{"id":1488,"date":"2011-01-09T07:47:49","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T12:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/?p=1488"},"modified":"2020-04-09T07:29:27","modified_gmt":"2020-04-09T11:29:27","slug":"upgraded-brewpot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/2011\/01\/09\/upgraded-brewpot\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgraded Brewpot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I made a pretty significant upgrade to my brewing rig yesterday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I make my beer in five gallon batches. Because my biggest pot had a five gallon capacity, I had to use what’s called the “partial boil” technique. This means that I would boil perhaps 3 gallons of water – plus all the other ingredients. At the end of the brewing process, I would transfer everything to the primary fermenter (a six gallon bucket) and top it up to five gallons from the tap. There are a couple of potential problems with this. One was sanitation: I could either boil and then cool a couple extra gallons in a second pot, or else take the risk of contamination from un-boiled water. Another problem was more subtle – experienced brewers claim that partial boil leads to darker, more burnt tasting beers – something to do with the ratio of surface area to volume on the pot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any event, an upgraded brew kettle was the next logical step in my hobby. Jen provided the incentive \/ excuse with a holiday gift, the weldless kettle valve<\/a>, that would allow me to drain five gallons of liquid without lifting and tipping the pot. This is a huge advantage for the solo brewer. Five gallons of beer is about 40 pounds of unwieldy, potentially sticky stuff. A little spillage is unavoidable when you’re brewing – but so far I’ve managed to avoid catastrophic batch loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An aside: This was the year of small gifts that led to a big, geeky, moderately expensive upgrade and days of blissful hobbyshopping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went to the local brewing store<\/a> and picked up a 30 quart (7.5 gallon), stainless steel pot, as well as the ingredients to do the Brown Ale from Sam Calagione<\/a>‘s book. I’ve decided to work through the recipes in that book, in order, to expand my repertoire. For the record, mad props to the staff at Homebrew Emporium<\/a>. It’s a store run by, and for, people who make our own beer. I walked in intending to go minimal and purchase the 24 quart pot. Two different employees stopped me and said, basically, “look – you’re scaling up. We’ve been there. Soon you’ll be doing all-grain recipes. The 30 quart pot is what you want – and we’ll give a 5% discount so they’re the same price. You seriously want the extra space.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I then went to Home Depot and tried to find the equipment to drill through stainless steel. I had to put a hole in the pot for the valve to go through. The hole had to be 7\/8″, which is BIG for metal rated drill bits. I wound up getting a decent set of carbide bits that top out at 1\/2″, and a single 7\/8″ that explicitly does not support stainless. I took the opportunity to upgrade my ear protection as well. That was a good idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The procedure for drilling through stainless steel is as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* Mark a starter notch so the bit won’t “walk”
* Go slow. If you see smoke, that’s bad. The steel will “work harden” and turn black if overheated. Also, you’ll ruin your drill bit.
* Use heavy pressure.
* Use lots of lubricant.
* Drill a small starter hole, and work up incrementally to the actual hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I started here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Drilled and cussed and sweated. Stainless is some tough and unforgiving stuff!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

And finally got the thing right and installed!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Amazingly enough, for anyone who has seen me work with actual physical tools, it held water!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The only appropriate way to celebrate this sort of victory is to use it. A friend gave me some insulation a while ago that he had used to conserve fuel while camping. I made a little jacket out of it. I have no idea how much this helps – but I was able to sustain a good rolling boil on a single burner of my stove.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One other upgrade was to use a “rice ball” instead of a muslin sack to hold the whole leaf hops. Beer is basically grain soup, infused with hops. This let me get the hops back out of solution without a bunch of filtering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Once the batch was done and cooled, the valve came in very handy! Usually at this point I have to pour the wort through a filter into a bucket, and then through a funnel into a carboy. Instead, I used a length of high temperature silicone tubing and just shoved it in the threaded attachment of the valve. I was dubious – but it worked fine. No fancy attachments required!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Fermentation kicked off almost immediately, and it’s happily doing its thing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I made a pretty significant upgrade to my brewing rig yesterday. I make my beer in five gallon batches. Because my biggest pot had a five gallon capacity, I had to use what’s called the “partial boil” technique. This means that I would boil perhaps…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brewing","category-hobbies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1488"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1489,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions\/1489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}