My Homebrew Equipment
These pages have some information about my homebrewing equipment, and how you can make some of your own.
There are two major items of equipment necessary when making beer: a mash tun and a boiler. The mash tun is just a container capable of holding about 13 litres (3 gallons) of a mixture of grains and water and keeping it at a near-enough constant temperature for up to 90 minutes. The simplest way of doing this is to use an insulated container such as a picnic cooler, but you could use a boiler with a sensitive thermostat. I use a home-made mash tun, but you can purchase similar items in homebrew shops if you don't want to make one.
The boiler needs to be big - it will need to hold about 27 litres (6 gallons) with room to spare and be able to hold a rolling boil for about 90 minutes or more. For boiling, I have 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 sparge water at 78 to 80°C for about 30 minutes you could manage with one boiler, but it's easier with two boilers.
To use the mash tun efficiently, it helps to have some way of sparging. It is possible to use a jug and carefully pour the sparge water over the grains, but it's much easier to use a sparger. I have made a simple device for sparging the grains efficiently.
Running off some 'Robust Porter'
The picture alongside shows the view in my kitchen during a brew of 'Robust Porter'. You can see the two boilers and just make out the sparger 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.
A large bucket holding around 25litres is needed for fermentation. I currently use a plastic container which once held swimming pool sterilising solution, but fermentation buckets are cheap and easy to buy from homebrew shops. I also use a large 'wine and beer fermenter' for secondary fermentation.
It helps to have some sort of device for force-cooling the beer after boiling has finished. An easy method is to use an immersion chiller which can be made quite simply from a long coil of copper tubing, and to run cold water through it from the kitchen tap.
Finally, you need some way of storing your beer before you drink it. It is not very practical to bottle large quatities of beer, and it's a pain cleaning and sterilising the bottles for re-use as well. Purpose-made pressure barrels or 'Cornelius kegs' are the best solution, and at least two are needed (I have three).
If you want to save some money you can easily make some of your own brewing equipment. Take a look at the links alongside to see how I made my own mash tun, sparger and immersion chiller, as well as some other equipment which I find useful.