Well I finally received my 15 gallon Spike Solo last week and was able to do a brew day with the neighbors today. Went pretty well. We did a dry run (wet run? just water) yesterday, learned that the ball valve was full open, water everywere yay! Messed with an old furniture dolly as a stand, upgraded it's casters for more height, bolted the pump to it, made some "cup coasters" for the feet, probably going to make a PID stand off to the right of it via pipe within the next couple weeks. Beyond that the auto-tune took about 30-ish minutes, ran some PBW through it for quite a while then rinsed and set it for Sunday.
Brewed a Brewdog - Punk IPA clone via Brewfather. Hit all our numbers with the exception of having .5 gallons less than called for at the end which I'm not mad about since we didn't do a boil-off test yesterday (3400ft of elevation). Need to learn how to release the air from the pump, I'm sure there's a YT video. We're not huge fans of the recirc tub via the basket... I we ended up using our previous propane homemade sparge arm. I need to go through this thread again for some ideas but I kind of like this arm but ugh, more parts,
The Ultimate Sparge Arm | MoreBeer.
All in all pretty happy! Brewhouse efficiency per Brewfather is saying 55% which we'll take as it was our first go. I'm sure we can do better in more than a few areas. This was our first brew day actually hitting "play" on Brewfather via a laptop we finally remembered to bring (it's really just to have fun in the garage and bbq, like the Spike ad!). I'm happy I made the jump, it's so nice to just pick a temp and watch it go/hold.
Pictures because what would this post be without pictures!
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