Lawrence Brewers Guild

Since I recently updated my boilpot to a 26 gallon volume, the bottleneck for my system was the mashtun.

I finally got tired of struggling to get all the grain and water in the 60qt I've used for years. My max gravity was around 1.050 in that mashtun. Nothing like making up an excuse to upgrade.

I bounce back and forth between fly sparging and batch sparging, mostly because of the design of my last mash tun.

It had to be able to handle a 1.070 beer easily, well insulated, flat bottom (no wheels), and a peek hole to see water level without letting out all of the heat.

So I went with a Igloo 7 day 150qt marine cooler.


Added the valve and compression fitting first, reused a tap collar for fit.


Fits pretty well.


Copper manifold built and soldered.


Sparge Arm fitting


Soldering the inlet to the sparge arm (ignore sweaty guy in the yellow shirt)


Sparge arm mounted to the lid

Sparge arm assembled and mounted up


Put together:


Now onto building a brace for the sink (just a precaution) and a small stand for the mashtun to sit on.

Thanks to Dan, Andy, and several forums for the tips.

Oh yeah, this will handle a 1.100 beer at 1 pound grain to 1.25qt water ratio all day long.

And the heat loss should be minimal, but I will let you know after I do a dry run on it this weekend. Still need to cut all the slots in the manifold and sparge arm first.

Nice Sean, this should fix your Hi OG problems for sure!
Id also add some cross pipes in the lower manifold. Good possibility during a fly you will channel to the outer pipes as they are now.

cyburai wrote:Oh yeah, this will handle a 1.100 beer at 1 pound grain to 1.25qt water ratio all day long.

Depending on brewhouse efficiency, at 26 gal I'm coming up with about 95-100 lbs of grain?! You better get some more goats.

Nice! I agree with the cross pieces on the manifold.

Maybe this will motivate me - same cooler is sitting in the garage.

Rob Martin wrote:
at 26 gal I'm coming up with about 95-100 lbs of grain?! You better get some more goats.

whoyaaa!

Another Tun to borrow for Barrel Brewing!

Are you gonna batch, of fly sparge this space ship? With this configuration i'd imagine it would be just about as easy to do it either way. It'll be interesting to see how much pick-up the manifold achieves, and what wort, if any, is left behind.

Jensen wrote: what wort, if any, is left behind.

You nasty batch sparger you...

Blktre wrote:

Jensen wrote: what wort, if any, is left behind.

You nasty batch sparger you...

Fly spargers here baby. About 45min of fun each brew session.

Sean, I can show you how to squeeze in an extra pipe down the middle to prevent channeling. You could avoid using cross pipes this way as you would have uniform flow across the grain bed.

Show me quick. I'm planning on doing a wet run this afternoon if I can.

Here's mine - looks like I have some parts mixed up - not squared up - no sweated joints. Palmer suggests that whatever your distance between the pipes is, the distance between the pipes and side walls should be half that. Otherwise channeling down the walls may occur when fly sparging. I'd add an extra pipe down the middle or several cross pieces. Andy got me to do that several years ago when I posted pics. 80 - 85% using this manifold flying. Yeah, it's upside down...... to show the slots.

72 qt Coleman

Sean,

Now that is a mash tun...OMG. You could put 110lb in it but can you MOVE it with a 110lb in it

Well done.


Here was our first mash tun





Also used Palmer for the calculations.

This one if for sale ...make me an offer.

Jason