An engineering problem???

Hi, I was at a birthday party on Saturday, and met a guy who was having a lot of problems with an all grain system he designed. He did have any specific gravity to see if it was an extraction problem, but he claimed the beer turned out much better with his old system (mashing on the stove top and using Pihl's sparging system). His new system consists of a 1/2 barrel keg with a stainless steel basket of some kind to hold the grain. There is a welded stirring aparatus to constantly turn the grain in the basket (during mashing). There is no false bottom in the system, all of the grain is contained within the basket. It is apparently a sealed system so that the water is above the top of the basket which holds the grain (or the basket is submerged within the mash water). He said that he is hitting his temps right on the mark (122, 140, 150). He is thinking that when he sparges, the water is not coming into contact with the grain, thus resulting in "thin" beer. He said that last time he transferred grains from this system to his plastic bucket sparging system and it works OK. But I am not much of a beer equipment designer (I generally stick with a more tried and true design using a false bottom), so maybe one of the design gurus has some thoughts ... Cheers! WH __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/