I knew there was a reason why I had not finished building the return manifold for the mash/lauter tun up till now. I was never fully satisfied with the flexibility of my initial designs, given the variations in grain bed height for various recipes and switching between 5 and 10 gallon batches (if I were to do that). I think now I’ve hit upon a design that will be adaptable enough for any mash I conduct. OK, I did have a little help working out the design:

The biggest question I had was how best to adapt the length of the return pipe so that the manifold would be at the right height for each and every mash without the intake portion sometimes being way up in the air and other times right next to the lid.

I had originally planned on building various segments that I could screw together or be taken apart to get me to the right length pipe. Today I hit on the idea of using a length of tubing instead of the pipe. this way I could raise or lower to any length by attaching a simple hose clamp above the lid. The excess tubing could lie on top of the lid or be replaced entirely with a different length when the situation called for it.

I also incorporated a thermometer into the intake portion to give me another way to monitor the wort and/or H2O coming through the manifold. Used in conjunction with the temperature readings I’ll get from the MT and the HLT directly, this should give me a fairly good idea of what is happening inside my MT.

So it will work like this. The strike H2O and/or the recirculated wort will be pumped up to the intake manifold and enter in through their respective nipples (not shown). This design should allow me to keep both lines hooked up throughout the process when I finish putting the HERMS coil into the HLT (not the first batch):

The liquid will then travel down the hose, past the clamp and stop (a threaded fitting the hose will pass through, which will go through the yet to be built lid):

Finally it will travel through the “H” type manifold which will be suspended at the perfect height (as determined by the clamp placement) and gently distributed onto the grain bed:

If I need to, I will cut or drill additional holes or slats into the top of the manifold to better distribute the return. That will be a determination to be made later after some testing and usage determine the efficiancy of this design.

A look at the whole system. Don’t mind the tape, I haven’t connected the various parts yet:

The only question is how to mount it to the MT so that it’s positioned correctly. I need to think about that a bit. I’ll probably cut a hole around the top skirt somewhere so it sits something like this:

Overall I think this should work well for the system I’ve designed.

At last one of the aspects of this brewery build is behind me. The wiring is done!

I must take a moment to once again than my good friend Andy for talking me down from the edge when the first check of the wiring revealed that it was screwed up. He figured out that I had “zagged when I should have zigged”, as he put it. Basically I just wired the plug wrong and was running the power backward through the system. Have I mentioned that I hate electrical work? And plumbing. And roofing. And laying floor, in case any one was wondering.

Anyway after talking to him, the plug is rewired, the system is functional and I’m one step closer to brewing again. Wanna see it?

Proof that I’m no electrician:

The top boxes are the switches and the bottom an outlet individually controlled by the left top box switches. The right side is the master power and the light switch. The piping in the back houses the wiring up to the light:

A shot of the boxes and light housing. I’ll get better lights, those were just to test the power:

Nifty little bend in the wiring casing that was a pain in the ass to run the wiring through and get through the wood correctly:

The brewery mocked up:

A look underneath:

Still need to mount the brackets for the burner, hook up the water filter system, make tops for the kegs and finish putting the manifold together. Then it’s a full system test with H2O only and if everything works right, brew time!