Brew Day 1/2013

Well it's been a long time coming but the V1 Brewery finally kicked back into life on 31st March as a double brew day with a friend. The brew was a dark ale possibly for entry into The Spring Thing Competition on The HomeBrew Forum. The brew day went quite smoothly but there were a couple of issues, and a lot of firsts. Crankenstein Malt Mill - worked like a dream, love it. 50ltr boiler - worked like a dream, no leaks...but close to boil over with 30ltr in :shock: Hop stopper - very impressed with this on 1st use, gave quite a good flow rate even with powdered ingredients. Conical - it's got an air leak somewhere, think I know where..will have to be addressed for the next brew. Apart from that I think I'll have to find a way to CIP as they're a bit to big to go tipping upside down to ensure sanitisers everywhere. I really like the 40ltr fill volume it gives loads of room to aerate the hell out of the wort. Aerator/racking attachment - worked like a dream, brilliant piece of kit, need to get a bigget washer for it though as it refused to seal properly on male cam lock due to a slight modification I've done...didn't matter though as it didn't leak. What did I forget...well..err..a few things Copper finings....doh... ..oh well, not essential Calibration of STC1000 probe...after a day I double checked it with a PT100...it was tracking 1 deg under target. What went wrong I racked to conical when the copper PT100 read 19.2 deg c but on checking the conical temp it read 24.2 deg c (I now know this was really 25.2 deg c) On checking the copper all the hops had gathered in the IC and I assume they threw more heat into the wort on racking. I decided to use the fv cupboards chilling loop to chill the wort, but for some reason (still unknown) the cooler didn't work. I use a twin line beer cooler with python line to chill the 3 conicals. Conicals 1&2 are cooled by pumping a glycol solution thought the beer lines in the cooler then through the chiller in the conical and then back into a separate glycol reservoir where the pond pumps are located. I've subsequently removed the beer chiller and taken it apart, no problem there. I ran the chilling loop as it should be with an external conical chiller and the chiller maintained a temperature of 4 deg c, so no problem there. I then looped the python back on itself and turned it on to see if agitation of the water bath in the beer chiller would increase cooling of the remote chillers in conicals 1&2, it did with the temp slowly dropping to 0.9 deg c when i stopped the experiment. So to sum up, it would appear for maximum chilling potential I need to introduce a agitator into the beer chiller water bath which can be triggered to power up when conicals 1&2 demand. I also need to find out why the chilling loop didn't work in the 1st place...I suspect an air lock somewhere...tbh. Pics to follow