Is it a BIAB, is it a HERMS? NO - it's Super-MACSHE

[MDE]

I posted earlier about converting my "one-pot" system with a gas burner to a dual-heat (gas and electric), because the electric supply is inadequate to boil 10gals and the gas is not controllable. Instead, I decided to use the HLT (OK, so , its 2-pot not 1-pot) which is electric to act as a HERMS device, with the added feature that it would also be used to cool the wort after boiling, by filling the HLT with cold water and allowing it to drain and re-fill automatically. The schematic is in the pic below. The electric heater and the solenoid valve are PID-controlled. I did the first brew last week and it works a treat! So now I have a dual-fuel solution. If anyone wants more details, I'll happily post some more.

[Jim]

Interesting solution.

I'm not quite clear on how it would work though. At what point would you want the contents of the kettle/MT to go to the drain for example? How would you have the system configured at each stage of brewing?

[MDE]

The drain is only for the water from the HLT (which is also a cooling tank). Firstly it drains any excess not used for sparging. Then for cooling: Cold water enters through the troughmatic and is drained when the PID registers the temperature as too high while the wort is passed through the coil and into the FV. The troughmatic keeps the tank topped up with cold water.

[vacant]

Questions.

Should there be an arrow going from the 3 way valve to the T connector as it looks like that is how the kettle is filled from the HLT?

Those pipes are filled with wort during the mash. Is the HLT drained after the mash so that boiling wort can be passed through to sanitise them before the cooling phase?

[MDE]

The right-angle lines in the 3-way valve indicate where the flow is. The arrow indicates that this valve can be turned anticlockwise (through 90deg) so that the HLT is connected to the T connnector. This then allows sparging, whereby the hot water is passed through the coil first, thus sanitising it (the sparge temp should be enough to pasteurise it). (I use a final mash-out stage for the HERMS which raises the HLT temp to sparging temp).

[Secla]

I'd imagine keeping filling and draining the hlt to cool the wort may be quite inefficient with the amount of water you would use ?

[MDE]

In theory, that would seem to be the case as the outflow water is at a lower temperature than other methods (immersion/counterflow). In practice it doesn't seem to use much more water than my previous version which was using the same coil as an immersion chiller. But of course it's faster than the immersion chiller as it's transferring at the same time (like a counterflow). I imagine that a counterflow is a fair bit more miserly on water. Here in Cumbria we (usually!) have more water than we need.