The Kettle
The most widely used kettles are the Tesco / Asda Smart Price kettles. However, I can’t get hold of these (a reoccurring theme in London) so I was forced to find an alternative. Basically any cheap kettle will do with an exposed element with long enough power pins. By this I mean that the pins are long enough to attach a kettle plug (see image 1). They are probably about 1cm, but i don't have it here to measure. The kettle I got came from argos:
Argos Value Range White Cordless Kettle. 421/9639 (£4.79)
http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/p ... KETTLE.htm
Once you have the kettle unscrew everything. Later I snapped off the surplus to plastic and removed the auto shut off mechanism. (see image 5).
- 1. Pins on base of kettle. 2. The element, electrics and silicon 'doughnut'
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I made both a HLT and a boiler using difference bins. The HLT is made using a standard youngs brewing bin and the boiler with a H&G 10 gallon bucket which is made of much thicker plastic. Hop and grape fitted a boiler tap to this bucket for free. I did once try using the youngs bin as a boiler and whilst it worked fine the bin did become quite flimsy, I doubt it would stand up to long term use.
10 GALLON BUCKET (£17.99)
http://www.hopandgrape.co.uk/catalog/de ... =FER374247
BOILER TAP (£9.99)
http://www.hopandgrape.co.uk/catalog/de ... OTH2156036
5 GALLON / 23 litre BUCKET (£11.99)
http://www.hopandgrape.co.uk/catalog/de ... =FER374247
Assembly
The bit that I couldn’t get my head round before I did it was how to create the water tight seal. In retrospect it’s very easy; all you are doing is replacing the plastic of the kettle for the plastic of your bin. To do this there is a silicone ‘doughnut’ supplied with the kettle (see image 3). Measure this doughnut and use the appropriate sized drill. I measured mine to be 40mm, but I could only get a 38mm drill bit. This worked fine and provided a nice snug fit (see image below). The drill bit was actually quite expensive (£6.99) but I’m sure I will make many boilers out of it for others. I used a cheap cordless drill from sainsburys (£10)
Once you have screwed it all together you can add an optional cover. One quick and easy way is to use the base of a 1pt plastic milk carton, which you just cut and screw on. In my boiler I used plastic rice pudding pots which looked really neat, although I must admit these fell off so I need to find a better way to attach them rather than silicone which was not up to the job (was thinking no more nails?)
- Clockwise: 3. Silicone Doughnut in hole. 4. Covers on boiler 5. Electrics with shutoff and surplus plasic removed
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The boiler has two elements, both are used to bring the wort up to the boil and then one is switched off. This gives a good rolling boil without the need for a thermostat. Those I know who have the H&G boiler with thermostat and two elements don’t seem to think its any use anyway. As you can see I have yet to fit a hop strainer, I just let it flow through a sieve with a grain bag in it. I have not found that the tap gets blocked, although for ease of use I do plan to make one. As mentioned earlier the youngs brewing bin is fine as a HLT but I would not use as a boiler long term. I recalibrated the HLT to zero at tap level using Graham Wheelers method of weighing out litre measurements and then extrapolating with a tape measure (image 7).
- 6. 19l brew length in the boiler 7. Recalibrating HLT to zero at tap
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