Chiller testing
01 Dec, 2014
Testing the plate chiller. The temperature can be adjusted by either varying the amount of cooling water going through the chiller and / or adjusting the rate at which the beer comes out.
Beer out valve fitted
27 Oct, 2014
Fitted the manual beer out valve. Mounting it was a little challenging as the valve height was pretty much the same as the height of the shelf I was mounting it to.
Took the valve apart, marked out the holes, used a QMax cutter for the middle hole then drilled the others.
Very pleased with how it turned out given the tight tolerances involved.
Hop strainer and mash tun volume sensor
27 Oct, 2014
Finally ground down the mash tun filter enough for it to fit neatly in
the mash tun.
Also cut a channel for the mash volume measurement tube
to fit and then used a 6mm penny washer to cover the gap to avoid grain
escaping.
Was pleased with how neat this turned out given how difficult
it was to measure where certain components needed to be.
Video: Mash Heat via HERMS coil
25 Jun, 2014
This shows the Brewtroller keeping the mash at the target temperature by switching between just recirculating it and reciruclating it via the HERMS coil. I set the HLT target to be 40.0C and the mash target to be 32.0C.
It seems to be pretty accurate at holding the mash temperature, but I think the HLT temperature probe will need to be moved to get a more accurate reading of the HLT temperature and avoid overshoots.
Volume measurement electronics
23 Jun, 2014
The completed volume measurement electronics and hardware.
The small circuit board below the pump is a variable DC-DC converter to adjust the speed of the pump, mainly to minimise noise.
The two blue circles at the top are the gang valves to control the flow of bubbler air, the blue tubes split off and go to the Freescale MPX5010DP pressure sensors. The bottom tube out of the pump is the air intake line – it may require a filter.