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HOMEBREW Digest #4064
2
HOMEBREW Digest #4064 Fri 11 October 2002
FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
Digest Janitor: janitor@hbd.org
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THIS YEAR'S HOME BREW DIGEST BROUGHT TO YOU BY:
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Contents:
Welded coupling problem ("Michael Hackney")
re: Basic Stamp for RIMS? ("The Artist Formerly Known As Kap'n Salty")
Phoam Control ("Dan Listermann")
Hamms Beer Clone ("Mike Racette")
RE: Basic Stamp used for RIMS? (Mark Alfaro)
Good Eats ("Hedglin, Nils A")
Beer line calcs ("Todd M. Snyder")
RE: mash/lauter tun (Bill Tobler)
RE: Basic Stamp used for RIMS? (Kent Fletcher)
polarware pot brewkettle false bottom (Steven S)
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Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 09:48:46 -0400
From: "Michael Hackney" <mhackney@micromationsciences.com>
Subject: Welded coupling problem
Hi All,
I have a keg that was partially converted; Here's what I mean by that.
I handed a keg and two 1/2" stainless couplings to a welder
to have them welded on to the keg. The only problem is that when he made
the hole in the kegs sidewall where the couplings would be attached,
he made it smaller in diameter then the coupling. So now I can attach
things (i.e., pipe nipples, thermometers ....) to the outside of the keg,
but I can't attach anything to the coupling from the inside because the
hole on the inside of the keg wall is too small.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to enlarge (ream) the opening
of the hole from the inside of the keg without messing up the threads
on the coupling? I thought there might be some type of reaming tool that I
could use to enlarge it, but it would have to be tough enough to penetrate
SS. How about a large countersink bit on a short profile drill?
Thanks
Michael Hackney
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:58:08 -0500
From: "The Artist Formerly Known As Kap'n Salty" <mikey@swampgas.com>
Subject: re: Basic Stamp for RIMS?
Scott <sejose@pacbell.net> wrote:
=================
Hello!
I am now interested in circulating my mash, and am researching RIMS.
Someone at work suggested I use a Basic Stamp as my controller, rather
than a PID. Anyone doing this? Otherwise, where can I go online to
look at PIDs and try to get a handle on what they are all about? As
you can tell, I am new to the RIMS idea, but am eager to get my
efficiency up. Source for heating elements, relays, PIDs?
=================
Instead of the Stamp, I'd consider using a BX-24 from NetMedia
(http://www.netmedia.com). For the same price you get a much more
capable chip -- faster, more memory, A/D conversion, and floating
point. The latter two are important to a PID app, though strictly
speaking you could get away without floating point. The language used
is sort of VB-esque. Support is good.
No affiliation, but I do a good bit of robotics stuff, and believe me,
the BX-24 is the way to go.
PID, by the way, is an algorithm, not a piece of hardware. I think you
mean to refer to a "PID controller". You will want to implement a PID
algorithm on the controlling micro -- or maybe just a simple
setpoint/deadband will work.
Do a google search on "Proportional-Integral-Derivative" to get a
decent description of the algorithm itself.
Hope that helps -- tafKaks
====
Teleoperate a roving mobile robot from the web:
http://www.swampgas.com/robotics/rover.html
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 10:29:28 -0400
From: "Dan Listermann" <dan@listermann.com>
Subject: Phoam Control
With all this discussion of late regarding controlling foam from kegs, it
seems like a good time to announce the introduction of a new product that
addresses this very issue. "Phil's Phoam Phixer" is a long clamp that
constricts the serving hose which provides adjustable back pressure with the
turn of two thumb screws. It essentially lets you "dial in" your desired
level of foam. The key is that constricting the hose over a long length
gives back pressure without the turbulence that causes foaming. The pilot
production run was given away at this years "Beer and Sweat" Party in Cincy
as door prizes. I will start a production run later this week. The pricing
has yet to solidify, but it should not be much. Oh, it is stainless steel
for you guys who really like that - you know who you are.
Dan Listermann
Check out our E-tail site at www.listermann.com
Free shipping for orders greater than $35
and East of the Mighty Miss.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:57:37 -0600
From: "Mike Racette" <mike.racette@hydro-gardens.com>
Subject: Hamms Beer Clone
I don't think there are any hops in Hamms beer, but one time in college we
survived an entire 2 week spring break living on nothing but Hamms
Sandwiches, so there must be something in there besides water.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 08:38:39 -0700
From: Mark Alfaro <malfaro@qcpi.com>
Subject: RE: Basic Stamp used for RIMS?
In HBD 4063, Scott Jose asks:
where can I go online to look at PIDs
and try to get a handle on what they are all about? As you can tell, I am
new to the RIMS idea, but am eager to get my efficiency up. Source for
heating elements, relays, PIDs?
Heater Elements - www.grainger.com (I use Grainger P/N 2E768) This element
is rated for 6000 watts at 240 volts, but I run it at 120volts which gives
me a 1500 watt output that is distributed along 88 inches of heater
element. You need this low watt density to avoid the possibility of
scorching the wort. I have never had any wort scorching even at the lowest
flow rate.
PID Controllers, Relays, Heatsinks - www.omega.com (I use P/N CN8590-DC1
on one RIMS and P/N CN132 on the second) For a relay, I use 45 amp SSR's
with heatsinks on both RIMS. The max load I switch is 12.5 amps and a 45
amp SSR may be overkill, but the relay doesn't even get warm in operation.
The Omega PID's are occasionally available on eBay which is where I got the
CN132 brand new for $100.00 vs $168.00 from Omega.
Hope this helps. Feel free to email me offline if you have any other questions.
Regards,
Mark Alfaro
Chula Vista, CA
1950, 262.1 AR
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 09:12:15 -0700
From: "Hedglin, Nils A" <nils.a.hedglin@intel.com>
Subject: Good Eats
Hi,
Did anyone else watch the Good Eats episode on brewing last night? I
thought it did pretty good for a 30 minute show. Some of the introductory
brewing practices made me shudder a bit, but over all they seemed sound.
I only noticed that I thought was 1 mistake. Alton Brown said that adding
hops at the end of the boil was called Dry Hopping. Even though he was
using whole hops, I thought Dry Hopping was adding whole hops to the fermenter.
Nils Hedglin
Sacramento, CA
[1978.7, 275.3] Apparent Rennerian
PS-Has a new text limitation been added to the list? The last few messages
I've sent have been bounced back because the text line is longer than 80
characters. I don't remember having to format it like that before.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:50:53 -0400
From: "Todd M. Snyder" <tmsnyder@buffalo.edu>
Subject: Beer line calcs
Okay, I can't take it any more. I have to decloak and post something on
this discussion of flow in beer lines even though it means I'll be pelted by
spam for the next few months.
I thank Dave Burley for bringing up this discussion. But I read some
statements that just plain aren't true on today's HBD:
Sven Pfitt , DRTEETE , Andrew Nix wrote that somehow you would get a
situation where the beer just inside the fully open faucet would be under a
fairly large pressure, using Svens text because he actually put numbers to
what they were all saying:
>presume that 1/4in hose drops 0.6lb / ft and you use 6ft of hose, you will
drop 3.6psi off your beer from the time it enters the hose , until it exits
at the tap. If your keg is at 10psi, you still have 6.4psi as the beer comes
out of the tap. <
This just isn't true. Just inside the faucet, the psig IS ZERO (pounds per
square inch gauge).
Let's also drop the discussion of atmospheric pressure right now, I'm
assuming nobody is brewing on Mt. Everest, so there is no need to delve into
absolute pressure discussions or to even bring atmospheric pressure into the
picture.
With a constant size tubing back to the keg, the pressure drop will be
LINEAR. There will be no "sudden pressure drop at the tap" or "increasing
the acceleration of the flowing beer" , the flow will be steady with a
constant line ID because the beer is for our purposes non-compressible and
the cross sectional area of the tubing is constant along the path.
Where Sven, the good DR, and Drew are getting hung is on this idea of a
'balanced' system. The thing to remember is that THE UNDERLYING GOAL of a
balanced system is to have the beer pour at a relatively slow rate to
prevent rapid pressure drop along the flow path and beer that crashes into
the glass and foam there. For 1/4" ID tubing at that ideal flowrate (and
I'll admit I don't know what it is, maybe 3 oz/second?) you'll get a
pressure drop of 0.6 psig/ft of tubing as a rule of thumb. This is the goal
for that size tubing. As the equation above shows, 0.6 psi/ft does not add
up over 6 feet to equal the 12 psig in the keg. Instead, you'll get 2
psi/ft along the tubing (12 psig/6 feet=2) , and MUCH FASTER FLOW. This
would be a bad situation resulting in beer foaming in the line as the
pressure drops rapidly and the beer flies violently into the glass.
The point here is that the beer will find it's own equilibrium point where
the frictional loss to the tubing will equal the total pressure in the keg.
The faster the flow, the higher the drag of the tubing on the beer until the
drag equals the keg pressure.
If someone wants to prove this to themselves, put a bunch of T's along your
beer line and screw in pressure gauges. You'll see the pressure drop along
the path in a linear fashion, until it exits the line at 0 psi.
And then, reading on, I see Andrew Nix write:
<If the hose were long enough, the pressure drop would be so high that the
beer would not flow.>
That blew my mind, especially since Drew works with turbulent flow for his
PhD work I would have assumed he had a reasonable knowledge of fluid
mechanics! Again, I think he's getting hung up on the constant assumed for
frictional loss (0.6 psig/ft) given above for 1/4 inch ID tubing.
To illustrate that this can not be the case, consider taking the length to
an extreme. If we had 1000 feet of tubing, we wouldn't get 600 psi pushing
back against a 12 psi keg, right? No, of course not. You'd have 12 psi
loss over the length of the tubing, or 0.012 psi/ft. This is lower than
the 0.6 psi/ft GOAL for a balanced system, but the beer would still flow,
JUST SLOWER. It would flow about 1/50 the rate that we would like to see
when we fill up a pint. You'd have to stand at the tap for about 250
seconds instead of about 5 seconds.
The balanced system calculations shown on The Kegman's page
http://208.201.47.186/kegman/balance.html , are a great resource for setting
up your beer system (No Affiliation), and what's interesting to me is that
the equation he uses looks to be basically Bernoulli's equation, which is
the single equation that most students taking Fluids eat, live and breath.
It is (for one tubing size):
Pressure = Length*Resistance coefficient + (Height change)*0.5
When you break down Bernoulli's equation for a properly pouring beer system
(God I love applying engineering to beer!) , my guess is you could simplify
it to the formula above and the coeffients in the table.
For plastic beer tubing:
Tubing psi loss / ft of tubing
3/16" I.D 2.7
1/4"I.D. 0.7
5/16" I.D. 0.17
3/8" I.D. 0.11
1/2"I.D. 0.025
The height change term is also in Bernoulli's, but to be exact it would be
closer to the hydrostatic pressure of water, 0.43 psi / ft depth, instead
of 0.5 psi/ft . But it's close enough.
It's pretty neat stuff but like Dave said in his original posting, it's more
important to have a flow path that's clean with no restrictions like a
partially open valve.
Brew on,
Todd Snyder
Buffalo, NY
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 16:35:32 -0500
From: Bill Tobler <wctobler@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: RE: mash/lauter tun
Brian asks:
"Does anyone have any idea how many lbs of grain I can put into the 10G
Gott picnic cooler? I have not gotten good extraction or wort clarification
out of current lauter set-up. It has 4 copper tubes for a manifold in the
bottom of the cooler. Is there a general consensus on Polarware vs
converted keg for mash tun?"
I have both 10 and 15 gallon Polarware pots with false bottoms for mashing.
I can get about 23/24 pounds of grain in the 10 gallon Polarware with the
Polarware false bottom installed using a 1.33 qt/lb ratio. I would think you
can expect about the same in your 10 gallon Gott cooler, +/- 1 or 2 lbs. In
the 15 gallon pot I can get about 32 lbs of grain. There is about one gallon
of liquid under the false bottom in the 10 gallon Polarware pot. I also use
a Bazooka T screen under the False Bottom to help keep out the small husks
and grains that get through. It keeps my pump happy. I wrap a hot water
tank insulated blanket around the mash tun when I'm brewing to help
stabilize the temperature.
I use a converted keg for the boil kettle, and although it works fine, and
was affordable, I find it heavy and difficult to clean. Of course, I brew
inside and have to carry it outside to clean it. I bought a 15 gallon
Volorath pot on ebay to convert into an electric boiler when I get around to
it. It is much lighter and will be easy to clean. I guess I'm just
getting old and lazy.
By the way, my system is an all electric HERMS. Click on the following link
and you will go to my photo album on Nikonnet.com. (You may have to cut and
paste it in the address bar as its 3 lines long) It's a guest link only, and
you won't be able to change anything, just look. I have pictures of the
mash tun with the screen and false bottom installed, plus the rest of the
Brewery.
Bill Tobler
Lake Jackson, TX
(1129.7, 219.9) Apparent Rennerian
http://home1.nikonnet.com/servlet/com.arcsoft.LoginNew?com=arcsoftBanner&awp
=index3.html&DIRECT=&USERNAME=wctobler&PASSWORD=nikoneditor_1409905725&WHO=m
emberguest
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 16:42:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: Kent Fletcher <fletcherhomebrew@yahoo.com>
Subject: RE: Basic Stamp used for RIMS?
Scott was asking bout using the Basic Stamp MCU in a
RIMS app:
>I am now interested in circulating my mash, and am
>researching RIMS.
>Someone at work suggested I use a Basic Stamp as my
>controller, rather than
>a PID. Anyone doing this? Otherwise, where can I go
>online to look at PIDs and try to get a handle on
>what they are all about? As you can tell, I am
>new to the RIMS idea, but am eager to get my
>efficiency up. Source for
>heating elements, relays, PIDs?
1. The Basic Stamp adn OOpic are examples of several
small but reatively powerful microcontroller units
(MCU) popular with experimenters for robotics, etc.
They are tiny (less than 6 in2) computers that can be
programmed with a PC and include multiple IO's with
such features as Analog-to-Digital (AD or A2D)
converters, Pulse Width Modulation (PWM), serial
in/out (connect to LCD, for example), timers, etc.
2. A PID controller uses Proportional control with
Integral and Derivative functions to control a process
such as maintaining a mash temperature. In the case
of a RIMS application, the Proportioal control would
increase or decrease the amount of heat output by the
element proportionally to the deviation from the
setpoint. The Derivative function monitors the rate
at which the temperature is approaching the setpoint,
and adjusts the control output cycle to minimize over-
or undershooting. PID's can control temps to within
one degree F. of the setpoint.
3. A Basic Stamp or OOpic COULD be used to build a PID
control. Besides the MCU (OOpic complete for $49,
check out http://www.oopic.com/ for info), you would
need a Solid State Relay that could handle the load,
input devices (thermocouple or RTD and keypad) and a
monitor (LCD panel). Then you would have to write the
program to input a setpoint byte IO connected to
keypad), monitor the temp (AD input connected to temp
probe), control the output (PWM output connected to
SSR), and update the dipslay (serial or byte output
connected to LCD). You would also have to come up
with internal boolean logic (if mashtemp < setpoint
then heatoutput = true) and arithmetic functions (x
degree rise over y seconds = z output cycle) to begin
to compete with a PID that you can buy for about $200.
4. RIMS heating elements can be found at Home Depot or
any well stocked plumbing supply house. You can get
Solid state relays from any of several surplus
electronics suppliers like BG Micro
http://www.bgmicro.com/ or All Electronics
http://www.allcorp.com/
For PID's try Grainger or Omega. Also search the
Digest for PID, and check Zymico's site
http://www.zymico.com/
Hope that helps,
Kent Fletcher
brewing in So Cal
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 23:46:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: Steven S <steven@403forbidden.net>
Subject: polarware pot brewkettle false bottom
Howdy All
I recently acquired for a great price a 10 gallon PolarWare pot. You know
the one with the valve spigot and thermometer port. I'm looking for a good
false bottom or filter (ie: bazooka screen or similar). Do any of you use
a filter/false bottom with this pot when used as a brew-kettle and can
offer suggestions? Bazooka screen and easy-masher would work but only with
a good deal of modification. Any of you using these care to detail your
mods?
Steven St.Laurent 403forbidden.net [580.2,181.4] Rennerian
------------------------------
End of HOMEBREW Digest #4064, 10/11/02
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