My Brewhouse

If you click on a picture, it should open up into a 4mega-pixel shot.

This post has taken a while---just to load all the pictures without Blogger choking.

Last Saturday, I brewed a Belgian Golden Ale---Daemon Refuge. So, I took the chance to introduce my brew system.

First Slide...

Here we have Long Johnson going out of its hidey hole---yes I do have a floor jack in my garage. The rig was so named by Cheryll because it has four stations instead of the usual three (she may have had other reasons). Obviously, the wheels are a necessity. Two wheels on one end steer and the other end's wheels are fixed. Steerable wheels on both ends is not an improvement---you are warned.

This is the end that's coming out, believe it or not. The motorcycle and couch have already been moved. Blow up the shot and you can see the mess in my garage in hideous detail.

The command center (Oh my, the other side of the garage is messy too). The two gray tubs contain all the with-it parts like hot pads, lids, hop-clearing-tools, etc. The mash rake lays across the brewmaster's chair and the heat exchanger and copper wort-volume-measuring stick are on the side table. After the brew starts, the side table is clear for the log book and lab ware for testing previous batches.

Here it is all assembled (yes I owned all the kegs before cutting them up). The vessels from right to left are: hot liquor (i.e. water) tank, lauter tun (strainer), mash tun (heating/converting), and wort kettle (boiling with hops). You can see the white propane tank and the orange hose going down to the hot water pump. The riser between the hot liquor and lauter tuns feeds hot water to the sparge lid on top of the lauter tun (shown a few pictures down). There is also a power outlet with a switch for the pump and a couple of other outlets for sundry devices like mills and other brew stands.

Here we see two of the three burners--with a high-pressure burner on the left for the kettle and a low pressure burner on the right for the mash tun. These burners are also set on the same level like this for decoction mashing (boiling the decoction usually take place on the left). The low-pressure burner was my original homebrew setup when I graduated from (got kicked out of) the kitchen. By the way, the rule is: if the fire doesn't go out it wasn't a boilover.

There is another high-pressure burner under the hot liquor tank. You can see the pump clearly in this picture. It's a little sanitary pump. I used to have a regular Grundfos hot water pump, but the intermittent, very hot water use broke two of them. I recommend that you just buy a hot service sanitary pump and then you'll be ready if you ever need to pump wort (like through the heat exchanger---I use my brewing partner's pump (Kevin) which is normally used to pump wort).

The mash: Still life with rake. I rake the heck out of my mashes because I use a separate lauter tun. Mash should be 12-18 inches in the lauter tun and a single batch of regular strength beer hits the low end of this range in this vessel. Don't stir much at all if you are doing a single step infusion with a screen in the bottom already. Just enough to mix out the dough balls.

Here's the mash resting at a temperature maintenance step. Bubble wrap goes on after the fire goes out and off before it comes on again. It will still get a little crinkly around the lower edge---but it's cheap to replace after a season or two. The ubiquitous bucket of water for the mash rake, et cetera.

The copper works at the bottom of the lauter tun are shown above. The scientific reason for the asymmetry is that a big chunk of it broke off. The cuts on the bottom are pretty thin (cut with dremel disk) so almost nothing gets through. And they point down with room below them so they almost never block (and stay out of the bottom dough).

Here we see the sparge water distribution lid on the left and the goose neck outlet from the lauter tun on the right. The goose neck brings the runnings up higher than the copper works before releasing it to atmospheric pressure so that a suction will not build up on the slots, plug them and collapse the mash bed.

Now it's time for the lauter tun to wear the bubble-wrap party dress. Sometimes there is a little sink to catch the runnings (after going across the atmospheric gap, but for this brew I just let it fall into the kettle and collect. Old School.

I use whole hops, so there is a screen in the kettle (because the outlet valve is not big enough to use a separate hop back. You can see what looks like a stain in the center that is really an experimental copper chore-boy around the intake. The massive pieces of stainless are there to keep the experiment squished down. There's still plenty of little holes for the wort to go out.

Running hot water through the heat exchanger to sanitize it. After a while, and especially if you can't examine it after cleaning, it's safer to just trust to temperature and time to kill unwanted organisms. I usually cast out (when brewing with Kevin) by running out the valve in the kettle into a collection vessel and then pump it through the counterflow heat exchanger to the fermenter. I was doing it by myself (and didn't have said vessel) so it just went directly into the pump. I got away with it, but don't wish to immortalize the operation in pictures. There was lots of trub glued to the hop screen...but not enough to plug it.

All done! Roll it away and put everything back...eventually. Come to MisCon in Missoula, MT for a sample.