Reuben Rowntree's Blog (5)

I've been so busy with work/study lately I haven't had a chance to finish off my blog series, so thought I better get back into it.

The goal here is to allow the Brewtroller to calculate how much water is needed to brew a particular batch, then fill the HLT with the correct amount, transfer the mash water to the mash tun, and finally sparge until I have the desired amount of water in the kettle. There is actually a particularly useful feature where by you can set the flow into your BK…

I decided to go for 3kW elements, it seems that would be about the biggest I could go for without requiring new switches and fuses in my house. My circuit breaker is rated to 20A, and as a good rule of thumb I'm going to try and keep this below 15A. Basically, the bigger the element, the quicker I can heat the water to start the mash and get the boil rolling.

The Maths:

20A x 230V = 4600W (max)

15A x 230V = 3450W (my target)

Therefore: 3000W/230V…

Brewtroller Build:- Plumbing Connections

Plumbing:

First off I must say I'm surprised by the total cost of plumbing this system, it's much more than I would have guessed - but it has to be done.

Side note: I work as a sound engineer now, but actually I did my trade as a plumber so the plumbing side of things is going to be a piece of cake for me - the electronics side is going to be a little more difficult - but…

I just got my false bottom back from the sheetmetal workshop so I thought I'd post a few pictures. I bought a sheet of perforated stainless steel sheet from: LockerNZ - http://www.lockernz.co.nz/pdf/catalogues/Perfmetals.pdf

I opted for the P106 which is 2.4mm holes at 3.6mm centres. It comes on a roll which I think was about a metre wide but they sold me just a half metre of that (for about $90), so…

Well I'm well into my Brewtroller Build so I'd thought I'd document the whole process.

Building an Automated Brewing System

Background

I have been brewing all grain in 20L batches for a couple of years now. I have been using a 32L pot which doubles as a HLT and a Boiling Kettle, recently I started using the Brew in a Bag (BIAB) method which has proven to…