DaveT’s Brewery

I started kits and malt extract in 1983 to save money for a mortgage. Once I got the house I tried all grain brewing in an effort to avoid that extract taste you used to always get. It appealed to my technical bent as my background is electronics and my work is mainly about temperature control and gas and liquid flows. A contact in a big brewery offered me some old controllers that they were scrapping. I modified fridges and brew bins; I struggled with mash temp control and sparging/boiling methods. I was storing my equipment in a spare bedroom where I fermented, and brewed in the kitchen, much to my wife’s displeasure. I went from bottling to kegging in Cornelius kegs.

In 1997 we restructured our house and I got to build a brewery. It is a room, area just over 12 sq meters, inside the house with its own fuse box. I painted the floor and put water resistant paint on the walls and ceiling. My wife, a food scientist, urged me to convert from plastic to SS (stainless steel) vessels as much as possible to avoid the "house flavour" caused by plastic.

I had some of the equipment already, but with this "blank canvass" I created new, automated and back saving systems, including a rail on the ceiling with a runner and a block and tackle to aid shifting fermenters and Cornelius kegs about. The mash tun moves up and down easily using pulleys and counterweights to save my back when emptying. A floor drain has also proved invaluable. I added extra systems over the years and am reasonably happy with it now. I never stop learning though.

I have brewed Stouts, Ales, Lagers, Wheat beers (Wyeast Weihenstephan wheat), Herb/Spice beers, Gruit beers, Fruit beers, and (Home and Bamburg) Smoked beer. I only use sugars if the recipe stipulates it e.g. candy sugar in Belgian beers. My favourite recipes include Belgians and Pale Ales.

Over the years I have used yeasts from bottles, breweries, Wyeast and most recently and most satisfactorily in dried blocks by mail order (Fermentis K97).

Base malt comes in bulk annually from Greencore, speciality malts from breweries or by mail order. Hops from my bine or mail order. I run my water through a charcoal filter which vents to drain regularly to prevent it growing algae/moulds. The steriliser I use at the moment is Ritchies Steriliser and Cleaner, from the Country Cellar, bought in bulk.

In the following articles I have outlined my systems. It may be difficult to envisage the brewery as a whole. If anybody wants to build any of these I can supply more details and circuit diagrams. I have created a specific brewing email address for myself for that purpose: DaveTbrew@gmail.com

Editor’s note: All of the images in this article are thumbnails. Please click on them to see the full images, you’ll need to! There is also a slide show with a full set of photos available by clicking here.

Malt Mill.

Virtually any hand cranked malt mill can be motorised. I rescued a washing machine motor, belt and pulley from the dump. I had a coupling welded to the large drum pulley so I could couple it to the mill shaft in place of the hand cranking handle. I then mounted the lot on a "table" I made from Unistrut and wood and added a 10kg wooden hopper.

The gap between the rollers should be adjustable and set to just crack open the husks. If set too wide your efficiency drops, if too narrow you get set mashes. Do not buy a mill with a set gap! Simple Corona mills are sometimes used but if you are going to buy and motorise a mill, buy a decent one designed for malt. You plug in the motor and the mill turns, crushing the malt in the hopper into a brewing bin positioned beneath. I mill the malt twice to get greater efficiency. I put on the bin lid, which is virtually air tight to keep it fresh until I am ready to mash, usually the next morning.

If milling wheat you may need to mix it with barley malt to avoid jamming the mill by sending too many of the very hard wheat grains through the rollers per second. Raw wheat is even harder but a fellow brewer found that soaking them first made them more manageable.

 

Mashing.

The hot liquor tank (HLT), the mash tun, the boiler and the fermenters are all arranged from the ceiling to the floor to use gravity instead of pumps as much as possible and to allow me to keep going in case of a power cut.

The heart is obviously the mash Tun. I use a stainless steel mash vessel with handles front and back, and hoist points an either side. It has a removable perforated SS base inside and an outlet port in the centre of the bottom of the keg. This port is attached by a 10 mm SS pipe to a plastic tap mounted at the side of the keg. The tun can be lowered with the aid of ropes, pulleys and counter weights to make emptying and cleaning easier.

The HLT has pre-heated filtered water, under time switch control, to a temperature that will result in approx. 66C when the grain is added (via a top port in the tun lid), a standard infusion mash.

We know the mash should ideally last 90 minutes. Although SS is a poor conductor of heat, and although I have insulated it, there is some heat loss so temperature control is necessary. To maintain the required mash temperature, I use four temperature sensors (PT100s connected together so as to give the average temp throughout the tun), stirring and direct steam injection controlled by a temperature controller. To prevent local burning, a large SS paddle rotates at 60 RPM whenever the steam is being injected. If no steam is required for more than 15 minutes, a timer turns on the stirring to ensure an even temp throughout. It continues stirring until the steam turns on and then off.

If I am mashing a wheat beer I may start and maintain at a lower temp to cater for the wheat (protein rest at 50C). I can then increase the temperature using steam injection as described above. If desired I can do a step mash for lager production although modern malt is so well modified the only advantage would be for slightly better head retention and perhaps a little maltier flavour.

At the end of the mash I use a food grade pump to pump the tun outlet back up to just below the water/grain level in the top of the tun for up to 30 mins. This pumps up most of the small grain particles that are at the bottom to the top of the grain bed until it runs clear. As it is pumped back in below the water/grain level, hot side aeration, which imparts a cardboard flavour, is prevented. This recirculation helps produce a clearer beer.

Meanwhile the HLT has been refilled and heated with sparge water. The best way to sparge is to keep the water level above the level of the grain, thereby preventing the production of dry cracks or channels through which the sparge water will flow, reducing sparge efficiency. To achieve this automatically I use two level sensing probes, attached via circuitry to two solenoid valves (SVs) which control the sparge water inlet and the mash tun outlet. The mash tun outlet is by now piped to the boiler. If the two sensors are wet, the inlet from the HLT is turned off while the outlet to the boiler is left on. This lowers the level until the upper sensor becomes dry when the HLT outlet is turned on again. If it happens that both sensors are dry, for example when the HLT is empty, the tun outlet to the boiler is shut off, maintaining the level. In that particular case (end of sparge) I bypass the tun outlet control, draining the remaining liquid to the boiler.

My maximum grain bill is 12kg. From that I end up fermenting 50 Litres at approximately 1.054.

 

The Hot Liquor Tank.

I modified a large red screw top barrel as follows: Filtered water is plumbed in via a SV. A switch turns the water on and off, but if left on a level switch turns it off via the SV before it overflows. An outlet tap feeds the mash tun. A pipe up along the outside acts as a sight glass. It is graduated from 0 to 36 litres. A temperature sensor and a kettle element control the temperature via a temperature controller. Another level switch, positioned low down turns off the heat before the heater becomes uncovered as the water runs out. This is to prevent heater burn-out. A temp trip is attached to the outside to protect against overheats in case of controller/sensor failure.

 

The Steam Generator.

I modified a pressure cooker as follows: I made a 1/4" steam outlet port above the water level which is connected to an SV. The outlet of that SV is plumbed to the top of the mash tun. Inside the tun a stainless steel tube brings it down to around the bottom of the mash tun. This tube has holes of increasing sizes drilled in it to let the steam out into the grain. The stirring is always on when the steam is being injected to prevent local overheating. Injecting boiling water would raise the temp of the grain but would also dilute the mash too much. Steam, on the other hand, will heat the grain more, due to the extra energy given off when the steam condenses. This is the extra energy absorbed when changing from water into steam in the steam generator. It dilutes it by only approx two litres.

I heat the steam generator with natural gas via a ring it sits on. Obviously this would all be dangerous had I not kept the safety features of the original pressure cooker; the pressure indicator/steam release and also the over pressure release valve. As an indicator I have a temp sensor in the lid to monitor how close to boiling it is. At 15 PSI it reads about 110C; hotter than boiling water.

 

The Boiler

I use a stainless steel vessel with handles. A stainless steel band is welded to the top to increase its volume. There is a perforated stainless steel filter inside, across the bottom, with a stainless steel 10 mm siphon tube attached to a stainless steel tap in the side of the boiler. When filling I connect a transparent tube to the tap, attach it vertically to the side of the vessel and use it as a sight glass. I heat it with a high output natural gas ring and monitor it with a long stainless steel temperature sensor. This means I can save time by having full heat on till near boiling and then turn it down as it approaches boiling to ensure it doesn’t boil over. Over the boiler is a hood attached to an extractor fan to the outside. As I sparge, it fills up to approx 2/3 full. In the meantime I have refilled and heated the HLT. I boil for 90 minutes and can add hops at the start and during/at the end of the boil. When the boil is over I top it up to full with the pre-heated HLT water, while stirring. I then allow it to settle for 30 minutess before chilling the outlet flow to the fermenters.

 

Chilling the wort.

I use a wide bore (copper inner, diameter:3/8", plastic outer diameter: 1")  standard design, counter-flow wort chiller. The threaded brass end fittings I got from Norgren and brazed them to ensure a seal .It sits on a removable shelf that can be suspended from the boiler table. Hot wort from the boiler flows in one end and chilled wort flows out into the fermenter from the other end. Normally tap water is used as a coolant but nowadays that seems very wasteful and also somewhat limited in Summer.

I use a glycol chiller instead of tap water. The chilled glycol flows in the opposite direction to the wort. I use a large drum with water and glycol, previously cooled by a refrigeration system. This same refrigeration system can be used to air condition the brewery if need be. The compressor and condenser are mounted on the outside of the brewery wall.

A powerful pump recirculates the glycol out of and back into the drum, causing stirring. A thermocouple temp sensor connected to a temp controller allows me to cool the glycol anywhere down to -9.9C. The outlet of the pump is teed off in two directions. Each flow direction goes through a different SV. These two SVs are controlled by a temperature controller. The controller’s thermocouple sensor is positioned in the silicone chiller outlet pipe into the fermenter. If you position it too near the chiller outlet it is affected by the temp variations of the brass fittings. If the wort outlet into the fermenter is above the set point, all the cold glycol is directed by the SVs through the counter-flow wort chiller, lowering the wort outlet temp into the fermenter. If the wort outlet into the fermenter is below the set point all the cold glycol is directed by the SVs directly back to the drum, bypassing the counter flow wort chiller, so the wort outlet temp to the fermenter rises. Thus if I set e.g. 20C on the controller, the wort chiller outlet temp oscillates around 20C resulting in a fermenter wort temp of approx 20C. This can be read by a sensor in the fermenter thermowell, and transmitted by wireless to me wherever I am in the house. This allows me to do other important tasks (such as watch TV) until the fermenter is full. If the resulting fermenter temp is unsatisfactory I can vary the set point to correct it.

 

Fermenters.

I got an experienced stainless steel (tig) welder to modify Cornelius kegs. I got him to cut off the domed bottom and put on a conical bottom with a flat end and a threaded outlet port.

Onto this port I attached a food grade plastic elbow attached to a food grade plastic tap.  Just above the top of the cone I got him to put a "thermowell&quot$$ a tubular pocket to take a temp sensor and thus to sense the wort temp without the sensor getting wet/compromising the sterility of the wort.

Near the top I put a sampling port which allowed some fermented/fermenting wort to be taken to check the gravity and cleanliness.

I modified the top of the Corny to block the gas in and liquid out with silicone. I also modified the lid to allow gas out only through a silicone pipe which bubbled into water as an airlock. I wrapped the element from an electric blanket around the outside as a heater. This coupled with a sensor in the thermowell allows controlled heating in the winter. I have not used this for many years as I now ferment in fridges. Even in the winter they maintain 20C as the internal fan dissipates enough heat.

I use a sensor in the thermowell to monitor the fermentation temp to allow me to control it by varying the temp in the fermentation fridge.

 

Fermenter filling.

The counter-flow wort chiller outlet flows via an SV and a short silicone hose going through a modified Corny lid fitted to the top of a sterilised fermenter. As it is short, the cooled wort drops some distance, aerating it somewhat. A transmitter gives me the temp of a sensor in the fermenter thermowell by wireless telemetry wherever I am in the house. Positioned in this modified lid is a level sensor probe. When the fermenter is full this probe gets wet and the circuitry turns off the SV, preventing an overflow. When this happens I get a wireless signal to let me know it is full.

I then swap to fill another sterilised fermenter and use bottled oxygen via a stainless steel sparger to oxygenate the first fermenter of wort. This readies it for pitching the yeast. Before pitching I take a sample from the sampling port and I measure the (original) gravity. I then put the fermenters into the fermentation fridges (with the aid of my ceiling hoist and runner) with the ends of their airlock tubes immersed in water. I also put sensors into each of their thermowells which are attached to a display. This allows me to vary the fridge set temp to maintain the desired fermentation temp.

This all takes eight hours approx, on a good day.

 

Kegging

When fermentation is complete the gravity measured from the fermenter sampling port will stop changing and will hopefully be well below 1.010.

At that point I remove the fermenters from the fermentation fridges and move them to a kegging table with the aid of the ceiling hoist and rail. There I sterilise their outlet taps, Cornelius kegs and associated equipment to be used. I allow the yeast out of the conical bottom of the fermenter to flow to waste. I used to use it for the next brew but this increases the chance of a spoilt brew caused by an infection. Then I allow the rest of the fermenter contents to fill the keg via a wide bore transfer tube with a nylon filter bag tapped to the outlet of it in the keg. This bag catches any large flocks of yeast/trub that could cause a cloudy beer or block the keg outlet. I add Isinglass and if desired, dry hop by hanging a muslin hop bag from a hook welded to the inside of the keg lid. I then use CO2 to pressurise the keg, venting the air and shake it to mix in the Isinglass. I repeat with the other two fermenters to two other kegs as before. I then label the three kegs and put them in a storage or serving fridge under CO2 pressure. Then the clean up starts. This all takes two hours.

 

 

Fridges and freezers.

There are 3 fridges, one fridge freezer and a freezer.

Large fridge: This is in fact a large laboratory freezer I have modified. Set to 4ºC and plumbed for CO2 with 6 outlets for 6 Cornies. Beer will keep for months under these conditions. I keep my yeast in this fridge. It has a defrost cycle.

Bosch fermenter fridge: This is modified with a sensor, fan and a temp controller. It holds two fermenters and is wired with two sensors, connected to a readout unit.

LMS fermenter fridge: This fridge is modified with a sensor, fan and a temp controller. It holds one fermenter and is wired with a sensor, connected to a readout unit.

Fridge freezer: This is my serving fridge. It is modified with a sensor, fan and a temp controller. It is plumbed with CO2 and can hold four kegs. It has connections to four taps and is set to between 2 and 4ºC. It has a mechanical indicator sitting on the top of it. It defrosts via an evaporator heater once every 24 hours.  he freezer compartment is used to hold hops, Irish moss etc.

The small freezer in the shed holds hops.

 

Air conditioner.

This has set temperature and, fan speed control and can be time switched.

High pressure indicator lights on chiller controller will indicate if the fan is gone outside or the condenser blocked. The low pressure indicator lights will indicate if there is a gas leak on the refrigeration system, or if the re-injection solenoid valve is not operating.

 

The Loaner.

The loaner is a temperature controlled fridge on wheels with a tap on the door. Inside or outside it sits a C02 cylinder and regulator. Inside are one or two kegs of beer, a rinse liquid vessel and the gas/liquid plumbing. The purpose of this unit is to allow me to give beer away to friends/relatives and can be used at a party or just for somebody’s personal consumption.

 

Safety

Naturally safety is of paramount importance; hence I use several lines of defence:

Modified smoke alarm: You can buy a smoke alarm which has an output/input to set off or be set off by another similar type alarm. These are usually sold as a pack of 2. By inclusion of a very small amount of circuitry including a relay, this output can switch off the earth leakage circuit breaker in the brewery, thereby removing the power to all sockets in the brewery.

A 1 hour fire door.

Natural gas detector: This is arranged to cut off the gas supply and switch on a large extractor fan.

 

Growing Hops

I have two plants, a Hallertaur that Clive La Pensée (the English home brewing author) gave me and a Northdown rescued from the last hop garden in Ireland, just before it was sprayed with herbicide. The Hallertaur is 10 years old and is so well established it needs to be controlled more than anything else, as it shoots and spreads. Once you get the hop plant established, with some structure to climb, it takes care of itself. I use a telegraph pole with a length of old central heating gun barrel through it at the top, forming a T. I have wires attached to this T, running down and attached to bricks, buried in the ground. The hops climb (in a clockwise direction) up these wires, along the gun barrel and also up the pole.

You should water it in dry spells and if you feed it, you do get a better crop. At harvest time I pick and dry using a drying box I made. It is a large wooden box with a door, a light and a window at the front. Inside are expanded aluminium shelves. A hot air blower (a domestic "space heater", its thermostat bypassed) is controlled by a temp controller via a temp sensor. 30C is ideal and can take up to 8 hours for a full load. I then weigh, bag, label and freeze them. It’s lovely to brew a beer with your own hops but gauging the bitterness can be hit and miss.

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