The project that started this whole new home brewery was the modified "brewhouse".

When I started brewing I used a cajun burner with one pot. Since I am not a welder by any means I needed to have someone do the fabrication when I stepped to a single tier all grain system. Brad, is a friend of a friend who last year helped me construct this single tier brew scuplture.

Realtive to the new system is was very simple, quick disconnects, one pump and three 55k btu burners.

The new system about 1/3 of the way through the modications. Once it is done it will be entirely hard plumbed, have two pumps (one for sparging and the other for wort transfer), HLT heat exchanger for step mashes, inline temp readings, several polycarbonate sight glasses, an expandable / swinging control panel supprt, a tipping mash tun, integrated plate chiller and a way to reuse the hot water from the chiller. So I guess this brewery will be "green" in the way it conserves water.

These pics include one of Brad who has done a very good job of coming up with problems with constructing the brewery. More pictures will be included as Brad's part is done and as we hard plumb it.

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Rain is great for the growth of our hops but we cannot work on the brewery then...what a dilemma.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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I feel as though an insane amount of planning has gone in to putting our ultra home brewery together. Each person that is contributing to the brewery has their own specialty. Today I met with Brad, who is fabricating and welding the core of the brewery. I plan on bringing him in as a part of this blog in the future. I wonder how many other homebrewers have felt this way as they plan an exciting project like this. You feel as though you have done a ton of planning and things are slowly coming together but there is a great amount of anticipation and excitement as we proceed. One of the items that is on my punch list is posting some of the pictures that I we have taken along the way.

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Well, today is the day that the small brewery, in a small town, in an even smaller garage started... to get a bit bigger (yea we had a smaller brewery before). To make the brewery bigger plans had to be made. We needed a new brew process capable of brewing higher volumes of beer and a new fermentation process capable of creating more consistence results.

The new brew process design provides the ability to create a continues brew process by breaking the system into three parts the Hot Liqueur Tank (HLT), Mash Tun, and Boil Kettle. This new process also contains a CIP (Clean in place) system making cleanup easier (we all know this is the worst part of homebrew). Finally the heating of the Mash Tun is done by using the hot water from the HLT. This should create an easier system to deal with as there should be no worries about burning the mash killing the batch.




The new fermentation process will be controlled by a PLC. This will use two PID loops which will read the temperature of the Cold Box and the Fermentor. These PID loops will trigger heaters and coolant. pumps if needed to keep the brew at the correct temperature throughout the process.




So, plans have been made now all we have to do is build it.

Let the Homebrew Project begin!!!

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