My home built 1 barrel-ish system, so far

Well, that's a view of the brewery as it sits today. Notice the stove top way in the back? Notice something missing from it? I'm still waiting on my 55gal kettle, apparently Blichmann is way behind in their orders. The kettles in the foreground are just my good old homebrew system, which I still intend to use to pilot recipes and for miscellaneous support (I expect I could make some nice starters with it). Apart from the 55gal kettle, which I don't have, the brewery primarily consists of an Avantco stove top burner (which I am very pleased with so far), two 150 qt Igloo coolers (1 as hot liquor tank, one as mash tun), a penguin glycol chiller with small plate heat exchanger, and a 1 barrel polymer Spiedel fermenter. Also, integral to the system, a small Kegland pump to drive the sparge water, and a stacker to elevate the mash tun as needed.

I can't claim the system to be battle proven yet, so there could still be some tweaking, but I can tell you some of the things I've noticed so far. I'll start with the Kegland pump (which a keen eye can see on the floor just on the left side of the glycol chiller). Apparently, Kegland is Australian based. I checked into it after I found out that I couldn't find any common fittings to adapt to it. Its a great little pump. I haven't measured the flow, but I have experimented enough to tell that I am actually going to have to throttle it back a little while pushing sparge water up 6ft of head. I suspect the fittings are English pipe thread. I've ran into this in the past, and I believe I was able to get something from AAA metric in Denver, but I haven't bitten the bullet yet to find special adapters for this. Instead, I am trying to clamp the nylon tube directly to the fitting with hose clamp. I've gone about as tight as I am comfortable without breaking the fittings. There is a very slow leak, I hope I can live with it. We'll see if I end up regretting this.

I certainly saved some bucks using the coolers in lieu of stainless steel vessels, but probably not as much as one would think. By the time I had finished making a manifold for the mash tun, I had sunk another couple hundred bucks into copper fittings and such. Picture below. In hindsight, I wish I had gone with 6" bazooka screens as opposed to the 12" ones. I think I could have distributed them better. And I wish I had made some more modifications to shorten the outlet of the manifold. As it is, I had to cut down every copper fitting as much as I could, leaving just enough to solder. And it does seem that I get a cavitation effect, allowing me to keep drawing wort (water in my experiments so far) through the manifold even as the level drops below the high point of the outlet pipe.

The penguin chiller is also a cool little device, but it gets overwhelmed pretty quickly when I use it for cooling the wort. I suppose I could've evaluated the heat rejection capacity ahead of time, but then I kind of had a fixed budget in mind, so I was going to end up buying it anyway. It's totally overkill for chilling a fermenter, but a bit undersized for cooling wort. I've experimented with hot water and found that it will work if I go slow. I might be right up against 40min to cool the wort, but I think it will work, especially if I add another stage, possibly using the glycol chiller to cool another bucket of water, which in turn will be used to chill the wort, its just a question of how much water I want to waste, and whether or not I want to add another pump circuit to the mix.

A couple other notables; I made a rather simple sparge arm device out of copper with a couple holes in each arm (picture below). Using 3/4" pipe for the basis, and a total of 32 holes, each about 1/8" in diameter seemed to work well, seems to distribute the sparge water pretty evenly over the mash tun. I also have a flux wrap cooling jacket (30gal drum size) to keep the fermenter cool. It doesn't quite wrap around the fermenter, I have to use bungee chords to keep it in place, but like I said, the penguin chiller is overkill. Even given the poor heat transfer through the polymer walls of the Spiedel fermenter, I am confident this is going to work just fine.

All in all, I feel like things came together quite nicely, but you could say I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. I've done some experiments with water, but only time and exercise will tell if the system works as is. If it works, I am a genius for building a brewery on such a modest budget. If it doesn't, well, than I guess I'm not as clever as I like to think. I hope to write future posts about the pro's and con's of the system. Hope this gives you some ideas, but I wouldn't go building your own system like this just yet. Let me work out the bugs a little.

Just a couple more shots of the system below for posterity: