Some of you guys have giant brew set ups. Some of them I have worked on.
Even five gallons is big for me, so I got to thinking. How bout going small? After all its not size that matters, its what you do with it that counts.
Im thinking counter top brewery. Something that I can brew enough beer to fill four or five liter ez cap bottles. Maybe some sort of electric kettle and a two gallon cooler?
There are those electric kettles for tea water but they might need to be modified so the thermostat does not turn it off as soon as it boils.
Or even better some thing that is made up of two kettles one with an electric heat source for the boil and the second with a warmer for the mash tun.
A slick looking stainless steel counter top brewery would be fun!
Im more into the process and the experimenting then I am into having large quantities of beer on hand.
Do a brew in a bag on the stovetop. Throw a few pounds of crushed grain into a straining bag in the pot and hold it at your mash temp then pull it out and rinse it as best you can. Your efficiency will likely be low but you can supplement with DME to get to the OG you’re looking for. Top up the water, boil it, chill it in a water bath, and then dump it into a ported 3 gallon better bottle. Ferment and let it sit and then bottle straight from the better bottle with some carbonation tabs or measured sugar into each of the bottles.
Well, he’s handy. He could design something like a coffee machine. Dump some crushed grain into a basket filter, pour some water into it, push the button and cooled wort trickles out all ready to be fermented.
I actually designed something pretty similar a couple years ago, thinking maybe there would be a market in the Mr. Beer crowd. Got as far as pricing out the components and realized it would cost more to produce than a proper 5 gal AG brewing setup.
Well, a hot-water heater element is easy to wire up and install. At 1500w 2-3 gallons will heat up nicely. Hell- a RIMS or HERMS would be fun. Solder up a copper kettle and hot liquor tank. All electric. Just on a smaller scale.
If all one had to do was 2 gallons it’d be a snap.
I’m also partial to the BIB idea. I think that mash would be manageable- except I’d try two pots- and do a batch brew in bag to maximize extraction.
Well after you put in your ingredients and press the button, the wort travels back in time and magically the output is fully fermented beer in the present time. Only problem is the trip knocks the bubbles out of the beer and so you still have to force carbonate. Unfortunately it is only a 110volt system so the beer can only go back 2 weeks in time.
In my partial mash days, I would mash about 4-6 lbs of grain in my old 5-gallon stock pot/brew kettle. I would preheat my oven to its lowest setting (200F), then mash in in the pot (brew-in-a-bag-style, though I didn’t know that was what it was called), then I would put the pot in the oven and turn the oven off. I imagine that method could be easily employed for 2-3 gallon batches. You could drill out a hole for a weldless ball valve, then attach some kind of SS braid and batch sparge rather than brew-in-a-bag. That’s what I would do. If you already have a suitable pots (one 4L for mashing and one 6L for boiling and HLT would do it), then the total cost would be as little as two weldless ball valves, some SS braids, and a couple fittings and hose clamps. You could ferment in a 3 gal better bottle pretty easily if you kept it to 2-2.5 gal batches. If you went even smaller, you could do the mash in a toaster oven and ferment in a 1 gal glass jug (the kind that fancy apple juice comes in).
In a former life on the forum, an email was sent to this guy with all of the contact info with an offer to try this out and give a fair assessment of the end product since he was pushing it hard on the said forum. Never heard back.
