3 Dog Brewery
Adventures in Zymurgy
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PAWS - The 3 Dog Brewery Phase III
P.A.W.S., which stands for Portable Automatic Wort System, is a single tier brewing system that has been a 2 year project. A year in concept and design and coming up on a year of construction. The system was wired and test fired in October '08 only to end up failing catastrophically. Several of the many unions in the system leaked. Two of which leaked directly above the 120V circuitry. Unions were used to facilitate cleaning as well as assembly without worrying about a propane torch and a wood substrate. I tightened two of the unions to point of failure without being able to stop the leaks. If this had been a submarine, I would have been in big trouble. As it was, the leaks into the electronics were a major concern and I couldn't believe I had never considered this potential failure point in the design. One of the unions was tightened so far as to twist the copper pipe like a candy cane. As it turns out, I did find the reason behind the two unstoppable leaks. Leak number one was caused by a very small amount of silver solder that migrated to the mating surface of the union. I didn't think it was big deal at the time, but turned out to be the reason the union never sealed. The other leak was caused by a fracture (crack) perpendicular to the threads of the union. I don’t know if this was a casting flaw, caused by the heat of joining the union to the copper or the severe compression of applying to 24” wrenches to it and twisting the accompanying pipe. These unions had to be replaced, which meant that some major disassembly had to be accomplished.
Currently, the system is
sitting idle in my garage waiting for me to pay attention to it again.
The
One of the reasons for not
included the wort heating method (infusion or exchange) into the name is that I
have left my options open by allowing for either direct heating through the infusion
chamber and water heater element or by using an exchanger in the hot liquor tank.
I have not One more thing left to fix is the heat infusion chamber. The thermocouple for the PID computer is not liquid tight. I didn’t discover this until it started dripping cleaning solution everywhere. Both of the PID computers and the sensors were purchased from Auber Instruments which (I just discovered in writing this update) has recently released a liquid tight RTD sensor for the production of methanol or beer brewing. Seems they know who their customers are. I just ordered one, knowing I eventually need two, but at $29.95 I can live with one for now.
Even John Palmer is getting
in on the single tier brewing system and now I’m annoyed that I
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Current BrewsHere are the 7 recipes I have decided to use as my standard fare. I want to focus on these until I feel they are perfected before trying to brew any "specialty" beers. I have formulated several other recipes like my Pumpkin Ale and Belgian Golden as well as a Strong Belgian, but I want to save those for later, after these recipes are as good as I can get them. PAWS should make brewing more consistant from batch to batch allowing me to focus on the formulation rather than the process. I usually use ProMash to formulate and tweak my recipes. However, I have recently started using BeerSmith and I like it a lot. I find the user interface to be more intuitive, which in non software developer terms means "easier to use" than ProMash. Clicking the name will allow you to download the ProMash recipe file.
Click here to see the old Phase II brewery. |
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unions have been replaced and I
will test for leaks before proceeding. The other enhancement is the addition
of a top plate to the electronics box so that any new leaks will not drain into
it. The other consideration is that with the addition of the top plate the electronics
will be completely enclosed and I need to consider the internal temperature of the enclosure.
The top plate will simply be a piece of 1/8” thick birch that will be stained
and sealed to allow any liquids to run off of it. I can find plenty of small 12V fans
that could be added to the panel to facilitate some air exchange, but a 120V fan of that size
will be a challenge.
built an exchanger yet, but the inlet is there on the HLT where
I used to have my thermometer. I moved the thermometer to the front of the tank and the
spot left open was in just the right place for an exchanger inlet.
haven’t submitted my design and photos to BYO magazine yet.
If you are reading this, you are one of the chosen few who will have seen PAWS before the home brewing masses do.