Paulaner
Well-Known Member
I wanted a fully automated system that would rival what you find in a professional brewery or what other members here have done with theirs. I typically brew 2.5 gallon batches so that I can brew every week, but I also wanted the option to brew 5 gallons for certain circumstances. I've messed with cooler mashing, and PID control mashing, but both of these were too much manual work and didn't provide the results I was looking for. After working with Stout for about 5-6 months I finally designed and received the kettles I wanted, of course @Die_Beerery did all the leg work with Stout I just customized what he did to suit my needs. Here's what I received which I was very happy with.
Next step was getting these beauties up and running on an automated system. For that BruControl was the only option as I want a professional brewery and what Pete offers is exactly that. Everything I read said to get the biggest project box you can find and you'll grow into it. I went with a 24x24x16 thinking that I would be good. Well I didn't even get my box completed before I grew out of it and had to add another 16x16x8 enclosure which I also filled up during the build. Here's the initial layout prior to realizing I needed to add so much more and fine tune the layout.
Here's the 2 heater elements and pump sockets.
Here's the initial ball valve cannon plug, don't worry it's all protected in the final version to prevent arcing. It's an 18 pin connector, Ideally I would have went with 1, hundred or so pin connector for everything, but then I would have had to buy too many specialized tools.
This is the layout with the wiring enclosures put on, I thought I was nearing completion so I got ahead of myself by putting these on, what a mistake.
Then I decided I didn't have enough crammed into my box, and I needed more to truly make this a professional brewery so I added this.
And then my smaller box wasn't quite filled so I added this to it.
Then before I even got the kettles set up I started upgrading my PH transmitters.
After this I had to get the courage to drill into my brand new boil kettle, I tried to convince Stout to do this for me, but they didn't have any interest in doing this for me for a multitude of reasons, luckily I have somewhat of a clue to be dangerous with tools.
Now I got it all hard piped up, for now I have 12 motorized valves, 2 mass flow sensors, 2 DO sensors, 2 PH sensors, 1 conductivity sensor, 4 solenoid valves for pressurizing and pulling a vacuum on the kettles, 1 head space o2 sensor, and 5 flow meters. I just finished up my brew day script and will be fine tuning that along with my CIP script. Then I have quite the list for upgrades already. Now onto the brewery, my concern with this system is the RIMS tube. I went this route for space concerns, and the hope that I could get it to turn out the beer that I'm looking for. I'm not going to lie, but I think that I may swap it out for a HERMS system later as I can definitely taste the difference in the final product in the ones that I've tried. Of course, I like to take on a challenge, and I've done a lot of research on this, I plan on giving it at least a year of testing before I make my final decision of RIMS vs HERMS for this setup.
This is the layout with the wiring enclosures put on, I thought I was nearing completion so I got ahead of myself by putting these on, what a mistake.
Then before I even got the kettles set up I started upgrading my PH transmitters.