WIP: Brewery Part 2

After about 10 months of thinking, planing and construction work, we made it to day X, where we finally get the chance to test and evaluate the prototype capabilities of our „Reaktor“.

Facing a lot of diffuculties to get every part in place &  all circuits connected we want to launch our first mashing project tomorrow in the afternoon.

So what is the perspective?
We want you provide with some reasonable documentation & information about the brewing process with its corresponding problems supported by photography & text.
You’ll have the chance to get the latest news out of our ‘Kommandozentrale’ on how we’re progressing and doing. Due to its complexity and the shortage of time this mash has to be considered as a rather unstable condition with a large possibilty of error and epic fail.

 

When getting up in the morning it felt like our project is not even going to start due to missing conversion of force from our VW scirocco motor to the stirrer shaft (which basically didn’t have any paddles attached to it.), the non existence of a perforated metal plate for lautering and more severly the non arrival of our malt order from 5 weeks ago. Just some of the practical problems we had to face, I was also working to get the microcontroller and it’s interface set up.
But with the friendly help of Stefan from http://www.gaestehaus-melcher.at/index2.php?show=hausbrauerei, my father and Stefan II we managed to get everything back on track.

 

At the moment last preparations for tomorrow are being made to make our Yeasts (Saflager S-23) even more happy! Sterilisation of our two 500 mL Erlenmeyer flasks and subsequent inocculation is undertaken right now. Happy Mating my friends!

WIP: Brewery

You already noticed that I’m brewing beer with my friend Hannes. In the last couple of weeks I found some time to continue working on our ‘Reaktor’.

 

This is our work-in-progress boiler and it will be able to handle 30 l mash. A heating element boils ~16l of water that we use to heat up our mash indirectly. Two PT1000 heating sensor (I want to use 3 in the future) measure the temperature of the water and the mash, while a regulation (implemented in Processing) controls the process of brewing. Sensor data is been read by an Arduino that also controls the relay of our heating element. Currently we’re using 230V, 1.6 A to heat up water, but we also have plans to change the system to high voltage current, if we have to wait to long to heat up everything.

Primary data can be controlled via the Processing console and patch-window, while essential data is been logged every second to a MySQL-database, so that we can visualize data (D3 JavaScript library) of all brewing processes to make results repeatable.

We are going to test our reactor this weekend and I will let you know what will happen!

Isn’t that cool? : )