Outdoor brewery build

[Jocky]

With moving to a house and out of my 1st floor flat, there was always going to be a brewery upgrade and I thought I'd document it here.

My basic aims are as follows:

1. Bigger batches.
On a gas stove I could only reliably boil an 11 litre pot. With boil off, trub and loss to hops that would be about 6 litres bottled which is not really enough. Equally I don't want massive batches - bottling 15 litres would be fine by me, as I drink nearly all of it.

2. Put it outside.
I don't want to make the kitchen floor sticky any more on brew/bottling days. That goes for fermentation too - I don't want the eggier yeasts stinking the house up.

3. More flexibility in brewing
I've been through the full range of kits, extract, BIAB, but now I have the room to have something somewhat permanent it's time to go 3 vessel.

More to come very soon!

[Lime Corridor]

Good luck, sounds like a plan. I have brewed outside for the last three years - sometimes under a giant tarp if needs be to escape the weather - and I love it!

LC

[timbobist]

Brewing 6 litre batches wow! You will be able to quadruple your output! Good luck man.

[gibbiem]

I brew in the shed. Bit of a squeeze but doesn't matter if I make a mess etc. House is on the market and our next will have a garage and that's what I'm gonna use. The shed is spot on though

[Jocky]

Brewing 6 litre batches wow! You will be able to quadruple your output! Good luck man.

6 litres into bottles - sometimes up to 7, but it was never about the volume, it was always about the craft and process, and making something different - I've never made a session beer or a clone of something for this reason. And even 6 litres can seem like a lot of beer when it's 7%+!

[Kev888]

Sounds good! Larger batches are much more efficient in terms of time and effort so I like to brew favourite, tested recipes in reasonable quantity. It would be good to keep your ability to do small batches too though, to keep the variety and experimentation going.

One thing I would say after moving out to the garage; consider services and waste water - particularly if you're upscaling it can be a pain to get things to and from where you're brewing. For modest sized batches it may not be a big problem, but things like enough electricity and mains water could still be helpful, and some form of drainage or return hose if you use water to cool.

I thought I'd sorted mine with various food grade hoses initially... until they froze in winter, so I ended up digging a trench out there to bury the pipes. In my case a bigger armoured cable would have been a good idea too, but I didn't want the expense under part P.

Cheers
Kev

[Jocky]

I have actually made some good progress so far.

Before I could figure out what to build I had to figure out where I could use the kit.

Luckily the house already has a shed. Unluckily its 110 feet away from the house at the bottom of the garden, small, and not in the best of shape. So getting that up and running would require running electricity and ideally water to the bottom of the garden, not to mention possibly adding drainage too as well as fixing up/replacing the structure itself. I decided it was a non starter.

So really the only option was to brew on the patio at the back of the house, and build some kind of storage chest/mini shed that the kit could be housed inside.

At this point I needed to figure out how much space I needed. After going through a few recipes I decided that having all three vessels (HLT, MT, Kettle) contain 33 litres gave me huge flexibility in a relatively compact package.

Having figured out the height of stand I'd need on my top tier, I ended up finding this as a housing option:



Reading the internal dimensions, it's tall enough to store a 3 tier stand in there with a fermenter on the floor below the boiler, and enough other space to store the rest of my kit.

Next: Power! and Building the Brew Cupboard

[gibbiem]

Looks good that mate, where did you get that?

[Kev888]

Good stuff - looks a little low but if it all works out then it sounds very reasonable! Certainly preferable to a distant shed with no services IMO, if you can choose fine days to brew on.

If heights do make a pure gravity system awkward for any reason, you could perhaps consider pumping from the HLT. I've found it to be a particularly trouble-free place for a pump, since its pre boil and only water so cleaning is easy, the temperatures aren't too challenging and it won't suffer or cause problems pulling against grain or hop filters. But I agree the simplicity of gravity is quite satisfying, if that can all fit.

Cheers
Kev

[Jocky]

Looks good that mate, where did you get that?

http://www.gardenbuildingsdirect.co.uk/ ... orage-Unit

A quick Google should find you a 20% off voucher too.

[Jocky]

Good stuff - looks a little low but if it all works out then it sounds very reasonable! Certainly preferable to a distant shed with no services IMO, if you can choose fine days to brew on.

It's low, but the top is only the top of the brew stand - the HLT will sit on top of that. I have a pump coming anyway to cover all eventualities.

[Jocky]

With the brew house construction decided I realised I needed some outdoor power to run fermenter heaters from at the least, and as I was going to get a sparky in I might as well do it properly and have a dedicated 32 amp circuit installed, allowing me to run two elements simultaneously with headroom safely.
So bring on the commando plugs!



In fact while the electrician was around my shed arrived, and I decided I needed to get on and build it, which meant that on last Thursday I went from this:



To this:

[minesapint]

I keep all of my paraphernalia in the garage but do my mash and boil in a polythene greenhouse that I set up in the back garden.
It keeps all the steam and smells out of the house.
Once the boil and sparge are finished the poly greenhouse goes back into the bag and out of the way.
The greenhouse is only about 5 x 5 foot but plenty big enough for the boiler, buckets and headroom for an adult.

If anyone does try using a poly greenhouse like myself, keep the electrics well away from the walls and off the floor. Shield any connections from water drips coming off the ceiling.
It gets a bit like a sauna in there when the boil is in full flow and the condensation is incredible.
Cheers.

[Jocky]

Had a bit of a break while I wait for my vessels to be prepared by MrLard and HomeBrewBuilder.

As mentioned I'm getting three vessels at 33 litres each, and pretty much went for 'the works' on all of them. I blame the wife for this - when I was originally looking at some 2nd hand equipment the following exchange happened:

Me: "I'm just deciding whether I want this particular 2nd hand kit or something else"
Her: "How much is it?"
Me: "£200"
Her: "Is that all? This is your hobby, you could spend more than that"

...and that opened the floodgates to me speccing out a bespoke 3 vessel system.

[Jocky]

So what is on the way is:

• A hot liquor tank with a 2.4Kw element, 2 piece tap, sight tube and built in temperature dial.
• A mash tun thermos pot with a bottom draining 2 piece tap, false bottom and temperature dial.
• A boiler with a 2.4 Kw element, 2 piece tap, sight tube and built in temperature dial.

Plus:

• A huge hop filter for the boiler
• The biggest plate chiller MrLard had
• A pump for mucking about with recirculation
• Camlocks for everything - big bore ones for the hose barbs
• Silicon hose for everything
• A grain mill

Expecting this lot to be delivered next week.

I've had HBB fit together the vessels because I don't trust myself to not wreck nice shiny pots while drilling holes in them, plus I have plenty enough building work to do to assemble this lot and fabricate my own three tier stand.