Mash Tun dead space

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Permalink Reply by Andrew on March 7, 2011 at 12:47pm

If you could add a photo it would help us give you tips as I,m not sure what you mean by dead space. But; in a 54L bin I honestly wouldn't worry about 3.5 L of dead space. Just make a bigger brew and fill up the 3.5 L?

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Permalink Reply by Dougal on March 7, 2011 at 1:16pm

Getting the manifold on the bottom of the chilly bin helps.

I use a real high tech solution with mine on the second batch sparge- putting a bit of 3x2 under the back end to drain toward the tap.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Jack on March 7, 2011 at 1:32pm

I do the same thing, but I wait until it's already drained to the dead space and then lift the back. not sure if that makes a difference, but works well for me.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Kessell on March 7, 2011 at 2:20pm

the dead space is the area cannot be drained without tipping the tun to the side of the drainage hole. so putting a piece of wood under the braided hose wont do much surely... ?

 

i'll try and get a photo up tonight.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Jack on March 7, 2011 at 2:52pm

The wood goes under the mash tun to tip it up, not the hose.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Kessell on March 7, 2011 at 3:07pm

ahh, so you are doing that.

thanks. :)

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Permalink Reply by Andrew on March 7, 2011 at 3:42pm

I see what you mean now, couldn't get the picture in my head. If you look at my pics I have my mash tun on there. The "lauter" is fairy close to the bottom but I still have to use the trusty piece of wood too. Although; if you sparge too much water you might start to pull alot of polyphenols out of the maly with will hurt your final product so I wouldn't worry too much. Alot of the last runnings aren't that fermentable anyway so you don't lose much extract just some volume.

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Permalink Reply by Tilt on March 7, 2011 at 9:54pm

If you need to take up space in the tun to reduce the deadspace (rather than tilt the whole shebang towards the tap) you could use a white plastic cutting board or two under your manifold.  Reduced my deadspace by about a litre.

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Permalink Reply by Doublehoppy on March 24, 2011 at 11:56am

Yeah, that's exactly what I've done. Two plastic cutting boards perfectly support the manifold in my setup and have reduced the dead space to half a litre.

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