Tinkertoy Time!

Yesterday, I shuffled the brewhouse components into rough position to figure out some of the plumbing I’ll be doing. Externally, that’s cold and hot water feeds. On the cold side I’ll be including a CLT inlet connection, which will let me use an unoccupied fermenter or bright tank as a Cold Liquor Tank should the occasion warrant. On the hot side, I’ll be installing an inline water heater to augment the HLT. Internally, I’m modifying the piping to the mash/lauter tun to accommodate a flow meter for hot liquor. As configured, the brewhouse has one combined pipe path for vorlauf and hot liquor feed to the hydrator and the sparge head. Since flowmeters don’t much care for chunks in the ol’ turbine, I’m splitting the hot liquor feed off from the vorlauf. Also on the flowmeter/hot liquor side, I need to add injection ports for Audrey‘s water treatment dosing. To help figure this out, I went to the parts buckets full of tees, elbows, clamps, etc, to play Tinkertoys and figure out how to route all this stuff. Fun! Almost felt like a brewer, there. Another configuration thing I need to figure out is where and how to mount the control panels. The existing brewhouse control panel is in kind of a weird spot, mounted low on the platform railing, and facing outward; the brewhouse pump VFD is above it, also facing outward. I’d like most everything on the panel to be accessible and visible from the brew deck, so I’m going to relocate them. Then there’s Audrey, who will require mounting, a bit of wiring, a bundle of hoses, and a rack of solution reservoirs. I think I’ve decided where they’ll end up, but I still have to figure out the mounting bit. The other modification I’m working on is replacing the stock gas burner on the kettle, which operates at a fixed output of 200kBTU, on/off. A fixed output heat source is always a compromise- it needs enough power to bring the wort to boil in a reasonable amount of time, but not so much that the boil is overly vigorous once reached. For most kettles, this sweet spot just doesn’t exist. Luckily, I found a different model of burner made by the same manufacturer that can be modulated from just 20kBTU to over 400kBTU (I’ll have to put a limit on the maximum heat to avoid a meltdown.) Thus will I be able to reach a boil as swiftly as possible, yet maintain a gentle roll once up to speed. This will be one lean, mean, brewin’ machine!

It occurs to me that I never furnished any details about the brewing system itself. It’s a Premier Stainless system, circa 2014, we purchased from a brewery that was closing in Long Island. The brewhouse is a 5bbl, with a space-saving combitank, where the mash/lauter tun is stacked on top of the HLT. There are two each 5 and 10bbl fermenters, and one each 5 and 10bbl bright tanks. Additionally, we have ordered a pair of stacked 7bbl horizontal lagering tanks from Quality Tank Solutions in Wisconsin, so we can be sure to keep some Pils flowing at all times. I can’t wait to be in the driver’s seat of this rig….