Homebrewing

State of the Brewing

To start off I’d like to describe the gear I’ve been using to brew beer and a bit about my process. It’s in a constant state of change so I’ll try to keep this updated.

I brew in my garage, in the summer I’ve got the door open and in the winter the door is closed almost all the way. I don’t have a fancy stand (yet!), so my setup might look a little hodgepodge. I’ll have to find or take some pics and get them posted in here.

The process starts with milling the grain. I’ve got a crankandstein grain mill in my basement right next to where I keep all my bulk grain. I use my trusty cordless drill hooked to the shaft to save my arms. I try to crush the grain the morning of the brew, but on ocassion I’ve done it the night before or even a week before when my whole brewday was thrown off and I just put it off for a week.

Then I fill up my old turkey fryer pot with the appropriate amount of water that I’ve run through an activated carbon filter (basically a whole house filter that I’ve put a garden hose attachment on). I’ll heat the sparge water on the propane burner that came with the turkey fryer kit. When it gets up to temp I’ll transfer the water to my clean mash tun that is basically a coleman Xtreme 70quart cooler with a bulkhead fitting attached. The grain gets dumped in and stirred to break up any doughballs. I’ll check the temp and make any adjustments necessary by adding boiling or cold water.

If I’m doing a single infusion mash I’ll leave that alone for 60-90 minutes. This gives me time to eat some lunch or run some errands before I have to get back and clean out the boil kettle and start heating my sparge water. I’ll heat my sparge water just like my strike water and hopefully time it so it gets to temp right after I’ve drained out the mash tun.

After my 60-90 min rest, I’ll stir up the grains with my trusty stainless steel spoon, run off a few quarts into a pitcher (vorlauf) and dump that back in the mash tun. After the wort is running pretty clear I’ll start running that off into my boil kettle and I’ll pickup a sample to check with my hydrometer.

When the mash tun is empty I shut the valve and add my sparge water and stir for a bit. I’ll let it sit for a minute or so and then vorlauf like before and then start draining. I’ll take a hydrometer reading at this point and write that down, as well as the different volumes of wort I’ve collected.

I’ll usually start heating the boil kettle while the first runnings are being collected. Speaking of the boil kettle, I use a sanke keg (15.5 gal) that has the top cut out. This sits on a Bayou Classic SQ-14 that has a nice and sturdy frame even if it is a little low to the ground.

Once I’ve collected all the wort I need, I’ll stir the wort up and collect a sample for a hydrometer reading and record it and the wort volume.

After the wort starts boiling and the hop break subsides, I’ll insert my immersion wort chiller and hop bag. My hop bag is modeled after something I saw on homebrewtalk.com, but its slightly different than what I’ve seen. I use a large paint strainer bag that I’ve zip tied to 2 dowel rods. The dowels allow me to roll up the bag after the boil, stick the dowels in the keg handle to keep it rolled up, and let all the wort drain out. Typically people insert an immersion chiller at 15-20 min before the end of a boil but I put it in early because I don’t want to be pulling out my hop bag to add my chiller. I haven’t found run into any problems with inserting the chiller this early so I’ll keep doing it till I come up with a different chilling method.

Everything else is pretty typical for a brew session. I’m going to be making some improvements real soon to hopefully make my brewday a little easier. I received a giftcertificate from a homebrew shop for Christmas this year so I used it to buy a march pump, so as soon as I get the proper fittings I’ll be using that to transfer water from my HLT to my mash tun, transfer wort to my fermenter and possibly recirculate the wort at the end of the boil like Jamil’s whirlpool immersion chiller. I’ve got 2 weldless bulkheads to install, one for my boil kettle and one for my future HLT. I’ve already got another sanke keg to cut a hole in the top and drill for a bulkhead and thermometer/site tube.

I’m also going to build a platform out of scrap wood to raise my cooler up to the right level, since right now I use a sanke keg with a piece of wood on top and a spare cooler on top of that and finally with my cooler mash tun sitting on top of that. Before I did my first all grain I just looked around the garage to come up with whatever I could to get it at the right level.