Captain Video's Mountain Retreat

Yay craigslist!

I picked up a stack of brewing equipment a couple days ago, and it wasn't until last night that I finally had the time to look over all the new toys. Warning: Beware the incoming train-wreck of brewing lingo -- only a couple of my friends will understand everything in here... Just indulge me while I share :) I'll try to add enough extra info to make this educational and hopefully understandable.

Essentially what I'm doing is moving from a 5 gallon "brewery," to a system with a maximum batch size of about 13 gallons -- this is what most brewers would call a "half barrel" system.

I've now got 3 converted Sankey style kegs -- one is set up as a Hot Liquor Tank ("Hot Liquor" really means "Hot Water" in brewspeek), one is the Mash/Lauter Tun (which you use to steep the grains, and then strain/rinse them), and the third is a Brew Kettle (where you boil the sweet liquid, aka, "the wort", you got from the mash. You can see my old brew kettle in picture). The Brew Kettle and the Lauter Tun both have stainless steel Phalse Bottoms (fancy strainers), and the Lauter Tun has a Sparge Arm (kind of like a sprinkler for straining/rinsing the barley -- aka, "sparging"). On the right in the picture (the white thing on the barrel) you can see the Counter-flow Wort Chiller (a heat exchanger) that I also picked up -- you use that to quickly cool the boiling-hot wort down to a temp that's safe for adding yeast.

Here's a bucket full of random smaller bits and pieces (some of this is pictured later), and on the left of this picture you see two new (new-to-me) glass carboys (big bottles used to ferment the beer) -- this puts me at 5 carboys (I'm not really trying to collect carboys, but they keep showing up -- I want to start moving my fermentation over to some 10 gal stainless corney kegs I picked up.)

The following is a blurry picture of a new dual regulator, which will be nice if I ever want to serve different beers at different pressures.

Here's some of those random bits and pieces: racking canes, bottling tubes, various hose clamps and fittings, cornelius keg fittings, picnic taps....

This interesting stuff was also included: A counter-pressure bottle filler (used to put already-carbonated beer into bottles without having it foam all over), an inline carbonator (for adding carbonation, nearly instantly, and automatically, to any liquid), and a wort aerator (add's O2 to the wort to keep the yeasties happy).

There's also an electronic RIMS control system that I forgot to take a picture of. It's made of an enclosed electric heating element, a pump to circulate the wort, and a PID temperature controller to maintain the mash temperature. I'm not sure I'm going to use this control system the way it's all put together now, but I may part it out and redesign my own system. (explanation)

One of the things that's got me the most excited is the "project" pictured below. It's a for-reals, from England, old, dual beer engine! It's functional, and it's real, but it's roached. I'll probably get into more detail on this thing in a future post.

This all represents the 3rd full do-over of my brewery. I started boiling 1 1/2 gallon wort batches that were combined with cold water to bring the final volume up to 5 gallons. At V2.0, I started boiling and cooling full 5 gallon batches (I also started all-grain brewing). Now I'm likely to be doing 10 gallon batches. Interesting note: Dogfish Head Brewery began by brewing 3 batches per day in a similar 10 gallon system -- 400 batches in the first year!