Beer Forum

I mostly wanted to kick this forum off, so here goes:

I do all grain batches using a turkey fryer as a boil kettle, a 48qt ice cube mash tun modified with a slotted manifold. I fly sparge and have a 5 gallon rubbermaid water cooler as an HLT. I chill my wort with a home-made immersion chiller. My primary fermenter is a plastic bucket and I secondary in a glass carboy. Brew day goes as follows:

1. Boil 2 gallons of water to preheat mash-tun.
2. Dump boiling water into tun and begin heating mash water.
3. When mash water is hot, I dump hot water from tun into HLT to preheat it. Dump 2/3 of mash water in, stir in grain, then stir in remaining water. If mash temp is too low, I use a bit of the hot water that is preheating HLT
4. Heat sparge water.
5. When sparge water is to temp, I dump the hot water from the HLT into my clean-up bucket for later. Sparge water then goes into HLT and sparging proceeds.
6. Boil- while boil is going, I sanitize fermenter
7. Post boil, chill with home made immersion wort chiller.
8. Dump back and forth from boil kettle to fermenter (plastic pail) to aereate. I usually will do this about four times. I will usually pitch the yeast on the third.

That's about it!

My first post on this forum - please be gentle....

I've used the technique of pouring my cooled wort back and forth between two sanitized plastic buckets for some time now, and for me it's worked great... well, other than my aching back at the end of a long brew day...

Did this at a club brew a couple months ago and took a lot of flak for it... I just told them to bugger off - the proof is in the beer, not the process...

However, a brew buddy uses an O2 tank with an aeration stone that seems to work really well - he just burns thru those little red tanks pretty quick. I think I'll be switching to this shortly, but with a bigger tank.

My equipment is rather plain jane stuff - converted 15 gal keg, 170k burner, 48 qt (also have 70 & 100) coolers for mash tuns, homemade immersion chiller. Like BeerBiker I am one of the evil ones that ferments in plastic, secondary in glass.

I have been using an oxygen tank and aeration stone for my aerating purposes and I love it. I always get a fast, vigorous fermentation. Not saying it is any better than shaking but I get good results with O2. My equipment is shown on my http://PowersBrewery.home.comcast.net website.

To me, fermenting makes more sense in plastic. It is easier and much safer to move around. I've heard too many horror stories of folks winding up in the emergency room (or worse yet, losing beer!) because of a broken carboy. I can't think of a single advantage to using a glass carboy other than they are cool to watch. Anybody use one of the plastic Better Bottle brand bottles?

mjarvis wrote:My equipment is rather plain jane stuff - converted 15 gal keg, 170k burner, 48 qt (also have 70 & 100) coolers for mash tuns, homemade immersion chiller. Like BeerBiker I am one of the evil ones that ferments in plastic, secondary in glass.

Lots of people are going back to plastic buckets as they are safer to handle than glass. I still prefer glass for secondary, but only need a five gallon carboy, which can be had for ten bucks at the swap meet. If I break one, oh well.

I have several glass fermenters but have thought about getting a few buckets for back ups and such.

I just got some free equipment from one of the nurses that I work with. The plastic bucket was nasty. It was all stained and gross looking. The glass carboy was nice though. All I really wanted was the carboy anyway for a second secondary.

BeerBiker wrote:

mjarvis wrote:My equipment is rather plain jane stuff - converted 15 gal keg, 170k burner, 48 qt (also have 70 & 100) coolers for mash tuns, homemade immersion chiller. Like BeerBiker I am one of the evil ones that ferments in plastic, secondary in glass.

Lots of people are going back to plastic buckets as they are safer to handle than glass. I still prefer glass for secondary, but only need a five gallon carboy, which can be had for ten bucks at the swap meet. If I break one, oh well.

If you break one, I hope you are not carrying it and it isn't full. I just don't see the advantage and the disadvantages are too great.