I got two of the side pickup tubes and two of their nippless ball valves. Valves do not have locks on the handles which for me is a big plus. I know others like to be safe. The nippless design is so smart and I don’t understand why somebody didn’t do this before.
I had them custom weld the fittings. The bottom left is the out and above that is the whirlpool. The centered is for my thermometer. The bottom is the same position as their standard two port offering, the whirlpool is at about the 4-4.5 gallon level, and the thermometer is at the 3 gallon level. I brew 70% 5gal and 30% 10 gal. I wanted the ports to be best suited for the 5 gallon batches.
So far I am impressed. It will need a through cleaning before adding the fittings. Hope to take care of that later tonight. I’ll post more info and photos as it happens. It’s heavy with the tri-clad bottom, so it’s not a great choice for electric brewers if weight is a concern.
I got a 90* elbow on my pickup and it needs a thorough brushing after every brew. Trub and hop crud gets cooked on like it does around the edge of the boil.
The dip tube leaves over three quarts behind. I’d prefer it was two quarts, but I’ll see if I can live with it as is. Could always have the tubing cut. Wouldn’t take much.
After some experimentation I went with a straight up and down pickup with 2mm of gap. Have to use hop bags but leaves no more than two cups is left behind after the siphon quits.
Nice looking kettle Steve. I’m going to have to add a whirlpool port to my Blichmann. Currently I’ve been running the rerirc back into the top of the kettle by just draping a silicone tube into the wort, but I feel this is going to cause a problem one of the days. I always picture the tubing flopping out of the kettle and spraying the basement down with wort.
A one foot length of 1/2" copper tube bent in a U attached to the end of the silicone tube should fix that problem. You could bend another little angle in the outlet end at 90 degrees to the U to give you a whirlpool.
Cut down the dip tube to leave 1/2 gallon behind. It was leaving 3.5 quarts (.875 gallons) and I wasn’t thrilled with factoring some trivial volume into recipe design. Thought about upping my kettle loss to an even gallon, but that just didn’t sit right with me.
Figured since I had two dip tubes, I could sacrifice one. Measured as best as I could and I ended with just shy of 2 quarts dead space.
I’m ok with leaving some behind. I’d rather the majority of the trub and hops stayed behind. My old kettle was half gallon deadspace and I became used to it. Half gallon is also easy to work with as far as a volume.
With a nice cone they mostly stay with the trub! What wort I can’t recover goes down the drain. Ultimately there’s other things to worry about such as scrubbing the gunk off right away.
That’s a nice kettle man and the welds are superb. I may have to contract them if (hopefully) if I can swing an appropriately sized and powered induction burner.
They are induction ready, but it would certainly take a big induction burner to get it going. 30A circuit for sure. They also weld on tri-clamps for elements. $50 I think?
I mentioned that it was heavier than I expected, but that compared to a blichmann. Compared to my keggle it’s much lighter.
Boil is about to start. Hit my volumes and overshot my pre-boil og by .002. The etching makes measuring volume a breeze, but the og has nothing to do with the kettle.
I did hit one snag with my strike temp. I was under about 7 degrees. I must not have heated the strike water high enough. Solution was to pull off a gallon and heat it to a near boil. No harm done but for a few minutes lost.
