Its been several months of building, thinking, spending, bleeding, etc....
In a mad scramble I managed to complete the brew sculpture, leak test, clean the brewhouse, etc..... saturday night.....
Sunday morning, my wife and I set out to brew 10 gallons each, Northern english brown for her and an ESB for me..
So, after 10 hours of brewing, spilling, drinking, waiting, reprogramming, boiling over, etc.. I think we did pretty well.
Now I have to fix some problems found in the system,,, first of all the HLT with its 1500w element takes forever to heat my water to strike temps, and TOO long to reaheat it to sparge temp... so I am gonna add another 1500 watts to the HLT... And second, damn I need another pump, moving that thing from one tank to another is a small hassle,,, I have to shut the heater off to my HLT to pump some other fluids for a while, even further slowing the HLT temp heatup...
But all in all, the SCR for the elements worked well, the boil kettle boiled 13 gallons of wort with 3000w of heat, need to not put as much water for the boil because I dont get alot of boil off, I probably only loose right at a gallon out of 13 gallons in an hour boil. I wanted to end up with 11 gallons after the boil, but ended up with 12... which threw my gravity off a bit,, 3 points for both batches.... so it wasnt that bad, kinda tells me my efficency is a little bit more than 75%.. will have to caculate.. Nice thing is that, its a dedicated system, and soon I should have all the values necessary to make accurate repeatable batches..
anyway, here are some pics, enjoy,, and a couple of links to the photo albums if you want to see them all..
mike
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu29 ... 0complete/
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu29 ... 204-19-09/
