This brewery started as a birthday gift. A few years ago my wife gave me a starter kit for extract brewing based on the recommendation of a family beer geek friend. He knew my background in chemistry, my love for cooking, good beer and great wines. The rest they say is history.
We’ve come a long way from two 5 gallon plastic buckets. Now we have a microprocessor controlled 3 burner RIMS type system. So we’ve gone from 5 gallons in plastic to fermenting 10+ gallons in stainless steel modified kegs.
Our system is based on the Brutus system by Lonnie McCalister at www.alenuts.com. We bought the plans from Lonnie, and used that as our starting point. First off we knew that we wanted to use converted kegs as our kettles, so we needed to change the dimensions of the rack to support the kettles properly. Next, since my brewing partner (Brother Wheels) is a heating system control geek, he wanted to design and build the burner system and controls from the ground up.
When we priced the steel for the rack stainless was five times more money than regular steel, so I chose to go with regular hoping to get the frame powder coated to help keep it clean. We went with the same gauge as the Brutus system which is probably way overkill, but I’d hate to have the frame fail with three kettles of hot liquid.
We had a ton of help from our very good friend Tim. He is a welder
by trade(and a damn good one at that) and he took the metal and turned it into a thing of amazing beauty. Watching him do his thing was really a privilege, yes this is basically a cube or rectangle but welding it together and getting it completely square with some pretty awesome looking beads, it is awesome. Thank you Tim!!!
We took our square sculpture home, and Brother Wheels cloistered himself in his garage with gas valves, iron pipe, wire controls and some kick ass 85,000 BTU burners. (And of course that’s where his beer fridge is too) The end result is a well controlled (+/- 2 degrees) and safe system. The gas valves are pilot lit and controlled by thermocouples so that if the pilot is out (from the wind or a boil-over not that that has ever happened……today? ) With the gas/burners/ and control circuitry in place the rack moved here to the home of the Church where I worked on the liquid side.
We had some problems with the fuel/air mix with the burners we had but that has been fixed by adding a small air blower which in effect blows air into the throat of the burners, using this has allowed us to get the full BTU output of the burners.
We started with poor efficiencies in our first all grain batches but since we’ve improved the flow out of the kettle our efficiencies are now in the 80% range.
Fermentation has been going on in 13.5 gallon stainless kegs with 12” holes cut in the top. We are using pot lids to keep the keg closed, but up until the last two batches we had problems sealing the lid to the keg. Using some food grade sheet silicone we cut gaskets, and now with the use of a strong back on the lid we can seal the keg entirely.
Where do we go from here? We need to have a climate controlled area to brew, (freezing the water line is a bummer in mid mash) and we need to improve our ability to move wort, currently we brew outside then transport by hand 11 gallons of wort in a keg to the basement, then after fermenting we have to again move the keg to transfer to the next container. Ultimately I can see using a Blichman conical fermentor inside of a temperature controlled freezer, this would mean no moving fermentors by hand we could simply use CO2 pressure, but first we need the work area.
