The new system, pt. 2

Sentience in T-minus "right now" mofos

I had to post this pic again, because not only is it the one I wake up to and go to sleep to every day and night, it is also instructional! And it continues the story we left off in the previous post.


When we left off we were boiling some grain juice, which we were calling 'sweet wort' which now that we're boiling it and adding hops to it we will just call 'wort' (not pronounced like those disgusting things all over your feet, but like "WERT"--it's German, that's all I know). That goes on for an hour or an hour and a half, during which time many chemical reactions take place, primary among which is the isomerization of alpha acids in the hops.


Q: WTF? You trying to blind me with science here, Dr. Zeno?


That just means that the longer they boil, basically, the more bitterness is extracted from the oils in the hops. The shorter, the less, and the more residual flavor and amazing aroma-ness is left over for the final beer. So we chuck in various amounts of hops at different points in the 60-minute (or more) boil, depending on what the style calls for, to get varying degrees of bitterness (to balance the malt sweetness), and flavor and aroma. But dammit, just go read How to Brew if you want to know more about this. I'm trying to brag about my new system here.

You didn't need that kidney anyway, Mr. Roboto

Once the boil is done we want to chill the wort down as fast as possible from boiling temperatures to a proper temperature for pitching the yeast. (Sorry, more brewminology: 'Pitch' means 'put in' or 'add'.) In my new badass brewery, a plate chiller accomplishes this. You can see it in the picture above, and also the other one which is more above, which has a bunch of hoses sticking out of it, as it does its job chilling that wort the hell down.


You run the post-boil wort from the BK through the pump, and verrrrry sloooowly through the plate chiller. That little guy is constructed of a series of corrugated stainless steel plates. Every other plate will get filled up with boiling hot wort. The remaining interleaved ones will have cold water running through in the opposite direction. The two never actually touch each other.


You run a trickle of the boiling wort through, while opening up the water full bore from the other end; the hot, slow moving wort comes in contact with the fast moving cold water, and by the time it winds itself out the other end of the PC, the wort is cool enough to pitch the yeast. I haven't actually brewed on my system yet, but 5 gallons (19 liters) of wort should be wrapped up in around 20 minutes. Maybe more in summer.


Q: So what happens to all the waste water, you dirty Mother Earth Raper?


I'm really concerned about this. No doubt about it: brewing beer uses a gang of water. I make every effort to salvage as much as I can, and end up dumping very little down the drain without it first being used for something else, mostly washing.


The waste water from the chill gets routed from the PC back into the bath-tub. From there we pump it into our washing machine when we do the laundry. My former system provided about two loads worth of wash water. We'll see if HERMy will do better than that.

I will do much, much better than that.

So anyway, that's the chill. It goes from the PC into a fermentor, we pitch the yeast, do some other stuff, and then the next phase of the brew cycle is in effect. But let's keep looking at my bodacious HERMS-a-riffic system for a while, shall we?


You probably have noticed little blue cords and/or yellow plug thingies sticking out of various things in some of the pictures so far. That is because you are an astute, attentive, and attractive person. If you didn't notice these things, go back to the beginning and try to pay more attention.


The blue cords and yellow doohickies are connected to thermistors, which connect to the control box, seen here:

All your base are belong to us.

Scroll up and you'll see this guy sort of hanging out on the end of the setup there. In this pic here I'm monitoring the thermistor that's submerged in the mash, reading 65C. I switch between the various thermos planted around the system with the lil' buttons below the readout. The ones to the mash tun look like this:

Schpigotz

The spigot-looking thingy is the mash tun return (mentioned previously) which is mounted through the MT lid. The yellow connector/blue cord dealy attaches to a thermistor going into the MT return on the one side, and the control box on the other. There's also another thermistor that jams through the lid and straight down into the middle of the grain. So you can see the temperature of the actual mash, and also the temperature of the wort returning to the mash from its little trek through the HERMS coil. Fun stuff.


Altogether there are five separate temperature points in the system. You can see them if you click on the picture of the control panel.


The other cool thing about the control panel is the AC outlets. This is a nice feature, and it makes me even more full of gratitude to the man who built this system.


For privacy's sake, I won't say his name, but I will say that he's a great guy, who built this system himself, piece by piece. He only sold it to me because he'd hit on hard times, and I know how difficult it must have been to let it go. So I am extra obligated to him to use the system to brew lots of great beer. Here's to you, man! You will get some of the first good yield I get from it.


Video action in the next post.