Folks - I’ve been using an Anova one for brewing beer for a few years now and enjoy the simplicity and lack of clean up afterwards.
My grains go into a BIAB bag, and the bag is separated from the anova using one of those heat protection grates you use to put hot dishes onto a table.
It pretty much works very well, but quite often, I end up with burnt sugar on my heating element, and I’m trying to avoid this. The simplest way is to make low gravity beers, using full volume mashes - it seems that a high concentration of sugars in the wort cause this burning. Last time, the element overheated so much I couldn’t use it as it kept tripping out my power.
I was wondering if anybody else has this problem, or it’s just me (and my 240v UK higher voltage) and my dumb highish gravity brews. I was thinking about using a dimmer switch to decrease the voltage going into the Anova and thus the temp on the element, but I don’t know enough about electricity to know whether this is a dumb idea - and the current will go elsewhere in the system.
There is a reason it’s supposed to be used in water only. Unfortunately, solids dissolved in the water will accumulate on the hearing element. Back when i first got my Anova, i wad living in an area with incredibly hard water, and if need to scale and scrub the thing once a month. It’s the same with you and your wort. Having the heat element directly in it, there’s no way, that I’m aware of, to prevent this from happening
Yeah it’s definitely a little bit of that - it’s a bit of scorching as well. Most breweries use electric heating elements, you have to scrub them after use, so nothing new there really - just a smaller surface area for the heat to pass over than a lot of brewing kettles - so they get hotter. Sugars and proteins scorch - caramelisation, Maillard and all that.
Was just wondering if any other anova brewers had encountered and solved this issue.
As I said, my current solution is to either make sure the gravity is quite low, or to avoid using the stick heat the wort for longer than a minute or two - and let the gas do the work.