Apparently I hate money because I’m talking myself into throwing a wad away on upgrading from keggles.
I’m inclined toward Blichmann primarily because their thermometer face can be positioned to where i dont have to get on my knees to read it. But I’ve never used one and as you know they are the most expensive. It would be so nice to have a resource like Consumer Reports for Homebrewers…
So what brand of boil kettle/mash tun do you recommend?
Apologies to Denny, et al., but I just can’t bring myself to use a plastic cooler mash tun. They hold heat better than anything, but even in the face of scientific evidence I would feel that carcinogens or other nastiness would be leaching into my beer. Irrational or not, that is not an option for me. Chalk it up to OCD.
Steve, I use the economy morebeer 15 gallon kettle with a fixed face blichmann brewmometer, stainless ball valve, and I use a dome false bottom from morebeer. I mash with recirculation and a low flame to control the temp. Ive recently played with step mashing and it works but takes attention. A digital igniter would solve that.
So, get a 15 gallon blichmann boiler maker with flexible faced brewmometer and their false bottom, and a tower of power for temp control. Then when you up grade again call me, I’ll take all of your hand me downs
I went restaurant supply house and got some awesome heavy duty 15 gallon SS pots, bought the ball valves, etc from suppliers on sale, took everything to my welder/machine shop buddy and had him do all the mounting/drilling/etc, half the price of pre fab and couldn’t be happier:)
It would be cool though if there was a resource like that focusing on brewing equipment
As I brew in my garage for all the neighbors to see, I can relate. I get a lot of stares and I attribute part of it to the fact that it’s a hacked together system with a beer keg and whole lot of copper. “Must be making liquor or meth.” A proper kettle adds some legitimacy to the operation.
It depends on the ambient temp. Also pumping moves a 1/2" thick stream through about 10’ of tubing and the pump, so not much mass while its in there. Before I got the pump I used my yoga mat MT cozy (see last year’s zymurgy gadget issue). In that mode with ~45º weather I might lose a couple degrees in an hour. With my direct fire recirculation method I set the flame as low as it will go without dying. If its really cold out I might have to turn it up a little. My false bottom is the morebeer dome that draws from the center. I think its about 12" across. Ideally I’d like to have one that covers the entire bottom, but its not been an issue so I haven’t spent the money.
I currently use keggles and I was thinking of changing to a nice kettle when I convert to electric later this winter. However, my mind changed when I lifted up a 15 (or 20?) gallon Mega Pot at Northern Brewer and realized that the weight factor would disappear rather quickly once I added in valves similar to what I have on my keggles. I do agree on the bling factor though. My keggles are not bright and shiny. End of the day I’m just going to convert my keggles to electric this winter and move on. I guess I could always polish them for the bling factor.
Steve, you could also go with the heavy duty pots like the morebeer ones and take them to a body shop and have them polished. Shiny like chrome equals cool.
Yeah, for a total cost of around $900, 48% of my brain says it isn’t worth the money to buy new. I could polish the keggles (I already wire-brushed them so they don’t look horrible).
But honestly another part I didn’t mention is the whole stealing the kegs part. I didn’t know that when I bought them off of Craigslist. When I learned that I even went to the local distributor to see how I could pay AB/InBev for them - they told me I couldn’t.
I do want to keep one which is from Bert Grants though. Partly because it was purchased legitimately, but mainly for the historical connection. I plan to use it for the HLT.
Keggles have to be one of the worst options for homebrewing and moving to a more appropriate kettle configuration is a good idea. The tall, skinny configuration of a keggle presents a number of problems. First, the small bottom area exposed to the heat source reduces the amount of heat transferred to the wort. Secondly, the stainless steel material is also a poor heat conductor. Thirdly, the narrow interior diameter means that the trub is more likely to cover more of the bottom of the keggle and make it more difficult to get all the wort out of the vessel without sucking up trub.
I recommend that you consider a big aluminum pot for use as a kettle. The aluminum has a much better heat transfer coefficient. If you get a BIG pot, then the diameter is more likely to enable more of that trub to stay in the middle of the kettle after whirlpooling and that can allow the brewer to get more of their valuable wort out cleanly.
Let’s look at kettle configurations in most pro-breweries. They almost always have a MUCH larger diameter in comparison to the depth of wort they contain. For instance, 6- to 12-foot diameters and only 2 or 3 feet of wort depth. Compare that to a keggle with a 1- to 1.5-foot diameter and a 1.5- to 2-foot wort depth. Homebrewers should consider that in selecting kettles. When a homebrewer opens up their kettle material to include aluminum, then real cost savings can be produced and that can be converted to purchasing a larger diameter kettle that moves their brewing configuration closer to what the big boys already know. Employing a 15- to 20-gallon, large diameter kettle is a good idea…even for 5 gallon batches.
I’m really not following your logic, Martin. I’ve never seen a keggle fail to boil well. In fact, I’ve had more problems with wide pots, both with heat loss and excessive boil off. Most burners don’t produce a flame any wider than the keggle bottom, and the skirt is a good wind shield. Even wider pots have problems with whirlpooling at the homebrew batch size, so a filter or hop stopper of some kind can be helpful.
Also don’t agree that the pro kettles are wider than they are tall. Many of them are actually two stories so you’re only seeing the very top of it from the top floor. And if you want to be closer to what the pros use, you would have a stainless kettle.
I think Martin makes some good points about the use of keggles as BKs, but I do believe they make an excellent choice as a mash/lauter tun. For the same reasons he describes, their geometry.
My first kettle was a keggle (that was long before keg theft was a problem). I used my keggle for exactly five batches before giving it away. I would quit brewing before going back to using a keggle.
