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Home Photo Galleries Equipment Galleries Rich Bingham • St. Louis, Missouri

Building brewing systems and gadgets can be as much fun as brewing itself. That is, of course, as long as you have a nice, fresh homebrew to drink while you are doing it. One of the main goals in designing my system was to have everything on the same level, to prevent having scalding water above my head. My system can easily be increased to a 1 barrel (31-gallon/118-L) system by changing the vessels and attaching some manifolds. I’m not sure that this will ever happen, but I sometimes go overboard.

Rich in front of his HERMS brewing system. He likes to call it “Oscar.” My next consideration was accurate temperature control, which brought me to the HERMS concept. The Heat Exchange Recirculating Mashing System (HERMS) allows me to circulate the mash liquor through a heat exchanger in the liquor pot. This can boost temperatures or bypass and prevent temperature gradients in the mash tun. The bonus of this type of a system is that you get an unbelievably clear runoff to the boil kettle.

System
Here is Rich’s (or Oscar’s) mash tun with the mixer on top. To take it a step farther, an electric stirring unit was built from parts of an old ice cream mixer and a stainless driveshaft from an outboard boat motor. The motor is turned on to mix the grain and water as I dough in and continues to stir, preventing temperature gradients in the mash bed. This makes doughing in a piece of cake and really helps in extracting the sugars from the grains. Two pumps make the brewery pretty flexible. One pump can move liquid from any one vessel to another. While the first pump is doing its job, as during sparging, a second pump is dedicated to pumping heated water from the liquor pot to the mash tun manifold. By setting the flow of both pumps even, fly sparging is simple and painless. Both pumps are turned on and off via switches on the control panel and have LED status lights.

Mash Tun
This stirrer was built with parts from an ice cream mixer and a boat motor. A whole house carbon water filter is mounted on the system’s main inlet manifold. This takes out chlorine and any other off-flavor-imparting stuff that may come from the local water supply. There are two manifolds, a supply and return, that make the system work. Within these manifolds are 13 valves that will allow you to isolate any vessel that may be removed for cleaning or whatever. To finish up the brewing process, I have a counter flow chiller made entirely of copper. This consists of 3/8” refrigeration copper tubing within 3/4” copper tubing that was wrapped around a propane tank as a mandrill. Using this chiller, I can bring boiling wort down to within two degrees of ambient water temperature any time of the year. In the hot summer months, a pre-chiller coil can be put into a bucket of ice to get the wort down to lager pitching temperatures. All in all, the system is very efficient.

Stirrer


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