I live in a suburban neighborhood. It’s not overly discrete and the neighbors are friendly (but don’t know what I do), but I do have access to 240V power, the privacy of my garage, and a basement for storage. I think anybody who fits that bill might find something that applies to them here.
Also want to acknowledge that I am not doing this in the cheapest way possible…at all. I’ve sunk a fair bit into this hobby, but it’s all been very fulfilling and my goals are really to make the best spirits possible at reasonable volumes.
I typically mash 65-75 lbs of grain at a time in about 30 gallons of water. The photos I’m posting are from a 100% organic spelt mash from a farm just down the road.
Milling
I got pretty frustrated processing 75lbs of grain through a roller mill, even with a drill attachment. It’s dusty, time consuming, and I feel like I almost blew my drill a few times so quickly looked for alternatives. I’ve since run about 500lbs of grain through mill that I picked up on AliBaba:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/ ... 8d1cTTZgPX
It’s cheap, works beautifully, and the hopper inverts into the bucket attachment for really nice and easy storage. I can grind things to roughly a coarse flour which seems to meet my needs just fine.
BIAB
The pot is 164L and I got it via a request for quotations on AliBaba, where I was able to customize it to my needs. The lid has a 3’’ tri clamp ferrule so I can use the pot as a stripping boiler as well, and I also use it as a fermenter. It sits on an adjustable workbench rated for 400lbs that sits at a good height for drainage.
The Brew Bag is from…The Brew Bag. You can enter your measurements and get one custom made.
https://www.brewinabag.com
It fits perfectly around my pot and snug enough that I can hike it down enough to clear my heating element. That lets me run my controller like a pid through the mash, hold a consistent temp at each step and never scorch.
The pot has a layer of reflectix, then a layer of wooden shims that I roughly taped on to provide an air gap, then another layer of reflectix. That air gap is really critical to getting the most of the insultation and I could probably do better on it honestly. I also cover with 2 wool blankets during heat up and when the mash is resting, as a 5500W element has its hands full with a pot this big and that gives it a little help.
Heating
My controller is the newest part of my setup and I’m actually taking it through it’s first mash today. It’s an auber instruments controller with a DSPR400 Ez Boil controller. I am really impressed with how feature rich it is, and I absolutely love that I can use it as a PID to hold temp, and the ripple element has a low enough watt density to not scorch the wort or any fragments of grain that may have slipped through the bag.
I use this element:
https://a.co/d/jgDKUbD
The attached plug makes setup easy and I never have to worry about the wire connections to the element shifting without me knowing. Just plug and play!
Wort Cooling
When the mash is up I run it through a 50 plate wort chiller, connected to the hose in the garage and draining it into the laundry sink just inside the door. If you’re wondering about why I said I’ve had 13 attempts and 12 successes…well the very first time I didn’t do anything to cool my wort and didn’t even reach pitching temp before I had a nasty butyric acid infestation. Stunk up the whole house and wife made me ditch it. Might have been the worst thing I ever smelled to be honest. This chiller just uses gravity and a silicone hose from the pot and I empty it into buckets and bring them downstairs as I ferment in the basement.
Separating the Grain
Things get messy here, but not sure that’s avoidable. Since I move everything to the basement to ferment (too cold in the winter and not safe from nosy neighbors in the garage), I deal with the grain post-mash and ferment off grain. The brew bag gets hoisted up with a little ladder rig and a pulley rated appropriately for the amount of grain I use. It’s connected to 3 1x4s I had lying around that are glued and screwed and has a heavy-duty hammock hanger attached. I’ll let the wort chiller do it’s thing and keep an eye on it while I scoop grain from the bag to an apple press to squeeze what I can. I have to do 3 rounds of squeezing for 75lbs of grain and this is by far the worst part (until I have to clean the thing), but like I said I don’t know that it’s avoidable. I squeeze out close to 3-4 gallons or so, so I hate to waste it.
Prepping for fermentation
Once the wort is drained and grains are squeezed I truck everything to the basement. This is probably the second worst part to separating the grain, but you gotta do what you gotta do. The pot sits back on the workbench, the wort goes in. I’ll aerate with my mash paddle for a few minutes and then add about 30g of Fermaid O and 75g of yeast and we are off to the races.
That was a long post, but hopefully someone finds it helpful and I’m happy to give back to this community however I can. I first started browsing here probably a decade ago and have come a long way, but with a much longer way to go, I think.