3 Dog Brewery
Adventures in Zymurgy
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An EvolutionI started brewing very simple, with an enameled steel 'tamale pot' from Wal-Mart and a kit from The Brew Stop.
I used this for my I was on the lookout for
some time before I spotted a stainless steel crawfish boil pot with a burner and
stand to go with it. All the others I had seen before were aluminum pots and
aluminum reacts with stuff, especially beer before its fermented (called wort,
pronounced wert, although I've never heard anyone pronounce it that way). Anyway,
it is a 7 gallon pot, just what I needed to get my beer making out of the house,
as I had been asked to, and now I could do 'full wort boils' meaning I could boil
the entire 5 gallon batch at one time. I made just one batch with this setup
before making some minor changes.
It only took one time of having to lift that entire 5 gallon batch into a bucket of cold water to realize that I needed two things: An immersion wort chiller and A way to transfer boiled wort to a carboy without having to lift the 5 gallon pot and pour it through a funnel. Yes, 5 gallons of wort is heavy, but it's also very hot when it gets finished boiling. That's what makes it difficult to cool 5 gallons of wort in an ice bath is the temperature not the weight. I bought 14 feet of 1/4 inch soft copper tubing and made my own immersion chiller by wrapping the tubing around a pot that fit inside the 7 gallon SS pot. As long as I put the immersion chiller in the boiling wort for the last 15 minutes of the boil everything would be sanitized enough to not worry about nasty bugs getting in my beer before I could get the yeast to it. I added a thermometer (actually a brewmometer, if you've never seen one look here) and a stainless steel ball valve so I could use tubing and gravity to empty the wort rather than the 'clean and jerk' method. The next phase of the evolution started when I got myself a 5 gallon beverage cooler and made a mash tun out of it by adding a ball valve and SS false bottom to it. I brewed for almost a full year just like this. Without really thinking it through I decided that what I really needed was a 3-tier, gravity fed, all-grain system capable of brewing 10 gallons at a time. In hindsight I guess it seemed like I was brewing a lot and never had any beer on hand. There were several reasons for this, such as; lack of cold storage for finished beer, 3 batches in a row that went bad due to poor sanitation practices, trying to invent my own recipes from scratch with less than 2 years of brewing experience.
I used this setup for over 2 years before I got tired of both standing in the sun to brew since the tree would not fit under the shaded carport and having to heft the keg (usually with some water in it or still quite warm from heating water) over my head. So, what's the latest version of the 3 Dog Brewery? Click the "Brewery" link at the top right. |
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first two batches, but was 'asked' to kindly figure out a way to make that awful
smell outside from now on. The problem with this pot was its size. It
was only 3 gallon and could not hold the entire batch to boil. I was forced
to boil partial batches and add water in the fermenter to 'top up' the level to
the batch size. Without going into a lot of detail, this creates poor hop
utilization rates and it's hard to get a clear beer using this 'partial boil' method.
Unless you use the "Texas Two Step" method described in BYO magazine (link at left),
but I had never heard of this method in these days.
I found 3 half barrel kegs on