"guerrilla" brewing - incremental changes.

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PaulCa

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I have been accused of "guerrilla brewing" and I kinda like that. I started with a bucket with kits, and added little bits as I went, adapting recipes and techniques to work with what I had on hand to use. Through kits to adding speciality grains/cyrstal, partial extract to full extract and eventually all grain.

My current set up is
* 30L variable output 3kw electric boiler - Liquor, Mashing, boiling - bazooka strainer and tap fitted.
* Kettle - sparge water.
* 5 gallon, draw string paint strainer bag.
* 15L plastic sparge/drain bucket.
* 25L plastic barrel fermenter.
* 2x 19L Cornelius kegs, FE for CO2 in a fridge with a party tap!

It takes me between 4.5 to 6 hours to do a brew and as you all know, once that grain hits water, you're committed.

I have issues with temperature control during the mash and issues adding heat without horrible bubbling. So what do you think of the following incremental changes?

1. Buy a 30L cooler box, drill a bulkhead fitting through it's base and install a tap.
I can heat the strike water in the boiler, dispense into the cooler. Then add the grain in it's BIAB bag to the cooler.
Complete the mash in the cooler and then transfer to to boiler and sparge (rinse?) using the kettle to get to boil volume.
This should get me better mash temperature consistency and retain the option to add hot water from the boiler mid mash, instead of adding heat directly.
The bag retains the ease of draining and filtering so I can avoid most clogging issues.


2. One more step would be to add a pump. At the end of the mash, add the remaining boil volume water to the boiler. Start gravity draining the wort into the boiler while pumping fresh hot water from the boiler back to the mash box. Recirc sparge for a while and also filter the wort through the grains, then shut the pump off and let it all drain to the kettle. Lift, drain and dump the grains from the bag.

Does this sound like it would work?

I figure after that I need to go proper mash tun, bought or DIY.
 
In my quest for better mash temperature control I fitted a coil in my kettle/boiler to try out HERMS. While heating the sparge water I circulated the wort from the mash tun through the coil and back to the top of the mash tun. Worked ok but because the kettle was gas heated it was difficult to get good temperature control so I ended up making an electrically heated HERMS tank (DIY) controlled by an Inkbird controller.
 
In my quest for better mash temperature control I fitted a coil in my kettle/boiler to try out HERMS. While heating the sparge water I circulated the wort from the mash tun through the coil and back to the top of the mash tun. Worked ok but because the kettle was gas heated it was difficult to get good temperature control so I ended up making an electrically heated HERMS tank (DIY) controlled by an Inkbird controller.
Done that myself with a 20l tea urn and 10m copper pipe as well as adding an SCR to control the voltage as the simmerstat was way out.Used this with a 30l Burco and a 52l mash tun both of which I've now sold on but kept the HERMs.
 
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