We brewed the inaugural batch on the new brewery today. Had a few friends over as well. I'm very happy with the performance so far. I don't have any of the automation in yet so this was an all manual batch. There is no hair left on my arm from lighting the burners under the heat shields!
It took us about 4 1/2 hours total for the 20 gallon batch. We ended up with about 18 G in the fermenters @ 72% efficiency according to Promash. The only real problem was the Boil burner being too large. The only way I could keep a ridiculous boil at bay was to throttle back the gas to the point of having big orange flames and a ton of soot coming out of the burner. Not very efficient.
Other than that everything else worked really well. The new chiller dropped from 208* to 105* in about 10 minutes at which point I switched to the chilled water and overall was able to go from 208 to ~75* in about 30 minutes total. Not bad for 19 gallons.
I'm going to move the big burner to the HLT position and hopefully that'll help things out. I'll add the automation hopefully before the next batch. I have a few things to tune-up as well. I had to mess with the glycol chiller for a while to get it to work OK after sitting so long.
Everything is looking good. 18 gallons of wort pitched at 58 and sitting at 48 right now. Can't wait to brew again!
I'm pretty stoked! Here's a picture of me for comparison. Those of you that don't know me, I'm 7' 3" 285lbs.
Inaugural Batch
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- backyard brewer
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Inaugural Batch
Last edited by backyard brewer on Sun Nov 30, 2008 10:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.
- backyard brewer
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- Location: Orange County, CA
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- brew captain
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