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My Brewing Setup

This page gives a detailed description of the various components of my brewing setup. For a few specific components, such as for the electronics and the software, separate pages have been made.

The brewing setup consists of the following main components:

• The Hot Liquid Tun (HLT): the kettle on the left
• The Mash/Lauter Tun (MLT): the kettle in the middle
• The Boil kettle: the kettle on the right
• The magnetic pump: the heart of the brewing setup
• The Counter flow chiller (CFC): the cooling unit that cools down the boiling hot wort down to room temperature
• The gas burners: two burners of 24 kW (!) each, adjustable between 0 % and 100 % power (modulating)

The Hot Liquid Tun (HLT)

The HLT, or the Hot Liquid Tun, is the pan at the left. It can contain up to 150 litres.

The pan contains a heat exchanger (a copper spiral). The mash water flows through the heat exchanger.

In the picture, several connections can be seen:

• The connection at the front has a ball valve (with the blue handle). This is ball valve V2 (see How does it work?).
• Just above this connection, there's a connection for the digital temperature sensor (LM92), needed for the brew program. The pipe goes into the HLT, which assures a good temperature reading.
• On the right side of the pan there are two connections (both welded) for the heat exchanger inside the pan. The lower connection is connected to ball valve V4 (also shown on the picture). The upper connection is connected with a copper pipe to the return manifold in the top of the Mash/Lauter Tun (MLT).

Heating the water is done using a gas burner (24 kW, 81000 BTU/hour). The HLT is located on top of a stand. The gasburner (the grey metal box) is mounted to this stand. The stand itself stands on top of a concrete foundation, which absorbs some of the heat the gasburner produces. The picture also shows the gas connection (22 mm), which goes through the concrete foundation to the gasvalve (mounted underneath). The gas valve is controlled by the brewing program.


To facilitate a good heat exchange from the HLT to the MLT, a stirring mechanism is mounted inside the HLT. The stirring mechanism creates a flow in the opposite direction of that of the heat exchanger. The stirring mechanism is driven by a drilling machine. This turned out to be the most effective way to create a slowly rotating system, which had adequate power to set the large water mass in motion.


This picture shows the interior of the 150 L HLT. The following items are shown:

• A copper ring that is connected to the stainless steel pipe in the middle. This enables the pump to suck out almost all the water from the pan. This pipe is connected to ball valve V2.
• The heat exchanger which consists of copper pipes (total size is approx. 10 metres).
• A copper pipe (which points right up) which is mounted in between the copper pipes of the heat exchanger. This pipe contains the digital temperature sensor)

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The Mash/Lauter Tun (MLT)

The Mash/Lauter Tun, or MLT for short, is the kettle in the middle of my setup and can contain up to 115 litres. This kettle is the heart of my brewing setup.
It is a double-walled kettle, which is built by a professional metalworker. The inside diameter is 54 cm, the wall thickness is 2½ cm and the height is 50 cm. The space between the walls has been filled with glass fibre. The kettle isolates very well, even at 80 °C on the inside, you can't feel anything on the outside!

On the outside, the following connections are available:

• A connection for the digital temperature sensor, shown on the bottom left. On the picture, you can see the cable entering the kettle.
• The connection in the middle connects to a ball valve (with the blue handle). This is valve V1 (see How Does it Work? for more details) and it is connected to the filter at the bottom of the MLT.
• The connections on the right are the connections for the sight-glass and the electronic volume reading. The picture shows a mounted sight-glass. Next to the sight-glass, there's a copper pipe which contains a small plastic hose. This hose is connected to a pressure transducer (in the small box on the left side of the picture). The brew program reads to pressure transducer value to determine the MLT volume.
• The isolated connection in the top is connected to the heat exchanger in the HLT. This connection leads to the return manifold in the top of the MLT.

This picture shows the interior of the MLT. It contains the following items:

• The return manifold in the top. This is a circular ring with holes on the inside, see picture below.
• The manifold at the bottom of the kettle. This is a ring with grooves and holes at the bottom. The wort is sucked from the kettle through this, while leaving the malt in the MLT.
• The water tight pipe which houses the digital temperature sensor.
• The pipe leading to the sight-glass. This is an open connection. Before you pump water in the MLT, the sight-glass should have been mounted!

This is a detailed picture of the return manifold in the top of the MLT. You can see the holes on the inner side of the ring. These holes make sure that the wort lands gently on top of the grain bed. By making sufficient holes, there's almost no foaming.


This picture shows the bottom view of the manifold at the bottom of the MLT. This is the side that is actually on the bottom of the MLT! Many grooves have been made, through which the mash water can be sucked from the kettle. The grain remains in the kettle and will function as a filter bed.

The MLT filter is connected with a quick-connect coupling to the connection in the middle of the pan. The MLT filter is placed at the bottom of the MLT. In this way it is connected to ball valve V1, which controls the mash water flow. Many home-brewers use either this or a false bottom. Such a filter looked very practical to me and it works excellent (again this is not something I invented but was seen on sites from various home-brewers).

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The Boil kettle

The boil kettle is the right most kettle of my brewing setup and is made completely of stainless steel. Again, it is made by a professional metal worker. The inside diameter is 60 cm, the height is 50 cm, resulting in a net volume of 141 litres. But if you want a decent boil, it is better to limit the amount to 100 litres.


The boil kettle has one connection, which connects to a ball valve. To this ball valve two pipes can be connected (not seen on the picture). One pipe is connected to ball valve V3 (which is connected to the pump inlet). The other pipe is connected to ball valve V7 (which is connected to the pump outlet). See How does it work? for a detailed description of these valves. Both pipes are connected in this way to the boil kettle manifold.
The bottom right of the picture shows a little box with a knob. This box contains the electronics to control the gas burner. There is no need to control this gas valve with a computer, manual control will do.

Normally the connection at the bottom of the boil kettle is the outlet, while the boil kettle inlet is located somewhere at the top of the boil kettle (like we did with the Mash/Lauter Tun). The advantage now is that you only need 1 pipe and 1 manifold. This construction is not possible in the MLT, because the grain bed would be disturbed too much and you can not have an inlet and an outlet at the same time. This is not the case with the boil kettle. Again it works well (you just have to make sure that the correct valve is opened).
The copper manifold at the bottom of the boil kettle is nothing more than a copper circle that is connected with a quick-connect coupling to the pipe in the boil kettle.
The manifold has many cuts on the bottom side (the side that is placed at the bottom of the boil kettle).

The manifold has a unique double function, which depends of the position of the valves V3 and V7 (valves V3 and V7 can never be open at the same time):

• Function 1: collect wort. Valve V7 is opened. This is done during mashing when the wort is pumped from the MLT to the boil kettle. Since the cuts in the manifold are at the bottom, this is going very smoothly, no air-bubbles!
• Function 2: cool wort. This time valve V3 is opened. This is done after boiling. The hop flowers can not pass the cuts in the manifold and remain in the boil kettle. The wort is pumped through the counter flow chiller, which cools the wort. Never use hop pellets since they clog the manifold!

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The magnetic pump

The pump forms the heart of my brewing setup. It is a so-called magnetic pump drive. This means that the motor drives a magnet that rotates. Due to the magnetic force the pump internals are turning. There is no mechanical connection between the motor and the pump, no leaks are therefore possible. Perfect! It is difficult to obtain one in the Netherlands, of you have to order them in the States. This pump, type Iwaki, is from a dialysis machine (thanks to my brother Maurice!) and starts it's seconds life as a brewing pump. I am very pleased with this pump, very silent and yet powerful enough for my brewing setup.

This is my previous pump. The pump is a brass one and is connected with an axle to an AC motor. The motor power is 370 Watt (220 Vac). The pump can transfer fluids in both directions, but for my setup I only used one way. The pump had two 20 mm connections that are connected to a 22 mm copper pipe with a hose. With a quick-connect coupling (T, 22 x 15 x 15 mm) I connect both the inlet and the outlet to the standard 15 mm piping. The front hose is the pump inlet, the back hose is the pump outlet.

The disadvantage of this pump was that it had a bit too much power, so I had to add a pump by-pass (ball valve V8, see How does it work?). This by-pass connects the pump outlet to the pump inlet, so that the pump always has sufficient fluid. Another disadvantage of this pump is that it makes quite some noise. But the biggest disadvantage is that it starts to leak easily.

The new Iwaki magnetic pump drive does not have all these problems. Lesson learned: if you go for a pump buy a magnetic pump drive and never buy the brass version. Spend your money on a good pump!

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The Counter flow chiller (CFC)

The Counter flow Chiller (CFC) is a great device that cools down a significant amount of beer (of approx. 100 °C) in a short time down to 20 °C. The CFC consists of a long copper pipe where the hot wort flows through. Placed over this copper pipe is a black hose. Inside this hose cooling water is flowing. The flow is opposite to the flow of the beer in the copper pipe. This ensures an amazing cooling efficiency. A CFC always has 4 connections: beer in, beer out, cooling water in, cooling water out.
The picture only shows two connections (other two connections are outside the picture). The green hose on the picture is the 'cooling water out' connection. To the right you can see the 'beer in' connection. The 'beer out' connection (not shown on the picture) is a hose that I hang in the fermentation bin.

I used to work, like many home-brewers, with an immersion chiller (see picture). Cooling water if flowing through and the chiller itself is placed inside the wort. It took an hour of continuous stirring (very annoying) before the beer was cooled down sufficiently. And below 60 °C you might have a chance of getting an infection in your beer (this is impossible with the CFC, since it never comes into touch with air during cooling).

My immersion chiller has evolved into the counter flow chiller: I used all the copper from the immersion chiller as the inside for my CFC. The biggest problem here was to span the black hose over the copper (needed a few bottles of olive oil to get the job done!).

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The gas burners

There's a lot to tell about different ways of heating. I used to have a relatively small burner on propane/butane gas. The first modification was to convert this burner to natural gas. The disadvantage of this burner was the limited amount of power (8 kW, 27000 BTU/hour).

If you use this burner in combination with an electric heating element, performance becomes acceptable. I used this solution for a couple of years on the HLT.


But I needed more power for the boil kettle. One of the things I came up with, was a so-called paella burner, made by Garcima. These burners have a power of 12.5 kW (42000 BTU/hour), which is barely enough to get 80 litres to a rolling boil. The main disadvantage of this burner is the price. It did cost me 200 euro at Brouwland! I don't like to spend so much money on a burner, but after a long thought, I bought it anyway. This burner also served me well for a couple of years.


But the story continues... one of my neighbours happens to be a plumber. He regularly supplies me with old central-heating boilers (if he installs a new one, he removes the old one). Basically, such a central-heating boiler is an excellent brewing device, with many interesting components on-board. There's a lot of variation between these boilers: the old ones are non modulating (the burner is either ON or OFF), the newer boilers are modulating (controlled between 0 and 100 %).

After dismantling several of these boilers, I found out that the most interesting boilers are the AGPO Ferroli 1324T boilers. These boilers contain a modulating gas valve, type V4600N from Honeywell (electric modulating regulator is the V7335A). This gas-valve is relatively easy to control (28 Vdc pulse-width-modulated signal).

I have the brew program (with its built-in PID controller) control the gas burner under the HLT. It's a beautiful thing to see the brew program automatically adjusts the flames under the HLT.
For the burner under the boil kettle I created some electronics, with which you can control the flames with a pot meter. I prefer to control this manually.

But the gas burner itself (from the central-heating boiler) is the masterpiece. It is a brutal 24 kW (82000 BTU/hour)! And this is a lot of heat when it is fully open. It is more than sufficient for my brewing setup. Even when the burner is only at 50%, my brewery becomes tropical within a few minutes!
Another very convenient gadget (came also with the boiler) is the electric spark ignition. Turn the gas on, press a button, and the pilot light is on! Just take care of proper grounding, otherwise the sparks disturb the electronics.

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