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.