Brewery help

[TAB]

I am making a home brew setup based on one a friend of mine has. Homebrewers please take a look (see attachment) and give me suggestions on improvements or alteratons. He has improved his over time and I would like to make use of others ideas.

Other questions

How do you guys chill your wort? He uses the horizontal cylinder filled with cooling water and the beer passes through it in a tube.

Pros and cons of using an ez-mash screen and what size?

Pros and cons of using a false bottom?

Hopefully I can be brewing some beer this winter and drink it beside a wrm fire.

 

[Chuck52]

Tab,

Looks like a good setup. The only question I come up with is how do you clean the tube the beer passes through in the wort chiller? The chillers I've used are copper coils you put into the boiler of hot wort and run cold water through. They just need to be rinsed after use, because the hot wort sterilizes them when they are first immersed. I guess you could say the same about the chiller you describe, but I'd worry about crud I couldn't see building up in there.

Chuck

 

[knucklehead]

Da picture is too small! Pretty impressive setup, though. How much are you going to brew, yearly?

Most chillers I've seen and used are simply copper coils immersed in the wort, passing cooling water through the wort, not the other way around. But I can't think why it wouldn't be as good either way. I'm trying to think about chilled surface area, etc., and either my brain ain't working or there isn't a difference. One thing to think about is cleaning the system - how do you clean the insides of the tube, or coil? You will also need to filter the hops well unless you are using big bore tubes. And you know the type of cooler your friend has needs to be counterflow, right? Cold water and hot wort go in opposite ends, so the maximum Delta T is maintained for good heat trannsfer.

I can't speak to the other questions - the fanciest I got was to drill a million holes in the bottom of one of my plastic buckets with an 1/8" drill, and nest both of them for a cheap n' dirty lauter tun. I heated my mash in the oven, turned it into the tun, and filtered with water from a saucepan into my carboy. The carboy sat in a sink full of cold water to cool the last few degrees. So I'm a rank amateur, I guess. But it tasted just as good.

 

[knucklehead]

Ahhhhh similar, nearly simultaneous conclusions regarding cleaning the coil!

What else do you suppose we agree on?

 

[TAB]

The reply to all the cleaning questions is that he rinses, sanitizes, rinses after brewing and then again before the next use. It's way more efficent cooling, he thinks, but building the unit and cleaning are negatives. I was thinking I would go with the coil unless there was popular support for the cooling cylinder.

 

[knucklehead]

Counterflow is more efficient - it's what all the extraction feedwater heaters in boiler plants use.

 

[TAB]

I tried to make the picture bigger. When I increase the size I exceed the limites or lose all the detail. It's hard to see, he does cross feed the water through the chiller.
I would like to make several batchs per year. Different kinds and maybe have people over to try them out and watch some football.
To filter the hops I was wondering if the ez-mash screen or a false bottom would be better.

 

[MossRoad]

I eliminated the white space around the picture and am attaching it. Hope you don't mind /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[TAB]

I don't mind at all. Thanks David

 

[Steven]

If thats your basement I would be concerned about the propane cylinder. having that in your basement could void your homeowners insurance if something happend. your house would be in many tiny splinters.

Great setup though, I used to brew for a while did most of it in the winter used the soda kegs and charged them with co2 to push the beer thru the filters into another keg. cooling was done as the wort gravity fed controlled by a valve thru a copper coil in a large barrel packed with snow. my friend had 20 of those kegs and they hold 5 gallons each. bottles are a pain.