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Home Photo Galleries Equipment Galleries Scott DeWalt • Houston, Texas

Our “TexanBrew brewery” is a home brewery that, like almost all, has grown over time — from a five-gallon turkey pot to three converted kegs on a custom stand. The TexanBrew brewery is a Recirculating Heat Exchange Mash System (RHEMS). A typical RHEMS consists of a mash tun, hot liquor tank and boil kettle. Our brewery adds to those a separate, electrically heated vessel containing the heat-exchanging coils. Dubbed the mini-exchanger, this is the heart of the TexanBrew brewery.

<p>Scott DeWalt (left) and buddy Sean Lewis in front of the TexanBrew brewery. </p> <p>The mini-exchanger minimizes the amount of water we need to heat in order to raise and maintain mash temperatures. For the base of this piece, we removed the top of a Cornelius keg then drilled a 7/8-inch hole through the bottom of the keg to allow us to install a 2000-watt 110-volt heating element. </p>

Scott and Sean
<p>The complete TexanBrew system.</p> <p>Twenty-five feet of copper tubing, bent around a 6-inch cylinder and mounted into the keg, serve as the heat-exchanging coils. The entire vessel is electrically grounded and insulated using closed-cell foam. At the start of each brew session the mini-exchanger is filled with water and heated to about six degrees above the desired mash temperature. </p>

System
<p>The mini-exchanger contains 25-feet of copper tubing coils. </p> <p>After dough-in, wort is pumped from the bottom of the mash tun, through the mini-exchanger and up to the return manifold. Recircula-tion continues for the entire brew session. Raising the temperature of the mini-exchanger’s water heats the mash about two degrees per minute.</p>

Mini Exchanger
<p>The mash tun during sparging.</p> <p>To simplify the fly sparging process, I installed a float switch in the mash tun. Water from the hot liquor tank is pumped into the mash tun through a check-valve (which prevents a siphon from moving the sparge water back into the hot liquor tank). As wort drains from the mash tun during the sparge, the float switch activates the pump, which moves water from the hot liquor tank into the mash tun until the desired level is achieved. Setting the sparge only requires us to monitor the outflow from the mash tun.</p>

Float in Grains


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