Homebrew Project

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.

A few of the other guys have tackled the task of construction of the brewery and i have concentrated on the automation of the fermenation process. So far i have created the logic which will be used for both the cold box and the Conical Fermenter controlling the heating and cooling process.

The idea is to make the system as flexible and easy to use as possible. To do this 2 variables will be used at all times to define if the system will be cooling, heating, or nothing. The logic is is shown below:


Both the Cold Box and the Conical Fermenter will be controlled separately. By controlling these process separately we will be able to ferment different types of beer at the same time. Because a PLC will be used to control this process it should be easy to track where each beer is in the fermentation process. The Control logic which will control the heating and cooling pumps is as follows:


This is the basis of what is needed to brew different beers. This logic will always be used regardless of the stage of the brew process Primary, Diacetyl Rest, Crash, Secondary. I will followup with the diagram which will show each of the process steps in a later post for now we have temperature control... O, yea not to mention the data logging. The data logging will be essential so that we understand what a beer experienced during the fermenation process. In logging this information we will be able to re-create a beer over and over again.

So it's been a few weeks sense the planes where posted and we have made some progress and i have just been slow to post it. The Cooling Coils have been placed on to the Conical or as i like to call it 27 Gallons of goodness. For this 50' of flexible copper tubing was used to form around the base of the conical.

We chose to coil the base of the conical rather then the top so we could make a smaller batch and still cool the system. The Fermentation process should agitate enough to circulate larger batches even with the coils placed on the lower part of the conical. If needed a second set of cooling coils could be added to the top of the conical and could be driven by a third pump allowing cooling process to happen faster (if needed). This will all be controlled by a PLC so it should not be difficult to control the third pump.

It was tricky warping these coils around the base of the conical as it is cone shaped and it took some time to make sure we had good contact between the coils and the conical. After it was warped tension bolts used to hold the coils in place and keep them firm to the conical.

Check out the process in the following video:

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!!!