I see in a lot of pictures of the brutus 10 that they are running two march pumps. Is this necessary? I would be buying a H315HF march pump from MoreBeer. Is a single march pump enough if its plumbed right?

The main use for two pumps would be to pump sparge water from the hot liquor tank to the mash tun while also pumping runoff from the mash tun to the boil kettle. I also use mine to recirculate while pumping ice water through the immersion chiller (Jamil's whirlpool chiller).

If you want to batch sparge, you might be able to get away with one pump. If you had a multi-tier stand, you could use gravity for the sparge or the runoff. If you have a totally flat stand though, like a Brutus clone, and you want to fly sprage, you will need two pumps.

I use one pump on the HLT/MLT cart in junction with Stainless 3 way ball valves. Do not fly sparge, but run a RIMS system still. The other pump is on the boil cart to perform CIP and then transfer from BK to Counter Flow Heat Exchanger to Conical. FYI

If I had AutoCad running on the new laptop I would send you the schematic. Soon. I can not remeber if my website has the most recent schematic.

Yeah, if you're fly sparging on one tier, you need two pumps. One from HLT to MLT, and one from MLT to BK. As this is one of the only times you use two pumps, it may well be worth the effort to use a two-tier gravity system with the HLT elevated. Of course, the brutus looks pretty.

The other time people tend to need two pumps is if they use a counterflow chiller. The difference there is that the cold water pump doesn't need to be food-safe, and thus can be considerably cheaper.

I have a "single tier" stand with one pump and I fly sparge. I put the single tier part in quotes because what I do is drain the mash tun into the boil kettle sitting on the floor until it is half way full, then lift it on to the brew stand for the boil. I continue to drain into a small pot which I periodically pour into the boil kettle. So technically this isn't single tier, but it works if you have a brutus and only one pump.

The other unmentioned benefit to the two pumps is that you can be using the first pump to be cleaning half the system with hot CIP PBW solution while the second pump is busy cooling/whirlpooling the wort. By the time you transfer your cooled wort to a fermenter, you are already half finished with the cleaning.

This is exactly why I have two pumps... Fly sparging on a single tier AND used for secondary, ice-bath JZ chiller recirculation (after hose water has knocked it down, first).


Mylo