Newbie Equipment Questions

[Ben Matthews]

Hi people,

I'm just in the process of gearing up for my first delve into home brewing. I LOVE beer and have wanted to dabble with home brewing for a while but we've been doing up houses and moving regularly for years so haven't had the chance. Were just about to move house to our final home which comes complete with its own spring so I thought now is the time to start brewing.

I don't drink too much so was thinking of doing something like 11 or 12 litre brews once a month. (I guess about half the amount of your standard 5 gallon recipe size). As I'll not be heating up too much water and the kind of beers I love seem to call for step mashing I was hoping to use my kettle as a mash and later tun also. I've read somewhere once you get the mash up to temp I can just put the lid on and wrap in a duvet, then put it back on the cooker to take it up to the next temp etc. en route to mash out temp.

I've bought a second hand kettle in great nick with a tap and thermometer. Its got a stainless mesh hose on the inside attached to the taps bulkhead. My first questions to you guys is in relation to that. I read that when sparging the tap being on the side of the kettle will cause the water to be drawn down though the mash unevenly giving a fairly poor extract efficiency. Can I just stir the mash regularly when doing the sparging to help even this out?

I've also read I could maybe make a copper manifold to attach to the bulk head to make the draw through the grain bed more evenly. I've got all the equipment to make one here but wondered whether copper was a safe material to use and whether doing this was necessary if I could just stir instead.

I do have a few more questions for you all but thought I'd do them bit by bit.

Thanks in advance

Ben

 

[Dexter101]

Welcome to the slippery slope!

Regarding spring, worth getting water tested, 1 just to make sure its safe to drink and use and further down the line you may want to start adapting the water to suit brewing styles.

TO start with at least, I would recommend just keeping it simple. Theres quite a lot of techniques out there that are worth doing but if you don't do them, you will still get good quality beer. Step mashing for example, works but if you don't step mash, you would still get reasonable beer and lets you get used to the full brewing process first. Brulosophy do some "experiments" which show that lots of "must do" steps in brewing aren't always 100% needed.

I do Brew in a Bag so can't really talk about sparging but I used to use a stock pot as the mash tun. I would get the water up to temperature either by adding boiling water into cooled boiled water to get the right temp or bringing the pan up to temp on the hob. this would then go into the oven to hold the temperature of the mash. others cover in a sleeping bag or duvet and will mostly not lose too much heat either way.

My only recommendation is if you are buying anything, buy it to do 25L batches. you can always use the same equipment (in most cases) for smaller batches but if you suddenly want to do a larger batch you end up struggling.

Enjoy, and keep us updated on how things go!

 

[Ben Matthews]

Thanks for that. I'm keen to keep it all as simple as possible too. The current owners of the house use the spring for drinking water after filtering it. (No mains water at all) They've tested it although I'll be getting it tested as soon as we move in as well. It's fairly acidic water apparently. Will that be better for brewing than alkaline. The kettle I've bought will be fine for 25 litres and another of my questions is on this note actually regarding the purchase of a fermenter. Will it matter having a much larger fermenter than I need for a 11/12 litre brew such as a 30l one or is it best to go for a 15l?

I did contemplate the BIAB technique which sounds good but the kettle I've got has a probe thermometer 5 inches from the bottom that sticks into the kettle so I'm assuming that would just pierce the bag.

Thanks