DIY Homebrew Gear Update

Homemade wort chiller and mash tun.  Done and done.  Sort of. 

I spent a decent chunk of my free time this weekend building a couple new additions to my homebrew kit, as I discussed in my last post.  With a shopping list of parts and hardware in hand, I set off to Home Depot to get all the materials I needed.  A couple hours later (it took me forever to find all the stuff I needed and some of the staff their seemed like they were covering areas they don’t normally cover, making it take way longer to find what I needed), I was back in my apartment ready to go. 

The wort (unfermented beer) chiller went pretty smooth.  I ended up getting a 20ft. coil of 3/8” copper to mold into my chiller.  Since the copper came in a nice coil, a lot of the work was done – I only needed to shape it into the size chiller that would fit in my brew kettle.  My 8 qt. stock pot worked like a charm as a nice mold.  After that, all I had to do was bend up the intake and the outtake (so they will be sticking out of the kettle to be able to hook hoses to) to the top of the chiller.  This was where I had to be a little delicate to not kink the piping (which would disrupt water flow through the piping and make the chiller much less efficient) while bending the two ends up.  Since Home Depot did not have the proper size bending tool for me to use (which allow you to bend pipes without kinking), I had to do this by hand.  No worries though, I was able to bend it up fine without kinking the pipe.  After clamping on the hoses and the sink fitting, I was all set to give it a test run.  After a quick leak test and tightening the clamps a bit, I was ready to give it test to see how fast this puppy would cool down a kettle. 

Ready to chill :-)

Fast forward to Sunday.  For the chilling test, I put about three gallons (my normal boil volume) of water into my brew kettle, brought it up to a full boil, then took it off the burner, hooked up the chiller, and started the timer.  This chiller took the boiling water down under 100F in about 10 minutes, which I was very happy about (this will carve a whole lot of time off the ice bath method).  The one tough part was that it only got it down to the mid 70s after 20 or so minutes.  However, after a little investigating, I realized my tap water would only go down to around 74 or 75 this time of the year.  A little problematic if I want to pitch my yeast in the 60s.  Looks like I may have to use an ice bath at the end of the chilling to get it down the last 10 or so degrees.  The other option would be to build a pre-chiller (basically a smaller version of the chiller that you can put in an ice bath that would be upstream from the wort chiller to chill the water further before going into the chiller).  Either way though, this chiller will definitely help me out a lot and cut down the time of my brew day.  The only part I don’t like much is the sink fitting that I used to hook the intake hose up to the sink.  It’s clamped straight to the tubing which makes hooking it up to the sink kind of a pain.  I may end up looking into getting a couple extra pieces that would make this easier but for now I just went with a little bit of a cheaper method.  No biggie though – I can definitely make do with it as is.  Here is the link to the site that I used as my rough design.

One piece of equipment done.  Now, on to the mash tun.  For those unaware, a mash tun is basically a heated or insulated container that you “mash” your malted grains with hot water to extract the fermentable sugars from the grains.  The solution that a lot of homebrewers employ is to convert a water cooler into a mash tun since it is very well insulated.  The basic idea is to swap out the plastic spigot for a ball valve, put a mesh screen or false bottom on the inside opening to keep the grains out of the runnings, and you’re good to go.  Add grain and hot water, let it rest, rinse the grains with more hot water, and you have wort. 

Get home from Home Depot on Saturday.  Take off plastic spigot.  Done.  Start assembling ball valve.  Correctly sized hardware?  No?  Bunk.  Pause until Sunday. 

After going back to Home Depot on Sunday to get the right size washers and o-rings, I was able to finish up the build on the mash tun and do a couple tests.  First test was without the screen on the inside with room temperature water.  Not even a hint of a leak.  Next, I put on the mesh screen I put together from the stainless mesh off of a washing machine connector hose.  Time for a hot water test with the final assembly.  After adding in a couple gallons of hot water into the tun, I noticed a little leaking around the outside of the washer and o-ring on the outside.  Nothing big though – should be easily remedied by either tightening the assembly a bit better (I didn’t have the right size wrench for the ball valve so it is only hand-tightened) or by playing with the o-rings and washers a little bit to get a combo that seals up a little tighter.  Either way, I should be able to fix this up and get a pretty sturdy mash tun for use in all-grain and partial mash batches.  Here is the link to the design that I roughly based my mash tun off of.  They also have a design over there for converting a rectangular cooler into a mash tun.  I'll post a picture of my finished mash tun soon.

I ended up going with a 5 gallon water cooler (which is actually only big enough for enough grain to produce a beer around 6% ABV if you’re doing an all-grain 5 gallon batch of homebrew) for my mash tun due to space, price, and use issues.  No big deal though – since I am still restricted to brewing in my apartment’s kitchen, I will mostly be doing partial mashes and all-grain half batches in this mash tun, giving me plenty of space in this tun.  Occassionally, I will do a full-sized all-grain brew, but this will be pretty rare since I would have to split the wort into two boils since I am brewing on my stove.  In light of this, I am fine with the restrictions of a 5 gallon mash tun for now.  I’ll probably upgrade to a bigger size when I have more space to have a proper all-grain set up.

Song of the Day: “Lay Me Down” by The Dirty Heads (ft. Rome from Sublime with Rome)

Beer of the Day: Sam Adams’ Blackened Hops (Sam Adams Longshot Homebrew Contest Winner)