A good friend Tracy is an amazing welder and started the works on my new single tier brew system. I don't have the room yet or the funding for a full blown brew sculpture, but I figured I could be using the brew kettle part of it until then (house soon!).
I picked up three kegs on craigslist for $5 each!!! They usually go for $50 to $60 each. The guy was just looking to get rid of them and I was lucky enough to be the first caller. I was seriously watching CL for a good month trying to score some and was always too late.
They'll all be converted to a system much like this:
The automation on the right side will be a little different for my system - I plan on using LOVE controllers and it'll be less fancy/expensive. Plus It'll be more rewarding to put this together myself.
The irony of it all is that I'll be making 'good beer' in MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch kegs.
The progress on the welding for the brew kettle below. So happy about this - full wort boil double batches, and hopefully soon - no more apartment brewing!
As mentioned in a previous post - here is the counterflow wort chiller - I call it 'Godchilla'. It's essentially two 'Ts', 3" worth of 1/2" copper tubing, 2 compression fittings drilled out to 3/8", 23' of 3/8" copper tubing, and 25' of 5/8" garden hose. The fittings are silver soldered together and the copper tubing actually runs inside the garden hose. The way it works is the unfermented beer (wort) is running though the copper tubing, and then water runs in the opposite direction through the hose, never coming in contact with the wort and thus chilling it down to a pitchable temperature for the yeast. It chills the wort in the matter of time it takes to drain through the chiller and into the fermenter. Usually this process would take 30-45 minutes depending on size, with an immersion chiller. There's a little less risk of contamination with the immersion chillers because you leave them in the boil for 10 minutes, but your wort is also sitting outside of a fermenter longer, so it's kind of a wash. Pretty cool stuff -
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