Inline Dosing for Sparge

[DueSouth]

I imagine this has been discussed on the boards somewhere but I can't seem to find it.

I'm looking for equipment to dose phosphoric inline for sparge to avoid treating the entire 30BBL HLT. Anyone have any suggestions or part numbers?

[fmeric]

Hey Mike, Eric from First Magnitude in Gainesville here. We recently started using this flowmeter from McMaster-Carr: http://www.mcmaster.com/#5079k54/=yzh31x. Part number #5079k54 in case the link goes bad. Also bought a couple SS 1/8" NPT to 1/4" MFL fittings from Foxx to hook it up to a corny keg...

We measure our lactic acid into a corny, dilute with water, then inject through this flowmeter into our liquor before it hits the grist hydrator. We are on a 15 bbl system, and the 1-10 gpm flowmeter can work for both dough-in and sparge. We target the upper end of the flowmeter (10 gpm) and use only about 2.5 gals water during dough-in, to make sure we get it all injected in time (Our dough in is about 12-15 mins). Then for sparging we fill the corny to 5 gals and target the lower end of the flowmeter (3 gpm) to make it through the first 3/4 of the sparge. Works great. In our setup the corny needs to be pressurized to about 45 PSI to flow into the liquor, since the liquor is highly pressurized in a 1" pipe on its way to the hydrator.

[DueSouth]

Sorry for the delay man, I was in Yakima. Thanks for the info and I'll look into it right away.

[Tubbybrew]

Another option is to use a peristaltic pump with a known flow rate... set it up so that the volume of liquid in the reservoir (i.e. bucket on the brew deck) that it draws from equates to the flowrate X length in time of dough-in or sparging... then dose your acid into the water in the bucket and run the pump during the entire process. Our new brewhouse will have this feature... something that I thought up during design so I can't say yet how good it'll work.