Is HERMS brewing system suitable for microbrewry?

Some of our customers are from home brewing area. In home brewing area, here are quite a lot of creative invention to make good beer in a easier and more practical way. One of the good machine is the HERMS. A few customers mentioned this and plan to realize it in their microbrewery.

Here is our opinion for the HERMS brewing setup:The HERMS system is mainly used at home brewing area with smaller volume. May I know why do you prefer to HERMS heating?For the Large system (above 200L), we are worried about that here may be a few cons to use HERMS, though it has many pros for the home brewing. 1) When transfer the wort from the mash tun to the HLT to exchange the heat with the hot water, the large system will take more time to flow out the wort for recirculating.It is not like the home brewing system that is for example 5gallon, or maximum 26gallon. Within the same time, the wort can flow through the HERMS heating for several times, but can only finish one time heating in the microbrewery.This is one of the point that we do not suggest HERMS heating in microbrewery. 2) The much water in bigger hot water tank (water is the heating medium filled around the coils) will take longer time to be heated to expected temperature step by step,and then plus the longer wort heat exchanging time (due to the much bigger quantity of wort compared with the home brewery as explained in above). This process takes much longer time than usual. So we do not think the HERMS heating work very well in microbrewery.

If without HERMS setup, how should we do step mash?

To do step mashing, here are the suitable methods for the two vessel brewhouse:1) If we mash in the MLT, then we can add hotter water into the MLT from the kettle or hot liquor tank to increase the temperature of the mash.2) Or we can directly heat the mash in the kettle to increase the temperature (we do mash in the kettle). But in this case, we need to add the stirrer in the kettle to stirr at bottom during heating to avoid the scorch.

PS: Some customer use the three vessel brewhouse, independent mash tun, lauter tun and KWT, which means the mash tun already has the heating function (direct fire or steam heating).So we can do step mashing via heating the mash directly in the mash tun?or it is still good via introducing hotter water from the kettle/HLT like explained in

If without HERMS, how should we mash out?

Simialr as the step mashing:If we mash in the MLT via introducing hot water, then we mash out still via adding hotter water before lautering.PS?But if use the steam heating method rather than direct fire, we can mash out via heating the MLT directly with the steam rather than keeping introducing hot water.

If we heat the mash in the kettle (or independent mash tun) directly, then we can mash out still via heating the vessel directly

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