Brett Mason's Blog (5)

What a great title for a post.

After switching to all electric my old clean up method of taking my keggle etc outside and blasting with the hose became awkward with the cables attached. I'm also after ways to reduce the amount of lifting involved so have been looking at cleaning the vessels in place. Boring topic but clean up still eats up a good chunk of my brew day.

My trub filter was fixed in place which made cleaning the kettle time consuming. It doesn't…

Made a big step towards my goal of going fully electric today. The HLT is now using two 10 amp feeds with two elements and it looks like I have enough power to give a decent boil.

The initial driver to add more power was the 95 minutes it took a single 2kw element to heat about 40 litres up to mash in temperature which is a big delay at the start of brew day. Normally I just heat about 20 litres for mash in which is closer to 40 minutes but I was trying out no sparge…

Mostly finished the first version of my new control panel. Ended up mostly following the design from http://theelectricbrewery.com/ , considered a bunch of different options but was hard to fault Kal's design. This build is just the base build to control my HLT with a 10a supply, leaving enough room to add in pumps later…

A quick update on the HLT build which is now mostly wrapped up and been through its first batch.

The lovely insulation is courtesy of a warehouse camp roll and a bunch of duct tape.

I was concerned about usability with the large gap between the tap, thermometer and sight glass and it has been a minor nuisance since the thermometer isn't easy to read from an angle. I played it safe with a fairly large gap to avoid cross over between the probes…

Thought I would post some details on my electric keggle HLT conversion. Not finished yet but close. I've found reading over peoples other blogs/threads really useful, particularly those from NZ, so hopefully this is useful to someone thinking of doing the same.

Fittings from left to right: Element, sightglass & thermowell for sensor, tap (to be…