through the element. I direct fired it on low to raise the temp from 149 to 167 with it pumping through the element. I think it took me about 10 minutes to reach mash out temp. I was a little nervous direct firing the mash tun for the first time but with it circulating so fast and the burner on low it seemed to work great.
Thirsty you can be jealous of my brewing set up and I'll be jealous of your tap set up, deal?
andrew jensen wrote:
[Thirsty you can be jealous of my brewing set up and I'll be jealous of your tap set up, deal?
I suppose its a deal- however I think my jealousy level will be a tad higher. I have already been to the Sabco site 3 times today.
BTW what was the inaugural brew?
brewchez wrote:
andrew jensen wrote:
The hop stopper! I've been thinking about one of those for a long time. Glad to hear of your success with it. If the false bottom is inadequate I may just go that route. Thanks.
If you are using whole hops then the false bottom should work well. But if you use pellets, you won't get much seperation.
I assume by your false bottom comment it would be above the spigot in the brew pot correct? Also if I was to put a spigot in my brew pot how high off the bottom should I put it? Then I imangine the false bottom would sit just above it and where would I get a false bottom without having to make one?
DC
deafcone wrote:
[I assume by your false bottom comment it would be above the spigot in the brew pot correct? Also if I was to put a spigot in my brew pot how high off the bottom should I put it? Then I imangine the false bottom would sit just above it and where would I get a false bottom without having to make one?
DC
If you look closely at Andrew's pic of the hops and trub left behind in his kettle, you will notice the bulkhead for the spigot is above his FB. It is OK there because there is a pickup tube which extends out of the bulkhead and elbows down to the very bottom of the kettle. This allows the wort to be drained or pumped out until the very end, because the siphon will remain intact. Liquid will go uphill, as long as its destination is below its source.
If you are thinking of adding a bulkhead to your kettle, a pickup tube is a real help in getting every last drop out. You should still install your bulkhead as low as possible on the kettle though. The reason a hopstopper is so great is it forms a barrier around this pickup tube to filter out the break material and hop debris. A FB will do this, but still let pellet hop debris through.
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