Brewery Tour At Long Last!

Ok, so I have a great excuse about why it took me a month to get this post up. That excuse is currently 10 weeks old and is sleeping next to me on the couch. My daughter takes up a lot of my time and love and is ever so distracting when I'm trying to make time for computer work! =)

But here goes! The On The Loose Brewery Tour!!

Overview and general considerations first. Then on to a brew day....

So in putting together an all-grain system, you have two choices: Go with a cooler mash tun, or something else. Since the big guys use stainless steel vessels, I decided I wanted one too. Repurposed kegs are fantastic as brewing vessels as they are relatively inexpensive, have burly handles built in, are large enough to easily do a high-gravity 10 gallon mash (lots of malt there!) and they are double-jacketed stainless steel. On a normal temp. day, I only lose about 2-4 degrees over a 1 hour mash and that's without any extra insulation on the keg. I got my HLT and boil kettle from Beer at Home, one of my local shops and I sucked it up and paid out for the mash tun from SABCO. (I wanted the all-stainless pickup and tri-clover fittings). All of them have a ball valve and a brewing thermometer on them. I have a bayou burner under the HLT and boil kettle. I'd like to have a third under the MLT as I always seem to get my strike water just a bit off.



Once I had all of my kegs, I hacked together a wooden frame over the course of a weekend. It's a two tier system with a march pump to handle wort movement and recirculation. The stand is not the best as I did not do a good job on the dimensions and things do not gravity feed well. Stand 2.0 will have to wait until later in the year though.

The chiller is a Shirron plate chiller. I run the garden hose through it and waste a ton of water chilling my wort. See the upgrades section on thoughts of how to solve this.

I'll try to walk you through a brew day using my system:

HLT: The night before I add strike/sparge water to the HLT to let is offgass some of the chlorine. I start my brew day by firing up the burner underneath and heating up to strike temps (usually 170F or so). The HLT is pretty simple...it has a copper pickup tube that runs out the ball valve.

Mash Tun: Again..this is the pro kettle, bought from SABCO. The grain goes into the MLT and water is pumped from the HLT to the MLT. The MLT has a stainless false bottom and a stainless pickup that grabs from under the false bottom.

At the end of the mash, I recirculate...sometimes with the pump, sometimes with just a plastic jug I have around. (I'm still figuring out the pump). I don't have a recirculation picture...but basically I unscrew the output from the HLT and move it to the MLT, then let it flow out the bottom and pump the wort back up top.

Boil Kettle: I can actually use gravity here, I let the wort drain from the MLT into the boil kettle. The kettle has a stainless steel screen that is meant to be a cheap mash screen. But it does a good job of filtering out hop and hot break material after the boil.

Boil for 90 minutes and then set up the chiller.

Chiller setup: This looks confusing but isn't really. The green hose is cold water input from the faucet. The black hose is output waste water I try to water the garden with. The hot wort comes out of the bottom of the kettle, flows through the pump. is pumped through the chiller and then either recirculated back into the kettle, or put directly into the carboy.










Once the beer is chilled and waiting for yeast, I take everything apart,  drag it out on the lawn and hose it down. The grain goes on the compost pile and the kettle detritus gets spread on the lawn. I need to be better in cleaning the brew equipment by adding in a PBW wash and run through the system after or before each brew..so far I have been lazy and haven't done this every time.

Desired upgrades and next steps for brewery 2.0:

1) I would really like to tri-clover fitting the whole brewery....the threaded ports are begging for contamination and its a pain in the butt to try and unscrew tubes in the middle of a brew day. Quick release please!

2) I would like to have a second pump so that one could be for hot side action and one for chiller setup.

3) Eventually I would like to upgrade to a stainless steel stand. I'm already burning the wooden one.

4) Chiller setup: I've seen rigs that use a sump pump to move a bucket of ice water through the chiller...reusing the same water rather than dumping it all over my lawn would help my hippy sensibilities. I would also eventually like to try one of Jamil's whirlpool immersion chillers. I get some weird crap that comes out of my plate chiller from time to time.

So I hope you enjoyed the tour! Please let me know if you have questions or comments. I could always try to get a better picture or write up a better explanation if something isn't clear!

Cheers!