My buddy is a welder and wants to make me a dual burner brewstand (I use a cooler for MLT so I don't need 3). It is a single tier. I am wondering what metal is best to use for a heat shield? My purpose for this is since the burners will be side-by-side I don't want the heat from one of the burners boiling a second beer (or heating sparge water for a second beer) heating the kettle next to it that is trying to chill the first beer. I plan on having him cut the shield to stand between the two kettles when needed but removable so I don't have to have sticking up when not in use. Thanks.
If you are seriously chilling wort and boiling at the same time, I would design the stand with plenty of space between the two. The way the heat rolls around my kettle, I don't see that working very well otherwise, heat shield or no.
he be trollin', they hatin' sorry op, couldn't help myself. are you using an immersion chiller? if you switched to a plate chiller, you could pump the wort out of the brew kettle directly into your fermentation vessel to avoid the heat exchange between the two pots. plate chillers can be pricey though.
I am using an IC, one that I have recently put money into and made adjustments on to get it to work with my new kettles, so changing my chillers isn't in the deck. Thanks for the suggestion though, if I am unable to shield the heat and it is a constant issue, I might have to look into that in the future.
Cost is definitely high, plus I am not totally convinced that transfer chilling is better than batch chilling on a homebrew level, at least not sufficient to require the money to make that move.
the big plus with the plate chiller is that you can cool a 5 gallon batch of brew down to pitching temp quickly (depending on the plate chiller, there is video on youtube showing it happen in 5 minutes). i don't use a pump to recirculate water through my immersion chiller so i'm basically wasting that water to cool my wort and it takes at least a half hour to get down to pitching temps. should probably think about getting a pump for my immersion chiller...
I grabbed one of theses to use with mine. I drop it into a bucket of water (once temps drop to under 100*F) and drop in 2 big cooler ice packs, and run that through the chiller while I recirc the wort through a whirlpool arm.
barfdiggs suggested this pump and it moves a lot of water. Looks like almost 3X the one you have. May be a little overkill, Im not sure but recirculating with the ice bath helped a ton! http://www.amazon.com/EcoPlus-72832...0925&sr=8-7&keywords=pump+submersible+ecoplus
