Cost Effective 2 Vessel K-RIMS on a DIY Cooler-Based Brew System: When Old Meets New Nostalgia Brew

hey everyone welcome back we are here again to talk about uh my old brew system my old diy cooler based system a lot of you have uh asked me over a time in recent years and more and more often more recently maybe it's because of inflation uh costing us an arm and a leg nowadays wanting to go a little cheaper on things but whatever the reason is i finally caved i decided to go ahead and dig out my old diy cooler base 10 gallon mash brew system here for your pleasure and for your viewing pleasure but actually as i was digging this thing out and dusting off i actually had a lot of good flashbacks a lot of good memories of brewing on this thing over the years and actually was getting more and more excited about actually doing this so today i actually i'm really excited about brewing on this thing once again it's been a while for those of you who are who are newer to my channel may have never seen me brew on this system before uh past several years i've actually gone electric and have been brewing on other commercially available systems like the spike solo the brew easy or the grain father and they're all electric right this is a throwback before those days back when i was doing things with a propane burner and some coolers right so what you're looking at here is my what i think is a is a cost effective way to brew beer that doesn't involve brew in the bag because really quite frankly i'm not a huge fan of the brew in the bag process to me if you have the baskets it's fine but if you're actually using like a mesh bag i always find getting those little bits and kernels of grains and cleaned out and they're kind of kind of a messy paint in the butt honestly um so for those who are not so inclined to use those systems and those brew in the bag systems are commercial available also costs money too right so what i'm showing you here is something that you can do yourself at home at a much lower price point i believe than you can get commercially so what i'm showing here is a system which is cost effective because it doesn't involve multiple expensive stainless steel kettles it doesn't involve multiple pumps or multiple burners what i have is a single burner single pump single kettle system using a cooler as my mash tongue and now those who watch those old videos might remember i had a third vessel a second cooler that i uh this was my hot liquor tank my hlp which i would actually heat up water in here put in here and then put water in here with the grains and then i would kind of do this kind of dance with the hoses and the water moving things around and that was kind of the old days but in recent years now i've learned a lot um i'm going to do this a little differently so i'm going gonna do something similar to what i have been doing on the brew easy this system over here uh the brew easy is available by blickman engineering um they sell these things right and they're not cheap they're good systems they're not cheap right so what i'm going to do is take a a lesson from that system and apply it to my diy cooler system under the exact same thing where i have my boiled kettle and my mash tun like it does in the brew easy with the mash tun on top and the boil kettle down below and i'm going to do the very same thing here where i'm going to use my mash tun cooler with a c pvc manifold in here to do my mashing i'm going to recirculate it through through the kettle here and what's called a k rims process or a kettle rims process and rims also stands for recirculating infusion mash system right so that's what i'm going to apply today i've never applied it in this manner before i've always always used that third hlt vessel so it's going to be a new experience for me a little bit the old a little bit of the new fused together for some uh for what was going to be my first unique brewing experience with this this caterpillar's process with my old equipment looking forward to it i hope it works out i hope you enjoy it and hopefully i hope it gives you some options to uh get in the brewing without a whole lot of money all right so stick around [Music] [Applause] when it comes to my pump you can see here this is a pump i've been using for a while now a number of years this is a chugger brand pump i've actually added some extra valves and things on here uh this one of these would be the actual out the other is really more of a bleed valve to bleed the lines of air so that silver will self prime and the input is over here and i'm using cam locks for all of these however over the past couple years i've migrated away from using my chugger pump in favor of a riptide pump which is like this one here and the riptide i find to be a lot better super quiet not noisy and this is especially important for today if i'm going to be doing a mass recirculation for an hour i especially don't want a loud screechy noisy pump running this whole time so um but but for nostalgic's sake i'm going to try the pump as is see how it performs as is but don't be surprised if i yank this out for the riptide uh pretty soon so let's try it out [Music] [Applause] [Music] so far so good it's just a little noisy wow it's really coming out here fast isn't it let's adjust the flow rate something like that that's more palpable so at this point i'm transferring the strike water from the kettle into the mash tun and i'm getting up to the prescribed level and it's doing fine and once it fills up maybe i'll recirculate a little bit to make sure that it's at the right temperature with the right strike temperature i'm trying to get at about 163 degrees fahrenheit that's my target one of the advantages of this versus my old batch sparge method is that i had to hit that strike number exactly i had to heat the water up to exactly the amount required for the amount of grain and water i'm using to get the temperature in the mesh that i want here i can get close and then i can adjust with more hot water or by shutting off the water supply and stirring things up to release some of the heat but either way it's looking pretty good let's turn it off just like that gotta love that foot pedal and the temperature is at a good solid uh one now it's going up 158 159 or so a few degrees shy but it's okay i'm going to add the grains in anyway and see where it stabilizes and then we'll start recirculating let's mesh [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] actually that's really right where i needed it to go anyway so this actually worked out one well it's 151 degrees i was shooting around 150 and a one degree isn't that much of a deal all right so uh i think it's going to drop but probably a half degree real soon too because uh it's still coming to equilibrium with the cold grains so i think i'm going to change my my approach here a little bit i think i'm going to let this thing sit and there's a single infusion mash um in the cooler and not add the k rims process into this just yet because i think i got it exactly where i want it right now 151 degrees so i'll tell you what i'm just going to close the lid for a little bit and let this sit and maybe maybe a half hour we'll come back and start recirculating but i think for now for the ease of brewing and having to maintain temperature and adjust gas levels i think i'm just going to let this ride as is so let's see what happens in a little bit [Music] all right it's been a little over a half hour uh we just let the sipping set here again the reason why is because the water in here was much hotter than i anticipated i'm not going to run that through here and kill the enzyme so i let this kind of cool a little bit for another 10 minutes it's about 40 minutes since we started the match yeah right about 40 yeah and uh so now we're going to recirculate so in order to voil off is the term we used to use it right but it's basically restricted in the mash around around so uh all right well let's get out of this [Music] so now we're back to the whole give-and-take of what is similar to like what you get with a brew in the bag biscuit rating system or a continuous fly sparge we're trying to match the flow rates again uh coming out with what's going in so we don't overflow the nash ton or drainer so yeah i couldn't keep an eye on these things uh let me watch this go and that's one of the downsides to this approach again again this is why going electric is so much nicer if you can afford it uh but for now yeah this is fine this is [Music] the mash is now done it's been a little over an hour clay and i have been talking and goofing off over here about different things uh it's still recirculating at the moment because i haven't quite got on the shutting the pumps off and starting to drain but the next step now is to go ahead and drain this bad boy into the kettle and get the boil on [Music] i'm gonna do a little first word hopping so while it's draining into the kettle i'm gonna go ahead and uh drop oh man it's here quick mm-hmm idaho seven idaho seven uh someone on one of my live streams i think recommended it and uh i've never used it before says it's got aromas of pineapple peach pine resin mango and black tea interesting so it's 2.4 alpha acids so um first we're hopping [Music] all right so now it's stopped right so now we have we have how much is in there 13 a little over 13. i think the rest of it is in these hoses [Music] [Music] we've drained the mash tun into the kettle we just hit our number i think we're shooting for 13.5 gallons we actually got it maybe a little tad shy maybe from from some evaporation along the way about 13.4 is my guess so it's really darn good my spreadsheet does an excellent job apparently a guesstimating the total amount of water you need to start so i don't have to do any top up or or whatever or add sugars or anything like that very often so um awesome speaking of adding sugars it's time to check our gravity reading and what i'm going to use today is the easy dens by anton parr i've been using this since november when i got it on a black friday sale and i have not gone back to using hydrometers or refractometers since this thing is awesome i'm going to use it again today so what i need is a sample there's no more sample in the in here this is done and i can pull this temple out of here i suppose now oh i almost made a boo-boo if you guys remember about a year ago i did a video about mastering your mash and brewing processing system uh it's a very lengthy video with lots of tips really useful stuff on how to calibrate your equipment and get accurate measurements and dial in your process right i'll put a link to that in the description down below for you again but i almost made the mistake i warned about in that video what you got to do is when you transfer your word over now this is all homogenized from being recirculated already in this in this rims fashion so i'm i'm pretty darn confident this is homogeneous already but because i've been burned by this before i'm just going to go ahead and stir this all up really well so i can make sure that i have a homogeneous sample of work that is representative of the whole batch but now i'm going to take a sample of my work it doesn't take that much because the the anton par doesn't actually require that much so it's just a little tiny little sample in fact this might be even way more than i need it's only a little bit in the bottom of this cup and even that might be overkill so i'm going to get a measurement and be right back let's take our sample here from the easy dens or for the easy dens i'm going to pull that cooled sample not all the way cool to hydrometer cooling you don't need to go that that exact which is one of the advantage of this thing it's like 74 degrees i think so let's give this a shot so i'm gonna fill it up nice and slow if i can get it to move there it goes let's take a little elbow grease or thumb grease all right so now i got it filled fill the fluid i got my little app here and when i say restart the test because the first test was it was too hot so um all right here we are this is our pre-boiled gravity 1.045 at 71.3 degrees i'm actually going to well i'm not going to save this because um this is not really ready to it's not the original value this is the pre-boiled gravity so i guess i could save it if i wanted to i can always erase it later maybe i'll create a batch call it uh well what are we bringing today an american imperial so i'll just do apa for short i can probably rename it later all right create and uh do i love this app i don't know maybe i do maybe i love it okay great oh no i don't want any more reviews and there we go yeah all right time to fire up the kettle guys [Music] it's about playing down here there it goes it's dying it's it's gone oh man well all right guys well another problem with propane it runs out so uh this is one of the big reasons that got me away from using propane was the uh was being tied up thank you clay so he's taking the empty out thankfully i have a spare full one on on on hand and lucky that we caught it because we were off to the side talking just happened to decide to look at our burner find out that was low gas and sure enough it's out so we caught it in plenty of time but that is one of the frustrations about using propane and brewing and a big reason why going electric is great and well time to hook up the next uh next tank there we go flame on at it so my gravity came up my mast efficiency was about 69.6 i guesstimated at 72 for this new system so i was pretty close off by a couple percentage points however it's still off a little bit and i my gravity's a little lower than i planned on which is no big deal normally i'll just say heck with it and go with it but if you recall back during that bourbon uh stout brew day live stream we did back in i think november uh i actually missed my mark then right and i had to add some dry malt extract to it to help kick up the the gravity for the boil and that was a lot so that actually made a difference now uh with only a couple points difference here i miss my gravity by .002 big deal but since i can and since i've updated my spreadsheet since then to accommodate for this exact scenario of missing your efficiency and adjusting for by adding multi-extract or water my spreadsheet now does tell you exactly how much of what to put in to get you back on track for your boil so that's what i'm going to do next i'm going to adjust i think it was 0.75 pounds i think it was according to my spreadsheet i'm gonna put that into the boil and get it back up to the right grab [Music] we're down to almost the last 15 minutes of the boil it's about time to start sanitizing my immersion chiller and this is the immersion chiller again along the lines of my nostalgic brew day that i made as part of this 10 gallon system upgrade that i did several years ago i have a video on how i made this i'm actually quite fond of of this chiller uh it's worked well for me and something i made myself and i take a lot of pride in this thing so i'm really looking forward to giving this thing a one more try it's been a while buddy awesome but uh actually you know what i gotta go take care of something i'm gonna take a 10-100 i'll bring it back [Music] clay i'll tell you this guy guess i'm using this all right i'm cheating here a little bit i'm not actually going to use my old diy chiller uh it did serve its purpose but it did take 15 to 20 minutes of chilling and we're behind schedule today it's getting dark out and clay's got to leave soon so because i'm just kidding so we're going to go ahead and use this thing and as is this is the jaded cilla for those who don't recognize it and i've used it many times already so i'm going to go ahead and use this uh there's just some things i don't want to go back to using again um and including that old chiller now that i have this one here so let's go ahead and attach the hoses [Music] so [Music] [Music] um [Music] you

Channel: BEER-N-BBQ by Larry

Views: 10,431

Keywords: beer, brewing, homebrew, homebrewing, recipe, how to, tutorial, instructions, home brew, home brewing, ten gallon, 10 gallon, 10 gal, ten gal, cooler mash tun, cooler mashtun

Id: hdSTlcoz7EI

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 27 2022