New Equipment: The Birth Of The Golden Child

"If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing to excess" - Edwin Land

"So when are you going to open a real brewery and start selling to the public?" - Mr. Donnelly

"Dollar, Dollar bill, y'all" - Wyclef Jean

Homebrewing aficionados devote considerable resources to their craft, not merely in terms of hours dedicated to producing beer, but also very often in financial terms. Although the greatest cachet appears to come from constructing one's own brewing equipment from raw materials or repurposing disused items for brewing, the novice homebrewer may find much of the construction process daunting - particularly brewers like ourselves with no experience of welding!

Despite our shortcomings as handymen we do, as fledgling brewers, feel the urge to brew better beer both by improving our method and by using better equipment.

To this end, we acquired two items with a view to improving our beer quality: a large brewing pot and a wort chiller.

The brewing pot is made of stainless steel and has a capacity of 30 litres. Due to its resistance to corrosion and the ease with which it can be cleaned and sanitised, stainless steel is the material of choice for all manner of food preparation, not least of which is brewing.

As for the capacity, a very common yield for beer recipes is 5 gallons, or 19 litres. A 30 litre pot should therefore be more than suitable for our purposes. Although the recipes we are currently following generally call for partial boils (boiling 9-14 litres of wort, then adding 5-10 litres of water to the carboy), this pot should allow us to try full boils in the future. This is desirable because the larger the volume of water boiled, the greater the absorption of sugars, alpha acids, etc. from the ingredients. Of course, the challenge for a full boil is in having a powerful enough heat source to boil 20 litres of water, but that is something we will worry about later.

It's worth noting that when we first began assembling equipment for brewing we made the mistake of buying a (relatively) small 11 litre stainless steel/aluminium stock pot. At the time we naively considered that this would serve our purposes for a while. It soon became apparent that a pot of this volume was woefully inadequate and, although we currently use the pot in the brewing process for heating extra water, it is unnecessary and was an expensive mistake. The lesson we learned, like so many homebrewers before us, is that the cheapest option is not always the cheapest option. It pays, in the long run, to buy equipment suitable for today's brewing that will also allow for some growth and some changes to tomorrow's brewing.

This picture shows the new pot, with the old pot beside it. It's hard to believe that we even entertained the idea that the small pot would be suitable!




The second new item we acquired was the wort chiller. The class of wort chiller we had in mind is characterised by the use of a coil of copper tubing. There are two main schools of thought for this type of chiller and they are differentiated in the liquid that flows through the copper coil.

One method is to submerge the copper coil in an ice bath and siphon the hot wort from the boiling pot into a carboy, passing it through the copper coil. Using this method, the wort is chilled very quickly as it passes through ice-cold copper tubing. In order to do it properly, an outlet tap, with a hop filter, should be added to the base of the boiling pot. This would involve modifying the pot, which we do not currently have the tools or the expertise for.

For that reason, we went with the other method, which is to submerge the copper coil in the hot wort and connect one end to a source of cold water (in our case, the kitchen tap). As the cold water flows through the chiller it cools the wort. The following picture shows this immersion-style chiller cooling hot wort in our boiling pot:




Cooling the wort quickly is an important aspect of brewing for many reasons, the most important of which is that when the wort is no longer boiling it becomes susceptible to contamination, both from bacteria and from sulfur compounds in the wort, and to oxidation (which is a Bad Thing). To cool a pot of wort by letting it sit at room temperature would require hours of potential exposure to contaminants. Another reason to chill the wort quickly is to cause what is referred to as the cold break, which is the term given to the precipitation of certain proteins that would otherwise cause the finished beer to be hazy when chilled.

While the wort chiller didn't involve any welding, this item did involve some assembly. We bought 10 metres of copper tubing from Woodie's. It comes in a coil which happened to be the perfect diameter for our brewing pot. Assembling the chiller then simply involved bending the copper tubing slightly at either end of the coil so that, when submerged, both ends of the tubing protrude over the rim of the pot. Once this was done, we attached some PVC tubing to the "output" end of the coil, in order to draw the cold water away from the pot. Many sources recommend attaching a length of garden hose to the input end and using a special screw-on attachment to connect it to a tap. In our case, we used one of those shower head attachments that have a rubber end that is fitted over the nozzle of a tap. We simply cut off the shower head part and attached it to the copper coil. The end result is a wort chiller that fits snugly in our boiling pot and can be easily attached/detached from any tap.

This picture shows the wort chiller in action:



Strictly speaking, the ends of the copper tubing should be bent downwards to minimise the chance of water leaking into the brew pot. In practice, the input hose is clamped on very tight and leaking isn't a serious concern. Ideally we would bend the copper tubing anyway, but such a bend would require using a bending spring and we can't find one of suitable dimensions!

So, having presented these new toys, you are possibly wondering what the Golden Child is. It is the "production" name we assigned to batch #3 of Ruff. It is so-called for many reasons. Although the recipe is the same as in the first two batches, this is the first batch brewed in a large enough pot and the first time we have chilled the wort quickly enough. In addition, this was our third batch, so we were more confident in what we were doing and the process was a lot more streamlined and relaxed. We had a healthy boil throughout, which is obviously very important and for the first time we actually made a yeast starter, as shown in this picture:


When using a Wyeast "smack pack" it is worth pitching the yeast into a small amount of water + dried malt extract before the beer is brewed. This gives the yeast a chance to return to vitality after being dormant for a while and accelerates the fermentation process.

So for all these reasons, this batch is the Golden Child. It represents our best brew to date (out of only 3!) and, based on the surprisingly good taste of the first finished batch and the preliminary tastings of the second batch, we have high hopes indeed. If nothing else, it had an original gravity of 1.096, so it should be near our target of 8.4% ABV and at least succeed in getting us trousered for cheap.



[the beer discussed in this post was brewed on the 6th of February 2011]