Homebrew Beer Blog

I got my new hot liquor tank in today. It’s replacing a keg kettle. I’m excited about it. It’s a 14 gallon Italian kettle, with two stainless 1/2-inch couplers. One coupler is for my ball valve, the other for a thermometer.

The advantages here:

1. It’s all welded, making no more weldless fittings in the brewery.
2. It still a tall kettle, 15-inches wide similar to the keg. Taller means I don’t need as much water to fully submerge the HERMS coil
3. No more siphon tube. This is the probably the biggest motivation, the siphon tube made pump sparging more difficult. I tended to lose prime once the water got below 4 gallons and below the pick up tube. It got better when I soldered it up well, but it still puked out on me once in a while to the point I need to baby sit the sparge to time things. Now, I can safely shut the pump off to coordinate my sparge water to the lauter drain.
4. Also, the siphon tube had to go through the HERMS coil. It was a real pain to remove the coil and drain the kettle and water remaining in the coil. I had to unscrew the siphon tube each time. Really annoying.
5. No more brass! The last brass fitting is going with the old HLT.
6. And finally, it’s not nearly as bulky as a keg. Much lighter and easier to wrangle.

I picked up a few mini-projects while setting up. I redid my stir motor stirrer with this kettle. I needed to chop off some length because the lid now sits right on the kettle, rather than on the keg skirt. Also, I drilled some new holes to remount the motor on my lid. Originally I had the motor centered, and the stirrer was too close to the HERMS coil. That resulted in the fin/blade banging against the coil if I didn’t balance the lid just right. Besides being a pain, the lid was ajar, losing more heat. Now the lid fits right and the stirrer doesn’t hit anything.

Probably the next major upgrade will be a float switch in the mash-tun. Now that I don’t have to worry about losing prime with the siphon pickup, I can automate the pump to switch off and on as needed.