dr_clyde
Well-known member
The brewery needed a new sparge ring, and yours truly was tasked with building one. The old one was built in the 40's and just isn't very efficient. I thought it was a neat project, and thought you guys might be interested in how I made it.
What is a sparge ring? Well, basically its a fancy sprinkler. In the brewing of beer, there is a process called lautering. This is the separation of wort from the grain. During lautering you need to run water through the mash to extract residual fermentable sugars left in the grain bed. This is called sparging. There are a couple ways to do this, but the most efficient is to gently add water at the same rate that wort is being run off into the kettle. Gradually, the wort becomes weaker and weaker until you have extracted all the sugars you can.
So the brewers want to be able to sparge at 20 gallons a minute, and the flow of water needs to be consistent and gentle. We designed a split ring, filled with threaded ports. You could then thread in spray nozzles in the desired locations, add more, remove some, whatever you need to make the flow of water what it needs to be. Supply flow is metered by pump RPM and a ball valve.
To start, I had some 1.5" sanitary tubing rolled into two rings. I don't have a ring roller, but a friend of mine does, and I hired him to do the rolling. I had him get as close to 53" in diameter as possible. Since I would be doing this in halves, we didn't try to make one continuous ring, rather 2 that had at least a half circle of the correct diameter. This was the result, two of these.
I then clamped it to the table and got to work laying out the cuts. In the computer drawing I was able to suss where the cuts needed to be such that when the supply tube was added, the halves would for a perfect ring. I used a drywall square as a big combo square and the edge of the table as my datum. I did this on both sides.
I set up my laser to give me a plumb line to trace. I just lined up both marks under the line and traced the line with a sharpie.
A quick check on the side of the table confirmed my layout.
I cut the halves on my Do-All bandsaw. I left a little material, planning to file the two cuts straight and true on a plane.
I set the fresh cut parts on the surface plate to see how close I got.
Not bad, but could use a little touch up with a file.
Much better.
What is a sparge ring? Well, basically its a fancy sprinkler. In the brewing of beer, there is a process called lautering. This is the separation of wort from the grain. During lautering you need to run water through the mash to extract residual fermentable sugars left in the grain bed. This is called sparging. There are a couple ways to do this, but the most efficient is to gently add water at the same rate that wort is being run off into the kettle. Gradually, the wort becomes weaker and weaker until you have extracted all the sugars you can.
So the brewers want to be able to sparge at 20 gallons a minute, and the flow of water needs to be consistent and gentle. We designed a split ring, filled with threaded ports. You could then thread in spray nozzles in the desired locations, add more, remove some, whatever you need to make the flow of water what it needs to be. Supply flow is metered by pump RPM and a ball valve.
To start, I had some 1.5" sanitary tubing rolled into two rings. I don't have a ring roller, but a friend of mine does, and I hired him to do the rolling. I had him get as close to 53" in diameter as possible. Since I would be doing this in halves, we didn't try to make one continuous ring, rather 2 that had at least a half circle of the correct diameter. This was the result, two of these.
I then clamped it to the table and got to work laying out the cuts. In the computer drawing I was able to suss where the cuts needed to be such that when the supply tube was added, the halves would for a perfect ring. I used a drywall square as a big combo square and the edge of the table as my datum. I did this on both sides.
I set up my laser to give me a plumb line to trace. I just lined up both marks under the line and traced the line with a sharpie.
A quick check on the side of the table confirmed my layout.
I cut the halves on my Do-All bandsaw. I left a little material, planning to file the two cuts straight and true on a plane.
I set the fresh cut parts on the surface plate to see how close I got.
Not bad, but could use a little touch up with a file.
Much better.
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. Must be nice to work somewhere than just about everything can be flooded and drained away.