CONDENSER-BOSS - STAINLESS STEEL ACCESSORY PORT MOUNTED STEAM CONDENSER
Do you brew indoors and struggle with how to get rid of all the steam created during the brewing process, especially during the boil part of the brew process? Historically, home brewers installed electric fan exhaust hoods above their brew kettles and evacuated the steam to the outdoors. In fact, you've probably seen that method used in some of our demonstration videos. The problem with exhaust hoods is that all your conditioned air (heated or air conditioned) inside your home or brewery, is evacuated the outside while you are brewing. This means that your furnace/air conditioner has to work overtime to heat/cool the indoor air you air to keep up with what you are exhausting the outside! Over a 2 hour brew session, that represents a real cost as well as unnecessary wear and tear on your heating/cooling system.
Commercial breweries don't use exhaust hoods, instead they have elaborate and expensive steam condensing systems attached to their boil kettles to condense steam back down to water. We've been working over a year testing various designs for a smaller simpler condenser that we could offer for our homebrew and small brewery customers that would attach directly to our Brew-Boss and Brew-Boss Pro kettles without modification.
Introducing the Condenser-Boss. This really cool device mounts directly to the Deluxe Accessory port on your Brew-Boss kettle (or most other boil kettles). We've tried/tested/researched several designs, using our concepts, as well as information found on public homebrewing forums, to finally settle on this design.
The image above shows how simple this device is. It is constructed from off the shelf parts! Basically, cold water is mixed directly with steam to condense the steam inside a Triclamp "T". The device is clamped onto the accessory port on the kettle. A cold water supply is connected to the device. This cold water supply can be tap water or could be water that you recirculate through a chiller or large tank using a pump that delivers at least 20psi. The device uses about 9-15 gallons of water per hour, depending on the temperature of the water and the power input to the kettle. A flow control valve is included that allows you to regulate the flow to the lowest flow you can that eliminates any steam from exiting the device. Note the image shows a camlock fitting for cold water supply connection. The device you will receive will have a female garden hose connenction.
When the steam condenses inside the device, the steam contracts and actually creates a vacuum inside the kettle, sucking the steam into the device. This assures that all the steam is evacuated and DMS is expelled. The result is a steady stream of warm water discharging at the bottom of the device. You can discharge this via a hose (not included) to a drain, let it drain into a bucket as we show in the video, or create a closed loop where you cool the water and pump it back into the cold water inlet.
We also provide a gasket that you press onto the rim of the kettle that provides a steam-proof seal between the cover and the kettle, so that no steam can exit the kettle through the lid gaps. We found placing some weights on the cover help prevent leakage around the lid.
After using this device for several brews, we've found that there was one huge, unexpected advantage, beyond eliminating the exhaust of our conditioned indoor air to the outside that we did not consider! We greatly reduced our electrical power used for the brew session!. Because the boil occurs with the cover on the kettle, the power requirement to maintain the boil was reduced to less than half! On our 20 gallon Brew-Boss system we use regularly, we typically had to boil at 63% power to maintain the proper boil. We-ve found that we can reduce that to 28% and maintain the same rolling boil! We feel sending 15 gallons of water down the drain, although not ecologically desirable, is way more than compensated by the power savings it provides during a 60-90 minute boil.
Condenser Boss includes a female garden hose fitting that allows you to connect directly to the discharge end of a garden hose. It also includes the mini flow control valve that allows you to turn the device off right at the device and to regulate water flow to minimize flow.
The cost of this item may seem high, but is much less than the alternative of installing an exhaust hood, and that doesn't even consider the ongoing cost of heating/cooling your indoor air every time you brew!
NOTE: If you don't own a Brew-Boss kettle, and want to use this device, you need to also purchase our Deluxe Accessory Port for your kettle. Installation of the accessory port requires drilling a 7/8" diameter hole near the top of your kettle.
YOUR BEER, YOUR WAY!
Brew Like a Boss!
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