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D.I.M.S (Drop In Manifold System)
I used hard copper tubing to make my dims manifold. There are two types of hard copper tubing, "M" & "L". Type "M" is the thinner of the two and is quite common in copper piping done for residential homes throughout the U.S.. I believe I used type "M" to make the manifolds for my coolers but I just happened to grab type "L" for the dims. I don't think it matters either way for brewing. |
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To make this manifold I pretty much followed the same procedure I used to make the manifolds for my coolers. I laid out the copper corner and "T" pieces where I thought they should be in the bottom of the kettle. Once I had them in place I measured between the pieces and cut the lengths of tubing needed. I sanded the ends of the tubing to remove the burrs and press-fit everything together. |
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With everything press-fit together it was now time to decide where to put the slits in the tubing. I used a hacksaw to cut about half-way through the tubing. I tried to keep them all about a half-an-inch apart and did this in all the long straight pieces and in a couple of places on the short pieces between the corners and T's. |
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I thought about sweating everything together but I wanted to leave some of it to where I could take it apart for cleaning. I decided to sweat 5 joints together. The first one is the joint coming out of the "T" in the manifold for the outlet. If you start there the next 4 are in order coming out of the kettle. I did this so that I could take the manifold in and out without having to worry about the thing falling apart in the mash. Bob "HHH" Hoaglan of the Brewrats put together a good page on sweating copper to copper or copper to stainless steel. click here to see it. This was my first time trying to sweat copper pieces together and I think I did a fairly good job for my first time. It wasn't too hard to do. The hardest part was holding the pieces in place while soldering. I don't have much in the way of a work space to do these sort of things. With the soldering finished I bent the ends of the rest of the connections slightly out of round so they couldn't rotate and would stay together tightly. |
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Here is how the manifold looks in the kettle. It fits nicely into the bottom of the kettle. It's not too tight but it's not loose enough to where it's going to shift around in the kettle either. The corners of the manifold all sit in the round at the bottom of the kettle and hold it in place pretty good. |
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The outlet of the manifold comes out pretty far from the kettle. I had this short piece with the ball-valve already made up from another setup and just decided to use it as is for a trial period. Once I decide where i'm going to have this kettle in my setup I will most likely change the configuration of the outlet. |
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I have 9.25 gallons of untreated, filtered tap water for the mash. With 25.5 lbs of grain I hit a pH of around 5.0. A little too low but it's not bad enough for me to worry about. |
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Mashin. There's still plenty of room for more grain. |
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Here is the mash resting. I tried to get a good picture of the temperature of the mash but it didn't turn out in the picture. |
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On the right is the boiling kettle waiting. On the left is the sparge water. I call this a no-sparge barleywine but I actually run about 3 gallons of sparge water through the grains. |
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This shot was just to show the majority of my brewing setup and to see the nice rainy day I was brewing on. Very nice weather for brewing actually. A little wet and cool out.. |
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The manifold in one hand and the camera in the other. The manifold is ready to go into the mash. I heated to mashout and stirred the mash up completely to get it nice and loose so that the manifold could sink to the bottom easily. |
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Inserting the manifold nice and slow. We can't go too fast since this is the virgin run for this thing afterall. |
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Ahhhhhhh.. All the way in. What a nice fit this is. |
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The lid is on and now we wait for the 20 minute mashout period to end. |
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The 10 gallon boiling kettle is put in place with two 1-quart pyrex measuring cups for recirculation. |
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This is the mash right before I started recirculating. The wort on top of the grain was very clear. |
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I recirculated 2 gallons to get the runoff nice and clear. Notice the tubing going over the edge of the kettle. It's pretty clear. |
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Now that I have the lauter going look at the tubing going over the edge of the kettle now. It was crytal clear. |
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This is a nice shot of the mash and the boiling kettle. The runoff is almost complete. My efficiency wasn't as good as I had hoped so I ended up collecting 6.5 gallons and topping up to 6.75 gallons instead of my usual 7.5g for the boil. This is the main reason I brew in 6 gallon batch sizes. If I don't hit my gravity I can lower the batch volume, hit my gravity, and still have enough to fill a 5 gallon keg. |
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I ran off another gallon or two into this kettle with the hopes of using it for starters but I never got to boiling it or checking it's OG. I just let it go to waste. |
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Here we are with the boil kettle full and in place. The burner is on and we are waiting for the boil to begin so that the first hops can be added. |
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I dug down to the manifold once I had finished with the runoff. I wanted to see if any liquid was left in the bottom. There was some left but not much. The manifold pretty much pulled all the liquid out. |
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Boiling after the hot break is finished and the first hops are added. columbus for bittering. |
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Another shot of the boil with the flavor and aroma hops shown in the plastic containers. centennials. |
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A shot of my sanitized chillzilla waiting for action. The top bucket in the foreground is my StarSan bucket. I keep about 4.5g of StarSan in that bucket at all times and use it to sanitize everything from my chiller to fermentors to racking canes and tubing when I transfer to 2ndary and kegs. I usually keep it around for a month or two. I change it out when there gets to be too much crud in it. I periodically check the pH of the solution to make sure it's still around 2.0 and good. I use RO water, StarSan and phosphoric acid to make the solution. |
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Barleywine in the fermentor ontop of a yeastcake of Wyeast 1272 from an IPA. I hit the wort with 60 seconds of oxygen and put the airlock in.
Now the brewday is finished and I clean up. The brew went fairly smooth breaking the dims in. It was much easier using the dims than mashing in the kettle and hand transfering everything to the cooler to lauter. I really think i'm going to like the dims once I figure out what kind of efficiencies I can expect from regular brew sessions. |
