Action Shots!
(Note that these pictures are of an older style of heatstick. They have a
different handle type (that proved to be not particularly useful) and were
sealed with silicone instead of two-part resin. On a more
performance-oriented note, when I rebuilt my heatsticks in the newer style,
I tested them by bringing six gallons of water to a boil from tap
temperature. Going from 64°F (tap temperature in Las Vegas in
mid-January 2006) to boiling took about 40 minutes with three 1.5-kW
heatsticks. Most temperature changes in brewing aren't over as wide a range
as this and some don't involve as much water as this, so you can expect
your brew day to move along pretty quickly.)
All three of the heatsticks fit in my mash tun (a 5-gallon water cooler with
a drilled copper spiral manifold) if they're angled in. The tips of the
heatsticks rest on the top of the manifold to keep direct heat off of the
plastic. It took maybe 10 minutes (if that) to bring three gallons up to
temperature.
While the mash was doing its thing, the sparge water was heated in this
high-tech :-) hot liquor tank with the heatsticks. 6.5 gallons took less than a
half hour. Once it was up to temperature, one heatstick was cycled on/off
periodically to maintain temperature. (The roasting rack in the bottom is a
possibly unnecessary safety precaution.)
Time to sparge. I use fly sparging with gravity feed from a copper racking
cane in the HLT through a needle valve into the sparge arm across the mash
tun. The manifold goes through another needle valve before going into the
brew kettle. The $75 I spent on those turkey fryers wasn't wasted, as decent
8-gallon stainless-steel pots can run about that much apiece at a
restaurant-supply house, or even more at a homebrew shop. This batch ended
up needing almost no vorlauf; the runoff was clear before the first quart
had come through. (The recipe called for a much thinner mash than I've used
in the past; maybe that had something to do with it. It was nearly at the
limit of what my mash tun would hold, though. I guess my next project is to
build a bigger mash tun. :-) )
It took just a few minutes to bring 6.5 gallons of wort to a boil. Here,
it's starting to foam up right before the boil begins. I've gotten good at
controlling boilovers, but heatsticks make it dead simple. Shut all of them
off and the boiling stops immediately. Shut one or two of them off and the
foam falls back.
Once the boil was under way, one of the heatsticks was shut off. Just two
produced a vigorous boil. It occasionally threatened to boil over (note the
hop residue on the handles), but switching off another heatstick for a
couple or three seconds would knock it back down. This was shot after maybe
an hour; the boil ran for 90 minutes and evaporated out 1.5 gallons.
Specific gravity went from 1.041 pre-boil to 1.053 post-boil.
The rest of the brew session went as they normally do: cool down with an
immersion chiller (using tap water to bring it down to 110° or so, then
recirculated icewater to bring it to a pitching temperature in the mid-70s),
whirlpool, rack into fermenter, pitch yeast, and throw it into a 68°
fridge for primary fermentation. Start to finish, the whole thing took
maybe 6.5 hours, and that was with a 15-minute break before the boil to walk
and feed my dog. It seemed to be easier and much less of a hassle to brew
this way than with the turkey fryer...and indoors, it's much safer than the
turkey fryer.
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