modifying the kettles

One of the rules I came up with when thinking about the design of the Bluto 555 was to use all 1.5" sanitary clamp (aka, tri-clamp or TC) fittings, if possible, in every place fittings were required, the reason being that all manner of 1.5" TC fittings are very commonly sold by all the vendors of sanitary fittings such as St. Pats and GW Kent. The truth is that 3/4" fittings would have been perfect for most of this system, but 1.5" seems to be the only size available for some specialty fittings, and 3/4" and sometimes even 1" TC fittings either aren't sold or are out-of-stock alot of the time. (update: Stout Tanks and Kettles has them available. They also have some great kettles, but I don't think Stout was in business when I first started my project or I just didn't find out about the company until later).

So I took the Blichmann kettles, enlarged the holes in the side and added 1-1/2" butt weld triclamp ferrules. I also added a hole and ferrule to the lid for the float switch, and also near the top of the kettle wall on the right to allow for MT and WP wort return and to act as a sparge water inlet.

click for more pictures

My buddy Mike Chavez, who was Auburn's first commercial brewer, connected me with a sanitary welder in Lowndesboro who does alot of work for a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Sabco has a good write up here re: sanitary welding vs. weldless fittings.

Sanitary welds are designed for one purpose. . . namely 'aseptic cleanability.' Big words that simply say that standard industry cleaning techniques and chemistries must be able to remove all possible risks of infection.

I don't completely understand the reason, but sanitary welding involves backflushing the area to be welded with argon. You'll see later that I haven't been completely successful in making every single fitting and weld on the system sanitary, but the threaded fittings I had to use were kept to a minimum.

Here's a gallery of pics for the kettles, including some pics of the modification work.