Looking to upgrade to HERMS ..

[NickW]

Hi all,

After seeing pittsys shiny herms setup I want the shiny. I'm going to see pittsy for some advice this weekend but I thought I'd throw this on the forum as well.

Currently I've done 7 brews with a basic plastic electrim boiler with a single kettle element. I have a rather basic coolbox mashtun with a basic plastic tap. I also use my boiler as the HLT.

I want to upgrade to herms, I have a five burner hob in the kitchen, I unfortunately had to pour my previous brew into a 23l pot on my last brewday as the kettle element conked out so I know my centre hob ring can handle at LEAST 23l of wort.

My question is... what do I need to buy? I've searched the net but haven't come across a decent tutorial on how to rig one up and what equipment I'd need.

Any help / links to products I'd need to buy would be great

 

[Fil]

Why? i dont mean it flippantly but unless you have a need to step mash or have a tun that looses significant heat during a mash its a redundant bit of kit that will need cleaning and storing and a bit of time/effort to set up, tune and run.

afaik few grains require a stepped mash?? and a kettle of off the boil water can do the job a lot quicker and easier.

and if your tuns loosing temp, investing in more insulation or a better tun could be a lot cheaper, quicker, and easier.


One benefit it should provide is a clearer liquor for the kettle and not require all that jugging back ( anyone who gets away with the fabled 1-2 jug fulls going back must be using 10l jugs ...)

And It can also be a lot of fun if your that way inclined I enjoyed knocking up my herms experiment which was used once and is way too much faff to use as my tun keeps a good temp.

beyond a coil in a heated bath, temp controller, plumbing and pump, you will need some sort of flow control, either a post pump restricting valve or pump speed control.

you may need to incorporate a drain bucket or underback to feed the pump and stop it sucking your floating grain bed down solid. But pump/flow control should allow u to manage that, but if not a float switch to stop and start heater and pump if the underback level drops too low could be expedient and allow u a few mins of unattended running without stopping and overheating on u..

if u use 10mm copper for the hex coil less than 3m length will be more than adequate, SS i dunno mines copper

if looking for a pid controller i would look at the sestos jobs, they are cheap(ish) far east boxes, but are very similar to the auber boxes which are high end and xpensive, Not an exact clone, but close enough that the well written auber manual (just google 'auber pid manual') makes a lot of sense and explains well, there is at least one difference the auber will display temps in F or C the sestos is a C only device, so do check the sestos lookup sheet for legal parameters to confirm after reading what it can possibly do in the auber manual.

if you go for it have fun with it..

 

[NickW]

Thanks for the advice Fil... I am making good beer at the moment, I would like to step mash more effectively but I can get away with almost three steps with my current plastic system - so maybe I dont need an upgrade just yet....

I do, however, want a new boiler, and possible a bigger tun... but, as I'm only doing 5 gallon batches - do I really need a bigger tun - will the extra unused headspace cause a problem with maintaining temperature?

 

[danb]

I do 23l batches and upgraded to, 2 50l pots for hlt and boiler which gives plenty of head space and 38l thermopot for mashtun. Mash tun loses less than 1'c over 90 minutes doing this size batch.

 

[danb]

The 3 pots were only £150 delivered too which I thought was great. The only down side is if going for stainless fittings they cost more than the pots alone.

 

[pittsy]

Nick if it was me i'd go for a thermo pot first for your tun , great bit of kit and you can upgrade others if and when you like , aim for a 30l , mine is 25 l and gets a bit tight .
For herms small ss pot , 5 l
10mm copper pipe
10mm speed fit couplers john guest
10mm to 15mm adapters jg
some of my 3/8 beer line (9.5mm) fits into 10mm speed fit jg
a 12v pump off ebay
a 12v adaptor ( old one will do usually)

 

[adomant]

Fil is worth listening to here, I went to HERMS a couple of years ago without really thinking through what I wanted to achieve with it. The result was brew days were much longer and more complicated and more than one stuck mash and broken pump incident.

Using herms to raise temperature takes some experimentation to get right and even though flow may be at 67C for 20 minutes, there can still be parts of the mash bed at 60C so you have to understand how the steps are really working in your set up and you need a decent MT with a suitable run off rate.

That said, when it works well, it is great - I have the auber PID with ramp / soak and I'm just about the stage where I can leave the whole thing unattended on a multi-step mash program

 

[pittsy]

Nick has been doing wheat beers with several steps involved and after i explained once i got herms my brew day has now become very easy and relaxed getting targets spot on and i use gas . It really is simple to adjust heating manually .

 

[adomant]

under your tutilige , I think Nick will be just fine if he goes for it