Need some help plumbing a 7bbl brewery.

Hey there,

My boss just bought a 7bbl brew system for a very cheap price, and while we wait for the rest of the brewery to be built it's my project to get it plumbed (it was in rough shape the way we got it). We have some other backups to figure out the hard stuff (having engineer friends comes in handy), but I figured it'd be a fun project to try and plan out this system.

I had a few major questions that I would like advice and help on:

1. Direct piping from Mash Tun to Boil Kettle (3 vessel brewing). I have heard that a grant is very useful if not required in some setups to prevent the grain bed from getting stuck, however the mash tun is raised already, and we could easily raise it another few feet (vertical space is not an issue) to allow us to simply turn a valve and direct flow away from the recirc pump and gravity flow into the boil kettle. Do you use a grant, and if so, would direct piping into the kettle circumvent issues?

2. Drain and Pump manifolds: the only system I have brewed on before was something like this where all of the brewery ran off of 1 pump, that was plumbed so the flow would go to a drain manifold (drained from HLT,MLT,BK, and City Water) and then hit the pump, and then to the pump manifold (choose to recirc, whirlpool,hlt,sprayballs 1-2-3,etc). It seems like this should be pretty cheap and easy to emulate. Here is another larger system with the same style manifold (15bbl). On the other hand I have seen manifold like this where you kind of assemble hard plumbing as you go on brewday. I have never used a system like that before, so I would be interested to hear anyone's complaints or thoughts.

I would be really, really interested in seeing your brewing systems fully plumbed and any issues you had plumbing them your self or dealing with the manufacturers plumbing.