Colorado brewing equipment reviews

[ChrisDino]

Sorry to hear about your troubles. We have a 2 BBL CO pilot system we're about to fire up next week. If you are willing, I have a few questions for you:

We've just started brewing on the 200 Nano Dual and I've actually had a bit of hard time dialing in efficiency. It seems like there is a fine line between good efficiency grain crush, and clogged sparge on this system. We do have flaked adjuncts in several of our beers, and have noticed many efficiencies in the 60's.

What's your crush like? (Do you carry out sieve testing on the crush?) Otherwise, what's your mill gap setting and how many rollers?

Is it only the grain bills with a lot of flaked adjuncts that you see efficiency in the 60s? And, are you referring to mash efficiency (I assume you are)?

Are you sparging? Or do you mean when you drain the mash basket into the kettle without adding sprage water?

I often find that I have to run the circulation VERY low, otherwise it seems to clog up. We do use a couple lbs of rice hulls to try and help this, but we still seem to have issues.

What pump size are you using? And do you happen to know the flow rate of your wort (gal/min)? Maybe a small wort grant would help relieve some of the pressure on the grain bed?

We've gone back and forth on a few grain crush settings, but noticing the crush we need for a higher efficiency seems to always lead to a very long and slow sparge.

What's that crush like?

Also, i'm wondering if water to grist ratio may be a culprit for us as well. It seems as if there is about 18 gal of water under the basket before water touches any grain. I'm wondering if this is throwing off our water calcs, and causing a lower efficiency.

What's the qt/lb ratio for the volume inside the basket? Have you tested the wort temperature inside the mash basket?

[GEB_Dave]

What's your crush like? (Do you carry out sieve testing on the crush?) Otherwise, what's your mill gap setting and how many rollers?

Is it only the grain bills with a lot of flaked adjuncts that you see efficiency in the 60s? And, are you referring to mash efficiency (I assume you are)?

Are you sparging? Or do you mean when you drain the mash basket into the kettle without adding sprage water?


Our malt supplier uses sieve testing. So far we have tried 1.8 sieve setting that we are getting a lower efficiency at. We then brought bags back for a remill to 1.6, but we’re informed we were likely going to get a result finer than 1.6 due to it being a remill. So our next attempt is going to be to try a straight 1.6 crush.

For bills with flaked adjuncts we have been doing an extended mash time, and adding the adjuncts after steeping the other grains for about 30 minutes. And for this i am referring to mash efficiency.

Also we are sparging. Using about a 1.3 qt/gal ratio (plus dead space under basket) then using the rest of our water in the sparge.