50L Keg Brewing

[Peter Smith]

I am moving away from my initial single BIAB pot system to a set of 3x 50L kegs.  I am mainly doing this as 50L kegs seem to be very good value for their 50L size, easy to carry with the built in handles and should last a lifetime if looked after.

After doing a bit of research online, I have decided to polish them with an angle grinder and conditioning pads (known as "gator grit" pads in the US).  I have found a NZ supplier of similar pads http://www.seearco.co.nz that fit small angle grinders.   My plan is to start with the medium pad, move to the fine one, then polish with polishing wheels (not shown), starting with a cutting polish (white Hyfin) then a finishing polish wheel with a non cutting polish to give bling.

I will post photos 

[Mark Weusten]

Hey Peter, do you polish the inside of the kegs for sanitary reasons? Whats the go?

[Scott H]

I've seen them with the insides bead blasted. They come up real nice.

[Peter Smith]

not necessary to polish inside but smooth = easier to clean

polishing a keg

http://www.brewhardware.com/polishing-stainless

Polishing Stainless

I started undertaking the keg polishing project in February of 2008 and shared by results and process on Homebrewtalk as I went along. The thread grew to hundreds of posts and a lot of people were inspired to polish their kegs as well. Now that I've gone through a few different vessels, I'm putting this article together to share my process and some tips and tricks if you too want to require sunglasses to brew. By no means am I claiming to be a metal finishing expert or that my process is better than others. This article lays out how I do it and what I've come to learn about metal polishing in the process.

http://www.brewhardware.com/images/brew/polish/hltshine2.jpg" alt="hltshine2" width="546" height="273"/>

Original Condition:

Before you decide to undertake this project, you may want to look closely at the vessels you're starting with. This takes enough time, effort and money that you don't want to polish up a severly damaged keg because polishing doesn't remove dents and you may not be happy with the results. If you want show-piece results, at least start with a keg that is generally straight with only surface gouges and scratches. If you're lucky, sometimes nearly new kegs end up in the scrap yard too. Bottom line is, if you're picking through a scrap bin of sanke kegs and have your choice between a newer looking dented keg or a scratched up undented, select the latter. The image on the right is what I started with. Most of them had the same level of wear but no real dents or deep scratches. The one with the paint on it was probably the newest and least scratched.

Basic Tools

http://www.brewhardware.com/images/brew/polish/gatorbacking.jpg" alt="gatorbacking" width="87" height="119"/>http://www.brewhardware.com/images/brew/polish/gatorfine.jpg" alt="gatorfine" width="90" height="116"/>You're going to need some specialty tools to get this done but the good news is that you probably already have a few of them from cutting the top out of your keg:

• 4.5" angle grinder. I have a Hitachi but just about any of them will do just fine. Even the Harbor Freight one might make it through a keg or two before burning up.
• Rubber backing pad. This threads directly on to the grinder's arbor (the threaded shaft) and supports the finishing/polishing pads. You likely have to remove both the positioning backup washer and the outer nut off the arbor of your grinder for this to thread on. Also, the nut that comes with the backing pad will have a different hole distance than the spanner wrench that comes with the grinder. No fear, you can tighten it enough with the flat of your gloved palm. It tightens more when you run the grinder.
• Gator Grit Fine (and possibly Medium) Finishing Pads (two pack at Lowes for about $9). These are used to take away surface metal on your project so you can get down to the deeper scratches faster.
• Gator Grit Soft Polishing pads (two pack at Lowes for about $4).
• Task Force #2 and #5 polish sticks (these are in the tool section of Lowes but NOT near thepolishing pads) The last two items are what take your smooth metal to a high luster shine.

How It Works

This is an important detail that you shouldn't skip over. Many people have tried to get a mirror finish only to be disappointed. There is a multi-step process that must be followed with no skipping around. You have to start with a coarse grit and work your way to a fine polish. How coarse you have to go will depend on how deeply scratched your metal is. Before I describe any more, the next drawing should help explain it well. (you can see a larger image by clicking on it

Each of the grey masses represents the surface of your project at a microscopic level. The left side represents the original condition of the metal surface, pitted, scratched, and jagged. The right side shows the resulting surface finish for each of three polishingsteps after a reasonable length of time. If you start with thepolishing pad, you can see it will only remove the peaks on the surface but generally removing a very small layer of metal. Some areas become flat, and therefore very shiny. However, there are many deep scratches left. This would look good from a distance, but not like a show piece. The next is what the "fine" Gator finishing pad would do on the original surface. It removes far more material than thepolish, down to deeper scratches. You can see that it makes a more consistant finish, but it is by no means flat. The end result is described as clean and smooth to the touch, but with visual swirl marks and NOT shiny. The last of the initial steps you might take is to go to the "Medium" Gator pad. On surfaces that are especially scratched up, this makes the quickest work of removing material down to the deepest scratch. The tradeoff for efficiency is that the resulting finish is consistent but very rough. You will absolutely think you've made a mistake by going this coarse because it will look less shiny than the project started with. Fear not.

http://www.brewhardware.com/images/brew/polish/polishprocess.gif" alt="polishprocess" width="488" height="162"/>

Now that you understand what each of the steps would do to the original finish out of order, we'll talk about the step by step process and what it does in context of the drawing above.  Understanding that the surface may need to get worse before it gets better, you start with the most aggressive grit that you need in order to get the deep scratches out first. If there are only a few isolated deep scratches on the surface, go ahread and work those areas only.

http://www.brewhardware.com/images/brew/polish/gatorfineresult.jpg" alt="gatorfineresult" width="109" height="140"/>From there go to the Fine pad and work the entire surface. If you run perpendicular to noticable scratches, you can easily see when you've gotten through enough metal to eliminate that scratch. If you get to a gouge that is taking too long to eliminate, you may want to circle it with a pencil and go back to those with the medium pad. Both finishing pads will create new scratches and swirl marks but it's the nature of the polishingbeast. You want to get out all the deep scratches as quickly as possible. One final pass with the fine pad using a lighter touch will buff some of the lighter scratches out that you've just created. Again, there will be no mirror surface but it will shine a bit. The picture on the right shows the result of the fine pad. Again, no deep scratches remain but it is swirled and patchy looking.

The picture on the left shows the correct polishing pad and what the polishing stick used to look like. You won't find the polish in this packaging anymore but the equivelent is still available. The #2 grit is relatively coarse as the polish goes. It won't take much work to remove the swirls from the previous step and you'll see some real shine coming out. Notice the reflection of the polish in the surface. After #2, change out the polishing pad and move on to the final #5 polish. This is where you get the mirror shine. 

Tips and Troubleshooting

• The most important thing I learned is that this is tedius boring labor. Don't think you're going to bang this out without preparation and committment. If you lay a keg down in the garage and lean over to work on it, your back will be trashed beforfe you get half way done. You can put two saw horses parallel to each other and throw a strap about them so they can't slide apart. Then you can lay the keg on top and it won't roll around. Most importantly, you bring the work  up to chest height.
• Wear protective gear including goggles, a dust respirator and ear protection. Better yet, a pair of in-ear buds for your iPod puts you in a happy place and makes time go faster.You may also want to wear a hat because it is messy work and you'll end up with dust and polishing cast off in your hair.
• The pads should be relatively flat on the work, angled upwards just enough to keep the keeper nut from hitting the surface. If you work with the pad angle up too high, you'll wear out the pad quicly and even melt some of the backing pad onto the surface. If you get tough black smudges, you can wipe it off with a rag with paint thinner on it or carefully scrape it off with a razor scraper. You can also avoid the problem by let the pad cool off a bit every few minutes.
• Work in small sections at a time and attack it systematically. For example, work a single 4" x 6" area back and forth until it's done on one grit. Move over and do the next 4x6" area, etc.  You'll never get a consistent finish if you randomely attach the whole vessel.
• Every time you change to the next finer grit step, it's best to wipe the whole surface down with a paint thinner-soaked rag to remove coarse grit and metal particles from the surface.
• It might be obvious, but the polish is applied to the soft pad by spinning up the grinder and holding the polish stick up against the pad briefly. Hold the polish firmly or it will fly across the garage.
• Once you get to the polish, the best results come from applying a pretty decent pressure to the point where the grinder slows down to about half speed. I know it sounds bad but it's what takes the orange peel surface down to a mirror. Keep applying more polish often. After some time, lighten the pressure and buff.
• For a typical Sanke 1/2 barrel keg, each of the four grit steps took me about 40 minutes or a total of about 3 hours with some breaks. Break it into a couple days if you want to.

Yes, I have about 6 hours invested into two kegs but the way I see it, I only had to sacrifice a single all grain brew day. The surface cleans up more easily in the polished state than the matte finish. After about a year, the finish will dull just a bit and can be rejuvinated by a very brief retouch with the #5 polish.

[Mark Weusten]

They come up amazingly well

[Crusader-Rob]

Direct fire or Electric?

[Peter Smith]

The kettle is currently setup as direct fire from the guy I got it from, but I am going to convert to electric / pid with the 5500 watt ripple element, with same element in the HLT.  The control panel will fire one or the other, not both at same time as per electric brewery.  My plan is to mainly brew on this 50L system but I want the flexibility to swap out to a bigger MT / BK and still run the same control panel and HLT.    I think electricity is fine at 50L but if I want to brew bigger I would go gas on the kettle like Scott B in Wellington, really like his setups.

I am pretty sold on stainless coil plumbed into the kettle to chill.  I am about 90% sold on the idea of standard copper HERMS loop through the HLT (as I have the copper already).   I need to go watch one of these in action, I have vague memories of Druid's copper loop and his  HLT stirrer motor to keep temps even,  but I have not yet got my head around how much the temp gradient needs to be between your HLT water temp and incoming wort temp to get effective wort heating, this obviously depends on pump LPM and length of the copper coil, but there is not much out there,  any feedback from working HERMS systems here?

[Scott H]

Brewed with mine for first time on sat. 50ft of 1/2 in copper or stainless is the recommended length for HERMS coil. I found that my recirc pump was slowish towards the end of the mash but I believe it was due to no false bottom I was just using a bazooka screen which I think got a bit blocked and was choking flow will have false bottom fitted for next brew in a fortnight.
General concensus for ramping times seems to be 1 degree f per minute so take around 20 mins to reach mash out temp.

[Peter Smith]

Do you recirc during the entire mash or just for temp control steps and at mash out?  I guess that a continuous recirc means you dont need a vorlauf step as its happening all the time, just heat to mashout then start sparging.

[Scott H]

My mash tun is a pot so I recircd constantly will wait and see over period of brews as to weather wort thrashing is an issue or not to decide if I need a grant.

[Peter Smith]

Druid sort of persuaded me that a grant was the way to go, I am 50:50...  was thinking of using a 89mm sanitary sightglass from aliexpress, replacing the glass with acrylic tube and using stainless float switches as a 600mm tube would give you quite a nice 1-1.2L per cycle grant.    Replace the short threaded rods it comes with threaded stainless etc, its all about getting a good match on the acrylic to stainless fitting point, but this could be botched up with food safe silicone.

As I understand it once you break the long protein chains you cant put them back together, a sort of humpty dumpty analogy for non chemists.....  I read the same thing for shake and bake force carbing corny kegs as well.

[Scott H]

I have read and heard the reasons for not thrashing the wort but until I try it for myself I won't really know. If the effects were really that bad then everyone would use a grant.

[Peter Smith]

Some breweries use variable speed motors on the recirc/transfer pumps for this reason.... when we did the off flavour tasting thing at the Britomart Brew pub the brewer who ran the session commented that the small brewhouse there did not have variable speed pumps so you had to use partial pressure from values etc and how that was definitely not an optimal solution.    I think steam brewing use a grant, as long as the grant pump was always fully primed, it would be a LOT more gentle on the wort, imagine whats going on inside a throttled back recirc pump on for a 60min mash... running at 1400 rpm

My observation is that in general nearly everyones homebrew is not as good as the pro's beer, there are exceptions... but the typical BJCP scoring distribution indicates this.   We just don't know yet what really makes a different or not.

https://www.facebook.com/steambrewingco/photos/a.10152561175586763....   

Now saying all that, there are probably a massive % of brew houses around who don't use a grant and make great clean beer.  Bit like Catholic vs Presbyterian interpretation......   I was having a chat last night with a winemaker who said many pro beer brewers are opinionated, and in their brewery their way is the right way, yet they all make good beer with different methods.