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Home Photo Galleries Equipment Galleries Nate Nord • Williamsburg, Virginia

"Jackie Boy Brewery basically began because of a love of real Scottish Ales..."

<p><em>My brewery began because of a love of real Scottish ales and their relative obscurity in the local and craft brew markets. After sampling some homebrews from friends, my wife and I decided to build a home brewery and focus primarily on Scottish ales. I have a background in process control systems. So, I decided that it would be a good idea to incorporate some automated controls into the system. After looking at numerous other systems and spending a little more time studying the brewing process, I settled on the HERMS design.</em></p>

Jackie Boy Brewing Setup
<p><em>The control system consists of an industrial enclosure, two PID controllers with thermocouple sensors, two relays, switches for the solenoids and wort pump, and associated indicating lights. Below, you can see the interior of the controller enclosure.&nbsp; On the left side, from top down are the PID controllers, power switch, indicating lights, and switches.&nbsp; The right side consists of a terminal strip and the output relays, which control the solenoids.</em></p>

Jackie Boy Brewing Setup - Electric
<p>The rear of the brewery is where it all comes together.&nbsp; Items of interest include the wort drain manifold (drains the entire system to a low point) and the propane manifold. The propane manifold is composed of a gas solenoid valve, brass piping, and brass gas isolation valves for each burner. The propane manifold also includes a 1⁄4-inch pilot line (far left) that supplies a pilot light for the HLT burner. The burners for the kettle and mash tun are manually controlled.<br /> &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p>One PID controller senses the thermocouple temperature at the outlet of the mash tun and controls recirculation flow either into the HLT (to raise the wort temperature) or bypasses the HLT to allow ambient losses (lower the wort temperature). The second controller senses thermocouple temperature in the HLT and cycles a propane solenoid valve on or off to maintain temperature there.</p>

Jackie Boy Brewing Setup - Lines
<p><em>The system was a lot of fun to build, and, considering it was built from mental notes and scribbles on scrap pieces of paper, it works quite well. If I had to do it again, though, I would probably do one of two things differently. I would either use all manual valves/controls (the automation contributed heavily to the build time and cost), or I would build the control system to make use of some type of variable control, as opposed to simple on/off HERMS coil and bypass flow. I may even end up modifying the system a little to allow <br /> for this. </em></p>

Jackie Boy Brewing Setup - Jct Box


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