Home brewing – equipment selection

For a long time, I’ve liked the idea of home brewing. It’s been one of those things I keep saying

oh yeah, I really should get around to ordering some stuff and doing it

This started around 10 years ago with a home-brew kit: a thick goop that you boiled up with some water, added some sugar and left in a bucket for a couple of weeks. A while later I teamed up with a friend and actually ordered some stuff. Unfortunately, we never actually got around to doing anything with it.

That was then and this is now, however, and the idea has once-more bubbled to the surface (there’s a pun in there somewhere). Over the last year or so, I’ve almost raised the enthusiasm to dive in but always been stumped by the vast array of techniques and equipment and ingredients and just decided it’s too much hassle and I’ll look into it more later. Finally, this month, I resolved to get off my arse and sort it out once and for all, and on Sunday 16th January I finally hit submit on my order. Here’s a run-down of what I bought and why.

I’ve broken it down by brewing stage, which is not how I approached the research and selection process but probably makes more logical sense for the reader.

Sterlisation

Like -INSERT HATED GROUP OF PEOPLE HERE-, your equipment needs to be sterlised. In brewing this is to remove bacteria that can make your beer taste bad and go off quickly; neither of which are desirable. In each stage up to and including boiling, it’s not too bad; the boiling will kill off everything anyway. As soon as the liquid hits the fermenting vessel though, everything has to be sterile.

Back in’t’ day, sterilisation was all done with sodium metabisulphate. In trying to determine if this was still the done thing, I ended up reading a 3-page discussion on whether the correct word is sanitise, sterilise or disinfect. Joyful.

I read posts on using bleach (with much detail on dilution levels) or boiling water, but finally settled on some simple powder as someone else somewhere said they used it. What more of a glowing endorsement could a man want?

Water Treatment

I bought some stuff for water treatment, but at this stage am undecided what – if anything – I’m actually going to do to my water before mashing. Jim’s Beer Kit guide suggests at the minimum to remove the chlorine from the water using campden tablets, so I got some of those (well… powder).

As water treatment is all about mash pH (NB: not the pH of the water that goes in!), I got some test strips to see what happens.

Then a couple of other chemicals that may or may not be used

Mashing and Sparging

Mashing is the process of extracting sugars from the malted grain. Basically, this involves steeping the grains in hot water in a vessel (mash tun) for an hour or two. Once this is done, the water is drained off and the grains rinsed. This rinsing process is known as sparging. The expensive option for mashing is to have a separate vessel, often made from a coolbox for insulation, with some form of grain filter for mashing. This allows the mash and sparge to be drained straight into the boiler which speeds up heating. The cheaper option is to use a mesh bag in your boiler. There are a number of options when it comes to sparging, but in simple terms for the beginner like me there are two options: pour some more water in, swill it around and drain it again (batch) or sprinkle water over the top of the grain (fly sparging). As far as I can tell, there’s not a great deal of difference between the two and there are pros and cons. The biggest issue is mash tun capacity; batch sparging requires a larger volume of tun. Fly sparging, on the other hand, means you get to play with a cool spinning arm.

Boiling

Once sparged, the sugar-filled water (now called wort) is boiled for a time. This can be done in a (huge) stock pot on the stove or in a single-purpose boiler. I opted for a boiler thinking that would be the easy option; it’s a plastic bucket with a kettle element in the bottom. Oh no. You can use a Burco or one made for brewers. You can have thermostatic or non-thermostatic (useful for warming up your mash water which is sub-100 degrees Celsius). You can have a pre-fitted element or rip one out of a supermarket kettle. You can have 1 element or 2 for faster boiling. I opted for the thermostatically controlled single-element Electrim boiler.

Cleverly, for a single-purpose boiler, the Electrim doesn’t come with any facility to filter out the hops that are added during the boiling process. Hop and Grape sell a strainer, which is basically a few lengths of copper pipe with some holes in.

Once boiled, it is important to cool the wort quickly to achieve the cold break. This can be done quite easily by dumping the bucket into cold water or an ice bath. Alternatively, you can spend a bunch of money on a wort chiller

Fermenting

Once the wort is chilled, then it’s ready for fermenting. There’s not much really to decide here; you want a big bucket…

… a thermometer to check the temperature …

… and an airlock to let the CO2 out.

And the Rest

I already had a hydrometer and long thermometer from my Dad’s brewing collection. Similarly, whilst at the time of ordering I had not decided whether to condition in bottles or a pressure barrel, I knew I could source a pressure barrel at short notice.

To keep the fermenting wort at a constant temperature, I also ordered a 75w thermostatic aquarium heater from a fish shop.

So there it is. I still need to get some plastic tubing for the sparge arm and wort chiller, as well as some insulation for the fermenting bin. Brew day is Sunday, and I will hopefully update the blog and twitter as the day progresses.

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