What would you customize/add on your brewhouse?

[NCBrewmaster]

Hey folks,

I know that this is a pretty open-ended question and that brewhouses vary considerably across manufacturers. However, I have the opportunity to see my entire brewhouse set up on the manufacturer's production floor and go over it with a fine tooth comb before they finalize everything and ship it out to me. They (A.B.E) told me that this is my chance to take a look, go over everything and add, move or adjust things like valves, ports, plumbing, flow, etc.

If you had the chance to add things or make adjustments to your brewhouse after the fact, what would you do? Or, if you did make adjustments or customizations to your brewhouse before you had it delivered, what were they? Anything you would do, or did, to make your lives a little easier? Anything that you would die to have now?

Thanks up front for any advice you can give! We are getting a 10bbl steam-fired two-vessel system if that helps. I can provide everything that is included if anyone is willing to take a look. I've had a great experience with A.B.E. so far and think they do a nice job on their systems but it can't hurt to get some knowledgable opinions since I have this chance to make tweaks if needed.

Cheers!

Ben
Charlotte, NC

[mswebb]

1. Grant tank.
2. larger HLT, can't have too much hot water. Capture every drop of hot water from your HX.
3. We use a digital mixing valve for strike and sparge water temp control and it sometimes has a hard time dealing with our mains water supply. A pumped line from our CLT would be more consistent and the water in the tank can be topped up on the fly with mains.

[NCBrewmaster]

1. Grant tank.
2. larger HLT, can't have too much hot water. Capture every drop of hot water from your HX.
3. We use a digital mixing valve for strike and sparge water temp control and it sometimes has a hard time dealing with our mains water supply. A pumped line from our CLT would be more consistent and the water in the tank can be topped up on the fly with mains.

Thanks for responding! We will have a grant, which I'm actually pretty stoked about. We went with a 30bbl HLT and plan to recapture coming out of the HX. I believe the valve for blending hot and cold H2O for strike and sparge is actually manual with a large dial thermometer. Is your issue with the digital valve because of water pressure or inconsistent ground water temps?

Cheers!

[wailingguitar]

Definitely a digital flow meter for hot liquor. I also like to have a number of extra valve ports so that I can hook in a portable pump on the fly should something happen to the main pump, or whatever bizarre eventualities may happen. For instance; my brewhouse would not originally have had a valve out on the vorlauf return, a valve we had placed there allows me to use a portable pump to vorlauf in a pinch and also to drain the line so that I don't have wort or water sitting in it getting rank.

[grnis]

1. Mass flow meter after lauter pump to monitor extract in real time. Would be nice to have during boil as well.

2. Better control and visualisation of process equipment, values and parameters on our control system.

3. Remote control / monitoring with my cell phone. Not only because I'm lazy, but then I can go and do other things like cleaning tanks or taking that delivery that arrives the worst moment.

4. Automated wort cooling.



But one tip is flow meters for everything. Can'ẗ immagine life without them now.

[mswebb]

Thanks for responding! We will have a grant, which I'm actually pretty stoked about. We went with a 30bbl HLT and plan to recapture coming out of the HX. I believe the valve for blending hot and cold H2O for strike and sparge is actually manual with a large dial thermometer. Is your issue with the digital valve because of water pressure or inconsistent ground water temps?

Cheers!

I think the issue is with our water filtration but have to do some testing to confirm. Ground water temp is consistent but we use an ozone treatment system which really aerates the water. Mixing with hot drives out much of the aeration but I think that is whats messing with the valve. I have some testing planned but really think getting the water deaerated and into the CLT and using a consistent flow be the best route. It's really just a bit of piping and re programming the brewhouse controller; not a big deal.

[fastricky]

Definitely a much larger HLT & CLT.

[NCBrewmaster]

1. Mass flow meter after lauter pump to monitor extract in real time. Would be nice to have during boil as well.

2. Better control and visualisation of process equipment, values and parameters on our control system.

3. Remote control / monitoring with my cell phone. Not only because I'm lazy, but then I can go and do other things like cleaning tanks or taking that delivery that arrives the worst moment.

4. Automated wort cooling.



But one tip is flow meters for everything. Can'ẗ immagine life without them now.

Thanks for responding!

How would you automate the wort cooling process? Automatic butterfly valves connected to digital temp probes or meters to regulate flow through the chiller?

Also, aside from a flow meter going into the MLT for strike and sparge, where else do you have them? I think adding one on the wort into BK from MLT would be helpful to measure exact amount of liquid being transferred over. Would you put one on the wort out on the HX as well?

Cheers!