My homebrewing setup

I get asked a lot about my homebrewing setup. Moreover, a lot of homebrewing content online is about recipes, and process, and less about hardware, but I do love hardware content. Actually, I think this is the main reason I brew: to improve my hardware, and always having a diy project on hand. I always like when other people show there brewery. I decided to take some pictures during my last brew day to share mine here.

Milling

For milling grain, I use a basic mill from Grainzilla. I tried to diy mine with an old pasta maker I add, but this was very slow, not very sturdy, and very difficult to operate. The slick rollers were too splipery for the grains. I tried to scratch them with some tools but it was not working as intended, so I decided to buy a proper mill.

What I made however is an adapter for my Kitchenaid mixer. Turning the crank by hand was not very pleasant and I was affraid to use a drill as the mill manual was explicitely saying to avoid high speeds.

The adapter connects the square port of the kitchen aid to the hex bit of the mill, using spare steel hardware I found in my garage.

Mashing

For the mashing part, I already explained a lot about my temperature controller in previous articles here and here.

The full setup in action, consists of the Klarstein all in one kettle, with a pump to recirculate the wort. I modified the cover so that I can use the pipes fitted with camlocks.

Here my laptop wirelessly controlling the temperature, next to my brewing mess.

For volume measurement I made a measuring wooden stick, using a dremel with cutting disk to mark the units. What is nice with this is that the wood burnt from the heat of the dremel so the marks are black and clearly visible. I used a small drill bit to mark every 5L with one dot for each 5L (so that the 15L mark for example is marked with 3 small dots).

The modified cover shows the camlock fitting for the recirculation pipe, used during mashing and sparging, as well as the triclamp port for the water condenser used during boiling.

Brazing stainless

For my HLT (hot liquor tank) used to provide the hot water for the sparging, I bought a cheap IKEA pot, and fitted a valve and camlock port. For this I tried weldless bulkhead you can found cheaply on the internet, but they were very leaky, and the silicone joint was always to close to the stove heat element. I decided to try brazzing the bulkhead, against all advice I have read online, and to my surprise, it went very well. No leak yet. The only issue is the look.

I brazzed only outside, as I wanted to minimize the flux quantity in contact with the water. For the brazzing I used a 40% silver core brazzing stick with flux and a propane torch.

Boiling

I brew in an appartment, and during the boil stage, 3L of water is evaporating diretcly in my kitchen. This creates a very wet and unpleasant environment. I bought a condenser which work very well by retrieving all the vapor and condensing it.

Fermenting

For the fermentation, I use the classic method of putting the fermenter in a fridge, where temperature is controlled using an Ink bird, which is a small electronic device with 2 relays. Heating relay is ON if temperature probes reads below the target and cooling relay is ON if temperature probes reads above the target.

The fridge is connected plugged to the cooling relay, and for the heating, I use a snake vivarium heating mat.

The only DIY thing I did was installing a probe well in the fermenter so that the temperature probe is at the center of the fermenter. The beer fermenting is a lot of thermal mass, and the yeast is actually producing a lot of heat. I had issues previously when putting the probe inside the fridge directly as the temperature was rising rapidly in the fermenter and the probe was not picking it up because it was cool in the fridge.