So, like anything else, you’ve got to have certain things to brew beer. Here we report on some of the equipment we have or have had in the past.
When I started brewing outside (to avoid stinking up the house with the smell of boiling wort — I love it, but my wife has a different opinion!) I purchased a cajun cooker from Amazon. Very happy with this purchase — it gets *much* hotter than my stove top, and I can really get a rolling boil on my wort! $42 bucks well-spent.
Got a standard immersion chiller from Northern Brewer. It gets the job done, although I’m currently looking at the Therminator to shorten the cooling time. I have some concerns about keeping it clean. Will report here when I get it.
So, the Therminator is a plate chiller. It is according to some the most efficient way to quench your wort — 5 minutes for a five gallon batch! Truly a boon to any home brewer, right? Well, at the end of it all, I *do* think it’s a remarkable product, and it did indeed cool my wort in 5 minutes. However, the overhead associated with the Therminator is greater than it is with an immersion chiller. With the immersion chiller all you have to do is remember to put it in the boiling wort when you have 15 minutes left in order to sanitize it. With the Therminator it’s a bit more complicated and I had not yet worked out a reasonable approach to sanitizing it. Also, with the Therminator, you have to be sure to quench your wort to the *right* temperature — not to hot, not too cold, and if you miss the mark it’s not easy to correct. So, really, you need the Thrumometer (see below), or something equivalent to monitor the temperature of your wort as it comes out of the chiller. To clean and sanitize I basically filled my brew kettle with a PBW solution first to flush the therminator, followed by a rinse, then sanitized using BTF Iodophor and the same technique. This worked, but sorting it all out the first time took a lot more time than I had expected.
Some further notes on the Therminator. On the last few brews, the run-off through the Therminator got stuck. I basically had no filtering of the liquid coming out of boil kettle and the pellet hops gummed up the works. It took a long time to un-stick it, clean it, etc. To avoid this in the future I purchased a Mash / Boil Screen. Worked like a champ this time around.
I have a couple of the floating thermometers, but have stopped using them recently. Instead, I use the Pro-Accurate Digital Thermometer. This quick-read thermometer is precise, and all I really need to monitor temperature during the mashing phase.
Started with the 30 quart stainless kettle from NB. Cost $78 bucks or so. It’s a good general purpose kettle. Lighter than the Megapots. No spigot. I’d get burn patches on the bottom of it, I think because the bottom was so thin.
I’ve since upgraded to a 10 gallon megapot w/ thermometer and ball valve. Having the spigot is great — it’s a piece of cake to drain off the chilled wort into the carboy now. No need to siphon. The Thermometer is good quality, but I’m not sure how useful it really is. I mean it’s pretty easy to tell the temperature when you’re boiling the wort. On this latest brew I wound up using the lighter weight Stainless kettle above for all heating except the final wort because it’s lighter and I was just boiling hot water (no risk of burning).
Further Notes. I believe that my kettle is one of the earlier versions of the 10 gallon megapot, which is wider and shorter than the new ones. Also, the ball valve is a bit high up, so when I run off the kettle, I lot of wort gets left behind. I built a stand which props up the kettle on an angle to help — it works reasonably well. I am Eye-ing one of the new Megapots (1.2), which appear to be a bit narrower and taller, which should also help reduce the amount of wort left in the kettle.
This is a good story. When I decided to try all grain brewing, I wanted to keep the experiment as cheap as possible (hahah). I decided to try making the “Zapap” lauter tun (see “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing” by Charlie Papazian for more information on the Zapap Lautertun) with a few enhancements of my own. I got the plastic bucket, drilled the holes, then glued flexible insulation onto it. This worked great, except that the glue dissolved the insulation, and the insulation didn’t remain stuck to the lauter tun! I wound up buying the deluxe all grain system from NB. I had heard some stories of folks having problems with the steel false bottoms, basically the false bottom would “seal” against the bottom of the lauter tun, so I got a different false bottom — Phil’s Phalse Bottom. The elbow on this false bottom has intakes on the sides which cannot be blocked by the bottom of the lauter tun. It’s worked well for me so far.
Further update. I wound up with a bunch of stuck run-offs using Phil’s Phalse Bottom, whether due to poor procedure on my part or something else is unclear. I built a copper manifold as a replacement. It generally works well, but I did have a stuck run-off in a recent brew. It was easily / quickly remedied by stirring things up again and recirculating again.
Sparge Arm
I use the Fermentap Sparge Assembly. It seems to work as designed — I must confess I am not yet confident regarding my sparging technique, so don’t feel qualified to judge the effectiveness of this particular piece of apparatus yet.
Kegs
I inherited a few kegs from an old friend who had retired from home-brewing. The first is a Cornelius Super Champion keg, the second is a Firestone VI Challenger clone — Spartanburg Challenger VI. First thing I did was to take the danged things apart so I could really wash them. Turned out to be a challenge! Required a breaker bar and a 7/8″ 12 pt deep socket to get the plugs loose. FYI — on the Corny keg the threads on the gas and liquid lines are identical — no sweat. On the Firestone keg they’re different.
Got a JT’s blow-off tube. It works fine for me, although because I don’t double the liquid yeast I don’t generally get the furious primary fermentation so often don’t manage to blow off the kraeusen.
Craft a Brew Catalyst Fermenter
I picked up this conical fermenter since it fits inside the top chamber of my Fermentator 9000 fermentation chamber and it seems like a great discount solution for doing a full fermentation in a single vessel. You can attach a standard wide-mouth bell jar to the base and close a valve on the bottom to replace the jar to remove the sediment (effectively racking) without having to transfer to another fermentation vessel. So far so good! But, I did find that running the fermenter through the dishwasher per instructions that some residual gunk (on the Pliny brew) created a ring that didn’t get cleaned and required serious scrubbing to remove, and that scrubbing caused some scratching in the plastic. We’ll see if that causes contamination issues. Second, the lid gasket has a common defect causing the attachment of the endpoints of the loop to fail/disconnect.