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Originally Posted by rjnonnie
Thanks for your input JJL.
What do you use as your heat source natural gas, propane?
Do you gravity feed or use a pump?
How are your 30 litre boilers setup? one for boiling your wort and the other one for sparging?
I assume your wort chiller has the cold water running inside the copper tube rather than through a jacket around the outside.
I've read up on various types of setups. The gravity feed seems to be the least expensive and I would prefer to use my natural gas stove as the heat source so I can brew inside.
Some of the equipment I collected over the years consist of a stainless 1/2 barrel and a stainless 5 Gal. vessle elevated on a stand with a built in thermometer.
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The boilers are 3 kW electric Burco (an English make). I use gravity feed, one for the sparge liquor above one used as the mash tun, which drains into a collection pan. I then manually transfer the collected wort into the now empty sparge liquor boiler for the boil. Ideally I would have a system where the wort was boiled in the collecting vessel - I may get around to this when time and funds allow. The wort chiller is just a large coil of ordinary domestic copper water pipe - it works really well, no need to buy those expensive counter-current gadgets. This is another thing worth making if you don't have one - it cools the wort down quickly, reducing the time 'at risk' to bacterial contamination, and it also precipitates out all the proteins and other muck you don't want in the wort before fermentation.
I have an old stone outbuilding about the size of a single garage (used for coal just now) I'm thinking of converting into my own micro-micro-brewery - wouldn't that just be great!
Botnst teased me about growing my own barley. I live in a rural area and my neighbour grows tons of the stuff for cattle feed. It might be interesting to take a few sacks and see if I can actually malt it myself - if this made good beer the cost of brewing would be next to nothing.
rjnonnie, why do you need to brew indoors - could you not use a propane burner outside, or is it just too cold where you are (it is here).