My Old Brewing Setup

I can attribute many of the concepts in my old brewing system to Geoff Scott, a Canadian homebrewer whom I've conversed with somewhat and respect what he has done. I've included my old system here to show (prove?) that you don't need a lot of fancy stuff to brew beer from grain. I sometimes miss the simplicity of this setup. It was a lot less stuff to clean up at the end of the day.

Boil Kettle

My boil kettle was a 10 gallon stainless steel milk can. The kind that dairies used to use. Near the bottom is a 1/2 inch bulkhead fitting that is the pickup tube. Attached to this bulkhead fitting is a stainless steel ball valve. To the right of that is a 1/4 inch bulkhead fitting that is used with a length of poly tubing as a level column. The poly tubing level column works pretty well at sparge temperatures but gets kinda soft at boil temps. Both of these bulkhead fittings have compression fittings on the ends. Above these two fittings is a 3/8 inch bulkhead fitting with the outside end having 1/4 inch NPT female threads. This is where I put a thread-in, bimetal, dial face thermometer. The biggest mistake that I made when assembling this kettle was that the thermometer is mounted too high in the side of the kettle. I need almost 4 gallons in the kettle to have the thermometer underwater. Another problem with using a milk can for a kettle is that the top opening is quite small. This could be easily cured by cutting the top off at the shoulders of the can and mounting the handles down lower on the sides.

Mash/Lauter Tun

My mash/lauter tun is where I really leaned on Geoff's ideas. It is a 6 gallon plastic pail with a lid inside an insulating jacket. I put a hole near the bottom of the pail on the side. In this hole I mounted another 1/2 inch bulkhead fitting with compression fittings on both ends. Mounted on the outside is a short length of copper tubing compression fit to a brass ball valve. On the inside is another short length of copper tubing with a rolled up piece of brass screen crimped and folded on one end and attached to the copper tube with a SS hose clamp on the other. The brass screen has about 1/16 inch square holes. It works quite well and NEVER a stuck mash in about 10 batches.

I insulated the pail by first attaching the fitting, putting the lid on the pail, making a cardboard form, and filling the space around the pail in the form with that foam insulation in a can stuff that they sell at the hardware stores. That was a rather expensive way to do it since it took almost $40 worth of that stuff to fill the form and adequately cover the top of the pail. If I were to do it over again I would probably use fiberglass batting or styrofoam sheets. The end result works fantastic though! I cannot detect even 1 degree of temp loss during a 90 minute mash. I have even brewed at -10ºF with no measurable temperature change!!

Burner

My burner was really quite a cobbled together pile of junk. (Literally.) The burner itself was one that I salvaged from our "recently-sprung-a-leak" natural gas water heater. This was mounted in an old car rim that I got from the salvage yard where I took the old water heater to be recycled. The burner was fueled by natural gas run from the house. The kettle sat on 5 "L"-shaped pieces cut and bent from some 1inch by 1/8 inch flat metal stock. (Again from the salvage yard.) All this sat on top of a frame made from the absolute cheapest 2X4's available at the local lumber yard. The valve on the left is the main gas valve. The valve on the right is the pilot light valve. I figured if the water heater had a pilot light in it's original life, why not in it's second incarnation. The pilot light worked marginally well. It blew out real easily when used outdoors. I guess it was designed to be used in some wind-free, dark corner of a basement, securely shrouded under a water heater. Something I have noticed about water heater burners though, the flame produced is not optimal for heating a kettle. It is too spread out and much of the heat is lost up the sides. Water heater tanks have a chimney up their middle and will tend to draw that spread out flame inward. To remedy that I continually modified the original shape of the burner. I think I reached the limits of metal removal on the burner without having it fall apart. It still worked good though. The metal shroud around the kettle was intended to direct more heat up around the sides of the kettle. In testing it seemed to help a little bit. Especially on windy days.

Wort Chiller

The wort chiller I use is very similar to the ones made by other homebrewers. About the only change I made to the basic design is how the copper exits the tubing. I took a compression fitting (3/8 inch tubing to 3/4 inch male NPT) and drilled it out so that the 3/8 inch copper tubing would pass straight through the fitting. I clamped the 3/4 inch male end of the fitting in the Tygon tubing with a SS clamp. The rest of the wort chiller is pretty much like the basic designs seen elsewhere. This is one of the components that was kept around when I built my RIMS.

On the wort outlet of the chiller I install a little"manifold" with another thermometer in it. This let me know the temp of the wort as it exited the chiller and went into the fermentor.

Grain Mill

This is my old grain mill. It ain't much but it's run a lot of grain through. It has the word MARGA on the side. I think it's from Italy and not necessarily intended for the American market as the instruction book was printed in Italian, Spanish (or Portugese), and German. I got it from my local brew supply guy for $30 used. I have put a larger hopper on it and a grain chute. The crushed grain used to collect in a little box under where the chute is now. The box would almost hold a half pound of grain. The mill is driven by an electric drill. Even in it's original hand-cranked configuration, a little mill like this would be ideal for an extract brewer that steeps some of the colored grains.