Beer Forum

As much as I would love to tell you all about my rad-as-shit EvenMoreBeer 666-69 Sculpture, in reality I am poor. This may or may not have something to do with me spending my time drinking, brewing, drinking, listening to the BN and sometimes also drinking. In between drinks.

Anyway I feel like we could use a thread for the poor / dumb / lazy to post our cobbled together systems so all may revel in their glory. And give us advice. If you can use words like "welded" or "pump" or "bought legally" this is not the place to post your system. This is a thread for words like "wobbly table" or "back pain". I want to see the awesome clusterfucks you guys are brewing award winning beer on.

Here, I'll start:

This pic kind of sucks since it's just my gear and not a real setup but you get the idea.

Parts:
Turkey fryer and the pot that came with it (HLT)
Converted keg (boil kettle)
Cooler (mash tun)
Some saw horses and a piece of particle board
Random piece of an old grill to stabilize the keggle
A stump

Typical brew day:
* Set up saw horses and board as table. Put burner on top, lift HLT onto it after filling it with 4-5 gallons of water. Heat to strike temp
* Drain into cooler on the ground, dump in grain, wait an hour. Meantime fill HLT with sparge water and hoist it onto the table again
* Lift heavy ass mash tun onto the table. Vorlauf and drain into kettle on the ground, dump HLT water into mash tun, drain again (I batch sparge)
* Move burner to the ground, lift even-heavier-ass keggle onto it and boil.
* At end of boil, lift keggle onto the table, drain into carboy through a hose

Pros:
* System completely disassembles, takes up no space
* Was cheap

Cons:
* Llifting 50+ lbs every hour.

My biggest issue is getting clean, good tasting water to the system. How do you all handle that without filling a heavy pot in the ktichen or making 5+ trips between the sink and the kettle?

Who else has a sweet system they want to share?

I bought a lead-free garden hose online and run it to my patio on brew days. I've got one of those hose splitter things with independent valves so that I can turn the water on and off without running back to the spigot. That also lets me feed my immersion chiller.

I like to let the water run a bit before I do anything in case water sitting in the hose has developed off flavors.

Docjowles wrote:My biggest issue is getting clean, good tasting water to the system. How do you all handle that without filling a heavy pot in the ktichen or making 5+ trips between the sink and the kettle?

Right now I make 5+ trips between the kitchen and the garage. That's not the worst part. The worst part is being busy in the garage and forgetting that the water is on in the kitchen, overflowing the pot onto the floor, going under the cabinets and down to the basement.

get a potable water hose from walmart and run that from the sink to whatever.

batch sparging will help with all the heavy lifting. place your pot on the burner, fill with water, heat then use a pump or a pot to add water to your mash tun up on the table by the pot. do your mash. add all the water you are going to need if you can take the pot off the burner, much lighter now, place brew kettle on the burner, slowly drain mash into pitcher until it runs clear, run mash into brew pot. saves a bunch of heavy lifting and is pretty much how i do it. an electric tea pot helps immensely. use it to heat up 2 quarts of water to boiling in a couple minutes, comes in very handy. good luck, Drew

Appreciate the tips on getting a food-safe hose, should have been obvious I guess. Do they also make a carbon filter (Brita or similar) I can screw onto that? I had a Brita on my kitchen tap for a few months but it was kind of a piece of shit, sprung a leak and no matter how I readjusted it I couldn't stop it spraying out to the side. Wouldn't matter much outdoors, though.

Docjowles wrote:Appreciate the tips on getting a food-safe hose, should have been obvious I guess. Do they also make a carbon filter (Brita or similar) I can screw onto that? I had a Brita on my kitchen tap for a few months but it was kind of a piece of shit, sprung a leak and no matter how I readjusted it I couldn't stop it spraying out to the side. Wouldn't matter much outdoors, though.

You can get an inline carbon filter with hose threads at an RV dealer or at Walmart in the camping/RV section. You can buy your potable water hose there too.
Good Luck!