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Major Changes, February 2003
I started out by adding another pump and a counterflow chiller. I got the chiller from St. Pats. The pump came from morebeer.com. It's a high temperature pump with a polysulfone housing. It's rated for 250°F. I like this pump so much that I just replaced the old pump with one of these new ones. That old pump is rated for 180°F and would sometimes make some funny noises when I pumped liquid hotter than 180°F. The new pump also seems to prime more easily. And with
two pumps I can now add water from the HLT while I'm recirculating.
The counterflow chiller works great! It probably saves me 30 - 45 minutes per brewing session. After the boil is over, I turn on the cold water and pump the wort from the kettle through the chiller. The 200°F wort is cooled to pitching temperature immediately. I can control the output temperature by either pumping the wort through faster or slower. Faster raises the temp and slower lowers the temp. Here's another view of the pumps and chiller.
That's not the end of the changes though. I had a problem recently with the false bottom I had added to my mash tun. (I never documented the adding of the false bottom) The false bottom sat above the Bazooka T and had a couple of round head stainless bolts supporting it. The round head of the bolts rested on the bottom the mash tun. Anyway, while mashing 15 lbs of grain for a Chimay Reserve clone, the head of one of the bolts broke through the bottom of the mash tun. Time for a new mash tun... Just after I got my first system built a friend of mine came up with few large commercial stainless coffee dispensers. They've been collecting dust in my garage since then. Two of them are insulated but probably only hold 5 gallons. The other one holds 15 to 20 gallons. It had a spigot, which I removed, leaving a 1/2" coupling to which I could attach a drain and mash screen. I ordered 2 more Bazooka T's and hooked up all three. I wrapped the outside with some of that reflective bubble-wrap insulation I had left over from the fermentation chamber. I installed a quick-disconnect and hooked it up to the return manifold. This returns the wort gently to the mash tun while recirculating. Here's another view of the latest Mash Tun.
Another thing I did was to combine the Mash Tun and Hot Liquor Tun Controllers into one box. In this case I used a cheap plastic toolbox to house everything. I'm not thrilled with the results, but it works. Here's what it looks like. Some one of these days I'll get ahold of a real enclosure and do it right.
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