hey, I live in colombia south america and am having trouble finding everything I need to put together a lauter tun. I can get my hands on an overpriced picnic cooler no problem, the problem is finding food safe stuff for the manifold. thus far I’ve only been able to find bronze fittings for gas lines. after spending an hour in the store playing with them I couldn’t put together a doable set up to drain out of the cooler. (the fittings are made with the idea that you will run lines between them, not assemble them together).
my thoughts to address this are to do a combination of the double bucket and cooler idea. essentially use a bucket with a false bottom inside the cooler and somehow setting up a way for it to sit a bit above the bottom of the cooler. it may look funny but as long as the grain sits in there I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. there’s no reason why this won’t work right? the benefit is I could also leave the drain spigot in place and double the cooler as my bottling bucket as well.
I’m going to try to get my hands on a food grade plastic bucket, if I can’t how much trouble could I really be in without it being food grade? on a further note as far as fermentation vessels, right now I can only get ahold of #7 plastic jugs. The only other option I’ve run across is buying big (I’d say roughly 3 gallon) plastic vases. Obviously none of this is ideal or what I would want, but how bad is non food grade plastic really?
Might be an interesting opportunity to make a hybrid BIAB/ mash tun. Get a cooler and some nylon curtain material (might be easier to find than manifold parts). A needle and heavy thread and make a bag to fit the cooler. Get a baking pan that fits your cooler, round or square. Drill some holes in it for flow and devise some sort of short legs to get the pan false bottom an inch or two off the bottom (Ive used bolts in the past). The pan will make a nice false bottom, and the bag will keep the gran from clogging the outlet and will act as the filter screen. Batch sparge and you wont have to worry so much about the flow characteristics of a batch sparge. If for any reason the bag manages to work its way between the cooler wall and the false bottom to clog the drain,(although I doubt this will happen often) just a slight lift on the drain side of the bag will clear it. It’s just a BIAB setup in a cooler instead of a pot. Although the traditional BIAB pot version will work as well, but in my experience, I had a harder time controlling the temps in the pot as opposed to a cooler.
Hope this helps or gives you any ideas.
If you’re using a BIAB bag, then you might as well no-sparge it as well. This eliminates the need for a false bottom or manifold. That’s how I handle my all-grain batches. I do 3-gallon batches, and I mash with the full volume of brewing liquor in a 5-gallon cooler lined with a BIAB bag. At the end of the mash, I runoff to my kettle, set my bag on a colander over my cooler to drain, then press down on it hard to give it a good squeeze and get as much liquor out of the grains as possible.
It gets more unwieldy with larger matches, but my kettle efficiency is consistently in the 80% range. It works quite well for me.