My Homebrew Equipment
Here are some pictures of bits of my homebrewing equipment.
This picture was taken in my kitchen during a brew of 'Robust Porter'. I use two 'Burco' boilers of 6 Imperial Gallon (27 litres) capacity - one for boiling and the other for heating the sparge water. Both were purchased second-hand. If you've got a well insulated container that will hold about 5 gallons (23 litres) of water at 80°C you could manage with one boiler, but it's easier with two boilers. You can just make out the sparger (see below) sitting on top of the mash tun. Ordinary kitchen jugs of 2 litre capacity are used to transfer the hot water to the sparger and the run off from the mash tun to the boiler.
If you want to save some money you can see below how easy it is to make your own mash tun, sparger and immersion chiller.
My home made mash tun
This is my home made mash tun.
It's a Thermos brand 'Weekend' insulated coolbox with a capacity of 28 litres. Near the bottom I've cut a hole in the side and installed a plastic 'drum tap'. These are available in just about all homebrew stores - they're the same as are used on pressure barrels. It is important to note that the tap is fixed to the inner shell of the box - the polystyrene insulation and the outer casing have a slightly larger hole than the inner, so that the flange of the tap will fit through and allow the tap to mate against the inner shell. The only thing wrong with this box is that the insulation of the lid is not very good. I just fold up an old woollen blanket and put it on top of the lid to hold in the heat.
This is a view inside the coolbox, without the manifold in place. There is a short length of clear plastic tube, about 20mm outside diameter and 15mm inside diameter, which is pushed into the inside of the tap. This connects to the copper manifold. The tube is about 45mm long and protrudes about 25mm from the end of the tap. If it is a tight fit inside the tap the tube can be softened in hot water before being pushed in. It doesn't have to be a tight fit either in the tap or on the manifold.
This is the copper manifold. It's made from 8 short pieces of standard 22mm copper pipe as used in domestic plumbing, 4 '90° elbows' (22mm), 2 'equal tees' (22mm) and one 'reduced branch tee' (22mm x 22mm x 15mm). The diameter of the 'reduced branch tee' is just right to fit inside the stub of clear plastic tube sticking out from the tap. If you're lucky you'll be able to get short offcuts of copper like these for nothing from a plumber.
The straight pieces of copper have slots cut in them about 5mm deep and at about 1cm intervals. Originally I used a simple hacksaw to cut the slots but they weren't really wide enough and I increased the width to about 1.3mm using a thin file. You could most probably use a 'Dremmel' drill or something similar to widen the slots if you didn't have a thin file.
The whole manifold is soldered together, although I have since read that it's a good idea to keep it so that it can be taken apart for cleaning. Well, I just sterilise it after use and just once in the last 8 years I've warmed it up with a blowlamp and given it a few good taps on a piece of wood to loosen any bits of rubbish that might be inside, so it's up to you. The manifold just sits in the bottom of the cooler with the slots facing downwards and you should be able to see from the picture that the 'reduced branch tee' is at a slight upward angle so that it joins neatly with the clear plastic tube.
This is my second mash tun - the first one was thrown out in 2005 after I dropped the manifold in it and cracked the bottom - but it's the original manifold that I made early in 1998.
Sparging
This is what I use for sparging.
It's a simple plastic cutlery tray that sits quite neatly on top of the mash tun. I used a small drill (0.9mm diameter) and drilled about 400 holes in the bottom of the tray at 1cm intervals - you can see from the picture how it's done. This is just placed on the top of the picnic cooler and water at around 78°C to 80°C jugged into it. The water slowly dribbles out through the holes onto and through the grist, at a rate of about a litre every 30 seconds.
You might see all sorts of complicated homebrew methods for sparging with rotating sprays, etc. in an attempt to replicate the way that full sized breweries do it. The idea of sparging is just to slowly drip water at the right temperature through the grist in order to leach out any remaining sugars. This is what happens here. It's cheap, virtually foolproof and works.
Immersion Chiller
This is my home made immersion chiller which I use for cooling the wort.
Cooling the wort quickly helps to produce the 'cold break' which precipitates out proteins which can cause haze in your beer - and it also means that you can pitch the yeast quickly, lessening the chances of the beer getting infected by wild yeasts and bacteria. This chiller will cool 5 gallons (23 litres) down to 25°C in about 30 to 40 minutes, depending on the temperature of the cold water going into it.
It's made from a 10m coil of 10mm copper tube - sold in DIY shops as 'microbore copper tube' - using no specialist tools apart from a tube cutter and a blowlamp for soldering the joints. Two short lengths were first cut off the coil, straightened and then the ends carefully bent by hand so that the ends (where the water comes in and goes out) will be outside the bucket. This is in case of accidental leaks - you don't want water in your beer! Starting at one end, the coil, which was originally about 20 inches (50cm) in diameter, was gradually tightened around an old demijohn so that it ended up about 8 inches (20cm) in diameter. Two 90° elbows were used to attach the coil to the two uprights.
What you end up with can be a bit like a 'slinky spring' so I have soldered two straps from top to bottom (made from some old flattened copper tube) to hold it together a bit more neatly - but it's not really necessary.
Plastic tube is used to connect to my cold water tap (cold water goes in at the top of the coil) and the hot water that comes out is collected in an old fermentation bucket which I then use for cleaning my equipment.
For efficient cooling, it is important to keep stirring the wort - and in the summer, I often find it necessary to use a minature cooling coil between the cold tap and the chiller to chill the cold water as well. This minature coil is placed in a large bowl of iced water, and the cold water runs through it before it gets to the chiller to cool the water down.