I've recently bought a new, bigger kettle so I could boil more beer at a time. Seemed like very little effort for twice as much beer. Gone from the Peco 23litre to a 56 litre stainless steel kettle.
I still used the Peco for HLT as it's nice that you can set a temperature and it will keep it there. I assume this uses a relay or a TRIAC in a very basic way as when it gets to temperature it just seems to switch the power off and on completely.
This new kettle has no temperature control. It just boils away while it's powered up.
I used to Peco to give me 23l for the original mash and another 23l for the sparge and used twice as much grain as I usually do.
I ended up with about the same amount of beer as I have done with the half sized kettle. So, I'm wondering whether the very aggressive boil with the new kettle has lost me a whole pile of beer. Is that possible?
I'm an electronics engineer and I could knock up a system, I think, that would, once up to temperature, reduce the current going through the element which would keep the temperature at a steady 100 degrees, rather than the 104 ish that it went to while boiling with this new kettle. (Assuming I could find a temperature sensor it was safe to drop in the beer! ) Is this a good idea? Has anyone else done something similar or know of it as being a normal way of controlling boils?
Many thanks!
I still used the Peco for HLT as it's nice that you can set a temperature and it will keep it there. I assume this uses a relay or a TRIAC in a very basic way as when it gets to temperature it just seems to switch the power off and on completely.
This new kettle has no temperature control. It just boils away while it's powered up.
I used to Peco to give me 23l for the original mash and another 23l for the sparge and used twice as much grain as I usually do.
I ended up with about the same amount of beer as I have done with the half sized kettle. So, I'm wondering whether the very aggressive boil with the new kettle has lost me a whole pile of beer. Is that possible?
I'm an electronics engineer and I could knock up a system, I think, that would, once up to temperature, reduce the current going through the element which would keep the temperature at a steady 100 degrees, rather than the 104 ish that it went to while boiling with this new kettle. (Assuming I could find a temperature sensor it was safe to drop in the beer! ) Is this a good idea? Has anyone else done something similar or know of it as being a normal way of controlling boils?
Many thanks!