Adam Shake joins me this week to discuss making beer with electric brewing systems, and we cover a wide variety of equipment topics including heating elements, pumps and different types of controllers to automate your brewing system.
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Topics in This Week’s Episode (49:02)
- Adam Shake has been brewing for more than 12 years, and is the current President of the ABNormal Homebrewer’s Club. He has worked with a wide variety of electric brewing systems and is the owner of BrewTroller.com – developing brewing control systems for home brewers.
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- Adam starts by explaining some of the advantages an electric brewing system has over a conventional gas system especially for home brewing and for small nano-breweries.
- We talk about some of the variations of electric brewing systems including BIAB, RIMS and HERMS systems.
- Adam walks us through the components of a typical electric brewing system – starting with the heating elements available.
- We discuss powering an electric system including the limits of a conventional (120 volt) plug as well as using a larger 200V (three phase) system.
- Adam shares his thoughts on using various kinds of temperature probes (thermocouples) to monitor and maintain temperature in the brewing system.
- He explains the variants of controllers – from simple relays to full microcontrollers.
- We talk about some of the adcantages of using a microcontroller to manager the entire brewing process.
- Adam explains why he recommends a solid state relay for maintaining temperature control over your heating element.
- We discuss the use of pumps for recirculation, mashing and also for transferring wort.
- Adam shares his thoughts on selecting a wort pump and the types available.
- Cleaning and sanitation can be a challenge – he shares how he keeps his system clean.
- Adam tells us why using a microcontroller can be the best overall solution as it can control every aspect of the brewing process – even adding ingredients in some cases.
- We discuss Adam’s specific project at at BrewTroller.com – which is a micro-controller to control your brewing system.
- Adam shares his closing thoughts.
Thanks to Adam Shake for appearing on the show and also to you for listening!
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