A journey into brewing beer

When you love beer as much as I do (which is quite a lot), you get to the point where you begin to wonder what’s in the damned stuff anyway. Most bottles of beer you buy are quite clear on the subject – barley, hops, yeast and water.  Is that it?  Clearly I’ve baked cakes that were more complicated, so last November I decided to embark on turning my shed into a brewery.

As a student in Sheffield in the early 00’s I dabbled with home brewing using kits and even ran a website on the subject for a while, but as I got more passionate about beer my palate was spoilt by the excellent beers available locally and the kits just didn’t cut it. I tried a couple of kits again about two years ago and still wasn’t impressed.

So, if I was going to the effort of brewing beer in my shed, it would need to be ‘All Grain’ – i.e. made from the base ingredients – or nothing. I could have tried brewing with malt extract as an intermediate step but didn’t really see the point as I knew where I wanted to end up.  I started to do some research and the shed started to fill with obscure items of kit.

The Boiler

It all started one morning, Jane looked across the living room and squinted at a strange silver object in the corner, “That looks like a tea urn” she said. “It is a tea urn” I replied.  To be more accurate, it had been a tea urn – it was now a brewing copper, the boiler that help my wort through its transition into beer!  The silver object was a 33 litre Burco catering urn I had acquired from eBay at a steal.  With the addition of some plumbing and a home made hop strainer it’s perfect for the job:

Tea urn / Boiler / Elephant

My home made hop strainer

Mash Tun

Next up was a 24 litre coolbox.  This was in the shed already and is a staple of our summer camping trips.  This has now become my mash tun and I really must buy a replacement before we next go camping!  I drilled a hole at the bottom and added a tap and then built my pride and joy – a copper manifold to filter the grain from the mash.  This involved some copper pipe, a hacksaw and a blow lamp and was quite fun to make:

This looks like a cool box, but it’s really a mash tun

This was fun to make!

Fermenting Fridge

As I would be brewing in the shed I needed some way to ensure I could keep consistent temperature whilst fermenting my beer.  The popular choice is to take a standard fridge and add a heater and temperature control unit.  In keeping with the theme I bought a fridge for £20 off eBay and built the control unit myself:

Building the temperature controller

Temperature Controller

Inside the fridge (spot the heater and temperature sensor taped to fermenter)

Brewing

To finish off, some pictures of the brewing process:

Taking the mash temperature

Mashing

Boiling

Transferring wort to FV

Beer!

So far I’ve done three all grain brews and in my opinion all three have been above average beers – a far cry from the kit brews I have done in the past.  I dare say this is just the beginning of my brewing adventure and I’ll be blogging more on the subject in the future so watch this space!