Hey guys, new to the boards and just spotted the Pimp My System forum. I’ve been working on this system for a while now and thought I’d share.
This 31 gallon system is made up of tanks from Stout Tanks in Portland and the automation was done by Brewmation in NY. Originally it arrived from Brewmation on this black brewing platform which I built the pallet for and the panel stand:
After brewing on this one time and doing 6 hours of cleanup I realized that wasn’t going to work for me so I had a friend put this aluminum stand together for me and it arrived last Friday. I spent the next two days moving things over and just ran a water batch through last night to test everything out. So far, so good.
Now I’m working on getting the brite tanks set up and the CO2 system installed in a 74cu foot roll in commercial fridge. I have two 1BBL tanks and 12 6th BBL commercial kegs. 4 taps.
The touchscreen allows for recipe input and temperature trending. The strike pump has a flow meter to measure out the strike water and then the operators screen lets me turn on and off pumps and heaters with a touch.
As I said it’s a work in progress and I’m still learning. The transition from 5gal to 31 is a learning curve but aside from the nasty cleanup job the first time the whole project has been a lot of fun.
Cheers.
More pics:
Sorry, lame hosting provider insists these are the correct orientation…
This is an 80gal but I have a 55gal on order as well
nice! I am green with envy! I have a stout tank HLT/Herms and use tri clamps and silcone hoses in configurations similar to yours and have been feeling decadent about moving from a one pump system with a complicated manifold to two pumps. I see your touch screen indicating that you have 4 separate pumps. I can’t tell from the photo what kinds of pumps you have, and how/why you need 4. I doubt my system will ever exceed 20 gallons, (10 gallon batch, maybe an odd 1/2 barrell), but wanted to know what drove that decision.
Currently I just open the garage door when I brew. The whole thing is electric as we didn’t want any open flames in the garage and while it’s a bonus it’s also a curse because it means extra cleaning and four more triple clamps. There are a LOT of triple clamps on this thing.
As to what I’m doing with the beer, I’m drinking some of it (probably too much) and I’m giving away “samples” so I can get feedback on my recipes. This whole thing is a trial to see if I want to quit my full time job and become a full time brewer. If not then it’s just a fun hobby and I should always have beer on tap in the garage. The growlettes I ordered have a clearly written disclaimer on the back that it’s a sample and they can’t sell it or transfer it or come back and sue me for anything and it has the government warning on it. I have a beer evaluation sheet I modified from the BJCP sheet and they have to fill that out.
There are two stand alone pumps. Not sure what the strike pump is but it’s a smaller version of the march pump for wort transfers. Then there is a dual pump that has the hoses running through it and rotating wheels to move liquid. These are used in tandem to sparge and move wort from the MT to the kettle. They move liquid pretty slow so it takes a while. They can be used in tandem or separately but are housed in one body.
I also have two external to the system pumps for moving wort and finished beer around (chugger pump)and 1 for sucking the crud out of the kettle and pushing cleaning solution through everything. That last one is a self priming job from little giant which was surprisingly inexpensive.
Kevin at Brewmation built in probes so the heaters in the kettle and HLT kick in when they reach a certain level. The Kettle has monster heaters in it, maybe too big and you can adjust the output. I had some problems with this last time and had a series of boil overs. A 55 gal kettle with 25 gals of wort and it was lifting the lid. Took me some time to get that sorted out and that is a large part of why I had such a mess the first time. That and a stuck mash which was entirely my fault because I screwed with the false bottom and limited the flow. Lesson learned.
Heya jas. I like them. I think the build quality is good. If I had a complaint about them I would say the lid design makes for more mess than is necessary but it’s not a deal breaker. These tanks all come with a lid that sits on the rim and then hangs down. A better design would be to have the lid sit down in the rim with a ring that fits horizontal and a dip inside so that fluid collected would drip back down inside. This however is an annoyance and the quality of the materials makes up for it. The welds are all very clean and over time this is very important. You don’t want crap building up messing with your brew quality and you don’t want rust. Thanks for looking
If I understood correctly then, what you are experiencing is the steam condensing on the underside of the lid, then ultimately at least some of it is rolling between the lid and kettle then dripping or rolling down the outside of the kettle? I can see that as being annoying… not a deal breaker, like you said, but it’s hard enough keeping everything clean as it is! Does it happen while the lid is just sitting there, or mainly when you lift and tilt it?
I wonder if a silicone gasket along the top of the kettles would help? I can’t find the original link, but I saw someone who wrapped their false bottom with a silicone ring. I saved the link to McMaster in case I wound up needing to solve a similar problem. Not 100% sure which one they used in their particular case, but there are a lot of options… Link: McMaster-Carr
If I could sneak in a few more questions… I was also looking at Stout’s 1bbl system that comes with 13" legs. I thought that would be kind of low to get the pumps primed good (so I would have to go ahead and build a stand anyway)… Yours though appears to be in the same general neighborhood height-wise. Any issues with that?
I’d like to still have the option to do 10gallon batches. The Stout kettles are only about 5 inches wider than my current ones (15.5g Bayou Classics)… So I THINK that I could still get away with it if I can get everything mounted low enough (would like 2 heating elements in the BK and HLT and Stout appears to stagger them vertically as well as different angles). Think (or know) a small batch is still doable?
I see the RIMS tube in your pics… Did you go with Stout on that too? They seem to have a nice price on that. Any issues with RIMS hitting your target temp(s) on a 1bbl batch? I use HERMS today on 10 gallons and generally don’t do any protein rests or anything “fancy” but would like to leave as many options on the table in the future as possible. HERMS has been great, but I’m questioning it on my next build because I think that it would have quite a bit of lag if I was indeed trying to do any temp steps in the mash. But that’s just in my head, not from actual experience…
It leaks all the time. This is only an issue on the kettle and minimally on the MT. I looked at the silicone seals you linked but I don’t think they’ll solve the problem and as I was telling you about it earlier I was looking at the lid and may try the next batch with the kettle lid inverted. They are domed and I bet it doesn’t leak at all. Even with a full batch there should be plenty of headroom. Ill let you know how that turns out.
The only pump I had problems with is the one side of the dual sparge/transfer pump. I noticed a reduced volume of flow from the sparge side and I just ordered a pair of 4x4x22" square aluminum tubes. I tested again briefly this morning putting the HLT on some 4x4 wood discards and flow was much improved. You should have zero problems with priming using the legged models.
This is going to depend on what you choose for heating and where your site tube begins. My 40 gal HLT site tube doesn’t start reading till 10 gals and that doesn’t reach the level of the float so I have to put 15 gallons in to get the heaters to kick in. I think 20 gallons is really the smallest batch you can do and remember, these tanks have at least one gallon of loss. Kettle is even worse with the concave bottom. I leave 2-2.5 gallons behind there.
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I don’t know the answer to this. Kevin at Brewmation provided the RIMs. I would say if you’re reasonably close to target when the strike is done you won’t have trouble maintaining temps. In fact when I had that stuck mash, temp dropped to 141 and I was able to raise it back up to 152 with the RIMs. It did take about 10 mins but that seems reasonable efficient.
This first one shows the dual pump. Both of these run clockwise so the left one (sparge) is the challenged one in terms of priming as the feed is on top. This is why I had to raise the HLT. On the original platform everything was raised 2 inches and that made the difference. The other pumps have no issues though with the new layout.
And again with the funky orientation…
It’s 7" to the bottom of the site tube on the HLT and 7" to the temp probe. A little less to the float.
