CHAPTER 17
Equipment
The following is a list of equipment used for homebrewing. It is by no means complete, comprehensive.
pH papers: These indicate acidity/alkalinity by gauging the color change of the paper wetted with a solution against a scale. Homebrewers commonly use wide range, pH 2 to 10, and narrow range, pH 4.2 to 6.2. Narrow range 5.2 to 6.8 and 5.2 to 7.4 are also available. The best papers are only accurate to pH .2 at best, and most are less accurate. Inexpensive digital pH meters are generally only accurate to ±pH .2, and so are only an improvement over papers because they are easier to read. More accurate (± pH .1 or better), calibratable pH meters are used by commercial brewers but exceed the budgets of most homebrewers. Temperature compensation accounts for the drift in readings made at other than the reference temperature, but readings made at other than 68 degrees F (20 degrees C) still need to be factored back to that temperature to be compared with standard brewing pH values. The decision to purchase any meter should be based upon the unit’s accuracy.
Water test kits: Kits are available to test for hardness, alkalinity, calcium, sulphate, chloride, chlorine, nitrite, nitrate, ammonia, iron, and pH. Many are inexpensively available at aquarium-supply shops, and others through laboratory-supply houses. Test kits, especially for water hardness, are more valuable to any brewer — and more versatile — than municipal water-supply analyses, the moreso when the two are used in conjunction.
pH Papers
pH and Hardness Test Kit
Kettle for water treatment: For boiling or mineral-salt treatment of brewing water. The brewing kettle is generally used.
Gram scale: A gram scale is necessary for accurately dispensing mineral salts. These are usually quite inexpensive, but because the accuracy of a cheap scale is likely suspect, it should be calibrated using a substance of known weight to correct inaccuracies.
Constructing a Balance Scale
Construction of a simple balance scale can eliminate the need to purchase this or any scale. To use the balance scale, suspend a substance known to be of the weight desired from one side, and add the substance being measured to the other side until the loads level. Coins in good condition make excellent balance weights; a U.S. dime weighs 2.27 grams, a penny weighs 3.1 grams, a nickel 5 grams, and a quarter 5.6 grams.
Covered liquor-storage vessel: For treated water. Any idle fermenter or food-safe bucket can serve the purpose.
Graduated one-quart measuring cup: A Pyrex cup is more serviceable than either glass or plastic. Use it to measure and dispense water, malt, and mash. It is indispensable as a dipper and for mixing during mashing and wort boiling.
Mill
Malt scale: Some brewers use malt scales in the one-to-ten-pound range; however, malt may be measured by volume with reasonable accuracy to eliminate the need for this piece of equipment.
Malt mill: Unless crushed malt is purchased, some sort of a mill is necessary. Countertop grain/maize mills such as that pictured yield a satisfactory grist, but roller mills give the best grist of any of the home mills. Coffee mills and others equipped with cutting blades are wholly unsatisfactory. Roller mills specifically constructed for crushing malt give the best results, but at a dear price.
Screens: Screens are used to gauge the degree of crushing. A kitchen colander, sieve, or flour sifter, or various gauges of screening can be used to separate several proportions of malt particle sizes. A rough comparison can then be made against separation by standard screens to guide mill adjustments.
Sourmash-tun: Used when a lactic-acid mash is being made to reduce pH prior to brewing. A well-insulated thermos, jug, or picnic cooler maintains temperature well during the long rest; it should be sized to the volume of the sourmash.
Mash-tun: This may be a food-safe plastic bucket, kettle, or insulated plastic picnic or beverage cooler. Capacity should be roughly equal to fermenter capacity.
If it is to double as a lauter-tun, it needs to be equipped with a spigot and a false bottom or filter bag. Some brewers equip the lauter-tun with the means to flush the space below the false bottom. On the whole, it is far easier to manage mashing and filtering in separate containers; this leaves the mash-tun to be fitted with a spigot from which to dispense the sparge water.
The most important criteria for any mash-tun are that it hold heat well and be readily and thoroughly cleanable. Food-safe, insulated, hard-plastic picnic chests hold mash temperature exceedingly well. High temperatures may distort the surfaces, however (high-density polyethylene at 170 degrees F [77 degrees C]); check the manufacturer’s specifications.
Large stainless steel pails or kettles are easy to clean, rugged, and lightweight, but they cannot maintain rest temperatures unless they are insulated. A jacket cut from Styrofoam or a wrapping for the tun from any of the myriad insulating materials will improve its performance. It should be used to stabilize the temperature of a stovetop mashing.
A heating element, whether it is integral or a hand-held immersible unit, is somewhat effective, but even temperature dispersal can be achieved only by demonic stirring. Some overheating and caramelization of the mash is inevitable and cleanup may be tedious.
An alternative to the immersible heating element is the RIMS (Recirculating Infusion Mash System), utilizing a picnic cooler, pump, heating element in copper tubing, and electronic parts to fabricate a temperature-controlled mash-tun capable of upward-infusion mashing. Its fabrication is described in Zymurgy, Special Issue 1992, Vol. 15, No. 4; it is also available as an off-the-shelf unit by a homebrew manufacturer.
Rigid plastic pails and buckets hold heat somewhat better than do those of stainless steel, but not as well as is required. They are very inexpensive and can be fitted with an insulating jacket and a hardware-store spigot with relative ease. Use only food-safe, heat-resistant plastic.
Enameled steel kettles should be avoided as they chip easily and expose the mash to certain iron contamination.
Lauter-tun: This is the most sophisticated piece of equipment required by the homebrewer. It should be either insulated or constructed of material having insulating properties. It should be of the proper diameter for optimal mash thickness, and at its base it must have a spigot and some manner of false bottom or filter bag set above it. The means to flush the space between them may improve the clarity of the runoff collected from it.
A fine-mesh bag, or one fashioned of canvas sides and a mesh bottom, is commonly used for holding the mash, but presents several disadvantages. These literally “bag” at their bottoms, even when resting on a slotted or perforated base such as is used for steaming vegetables, encouraging uneven percolation of the sparge water through the mash. With canvas-sided bags, the loss is compounded by sparge water flowing down outside of the bag. False bottoms fitted tightly to the inside of the lauter-tun, and one-eighth to two inches above its base, are employed by commercial brewers. Similar designs available to homebrewers give excellent results.
A mash strainer can be used instead of a false bottom to separate the wort from the spent grains. It can be constructed from one-half-inch PVC or copper pipe, using hardware-store fittings. Fitted to an insulated picnic chest, the mash strainer allows mashing and sparging to be accomplished in the single vessel.
The lauter-tun should be of roughly the same capacity as the mash-tun and must be selected with consideration for the effect of its diameter upon mash depth. Mashing ten pounds of malt at grain depth of six inches requires a diameter of fourteen inches; for a twelve-inch-deep filter bed, a diameter of ten inches is needed, and for eighteen inches, a diameter of eight inches. For twenty pounds of malt, these figures become twenty inches, fourteen inches, and twelve inches.
Some manner of spigot is also a prerequisite of any lauter-tun.
A dedicated means of flushing the space under the false bottom and above the lauter-tun floor is not generally necessary; either an inlet set opposite the spigot or a tube thrust down through the mash to the false bottom suffices.
Sparger: Any manner of introducing a regulated flow of liquor at 170 to 176 degrees F (77 to 80 degrees C) evenly over the top of the mash, without unduly disturbing it, serves the purpose of a sparger. A perforated stainless steel, copper, or plastic tube or sprinkling head attached by a length of flexible tubing to the mash-tun, a pail, a kettle, or a jug with a spigot serves well as a sparger. Any method of introducing the sparge liquor that does not “drill” the liquor into the mash is entirely suitable.
An insulated mash-tun, filled with the hot sparge liquor while the mash is setting in the lauter-tun, makes the most economical and easily managed arrangement. This fact should greatly influence the selection of the mash-tun.
Large stainless steel spoon: Preferably of one-piece construction. It is used throughout the brewing. Use the spoon to calibrate your kettle by standing the long-handled spoon in the kettle, adding water one quart at a time, and scratching calibration lines into the spoon’s handle after each addition.
Mesh strainer: Useful for pulling the goods for a decotion, because the free liquid drains off through the mesh.
Making a Paddle
Paddle: Can be used to stir the mash and boiling wort; it is easier to use and more effective than a paddle. It may be cut from a hardwood board.
A good combination is using the one-quart measuring cup to mix the mash and the long-handled paddle for keeping extract from caramelizing on the kettle’s bottom.
Immersible thermometer: In the 32 to 212 degree F (0 to 100 degrees C) range, this is indispensable. The floating type that is sealed in a concentric Pyrex bulb offers the best alternative, as it may be readily cleaned, fits through the neck of a carboy, and floats in the mash-tun. Digital electronic thermometers are preferred, if they are accurate to .25 percent of the scale.
Caution: Mercury is highly toxic; never use a cracked or damaged thermometer, and always handle it carefully. Should mercury taint a brew, the brew must be discarded! Alcohol thermometers are vastly preferred.
Decoction kettle: The kettle should be roughly 50 percent of the capacity of the mash-tun. Stainless steel or copper is best for boiling decoctions and, in British mashing, for boiling water for infusions.
Porcelain plate: This is essential for starch-conversion testing with iodine. It should be kept solely for this purpose and washed and rinsed separately.
Hydrometer/saccharometer: Measures sugar in solution by displacement, sinking less deeply into solutions of increasing density. A hydrometer measures specific gravity. A saccharometer is marked with a scale in degrees Balling, Plato, or Brix; otherwise, saccharometers and hydrometers are functionally identical. One equipped with an integral thermometer is handy, although better accuracy is obtained by heating or cooling the solution to the reference temperature of the instrument.
Hydrometer
A hydrometer may be retained within a trial tube and immersed directly into the wort or beer to make a reading, or set into a beaker filled with a sample of the wort or beer.
Scrub brush, sponges: For cleaning brewing equipment. Use only a soft-bristled brush on plastic; a stiffer brush should be used on porcelain, metal, and glass.
Wort kettle: This is usually of 40 to 50 percent greater capacity than the closed fermenter. The kettle may be equipped with a spigot — and a false bottom, stainless steel or copper “scrubby,” or cheesecloth pressed down over the kettle’s outlet — to filter hop and break residues from the wort. If the kettle has no spigot, filtering may be accomplished by siphoning the wort through flexible tubing and a racking cane fitted with a stainless steel or copper scrubby. For grain brewers, pouring the wort into the lauter-tun and using it as a hop back gives excellent results. Where hop pellets are used, the wort can be whirlpooled and then siphoned off its trub.
Copper Jam Boiler
A kettle is best fabricated from copper for heat-transfer efficiency, but stainless steel is far easier to obtain, clean, and maintain. The exception here is the not-uncommon copper jam boiler, which makes an excellent asymmetrically heated kettle for five-gallon brewing. At this volume any metal kettle may be set directly on a range top to heat (although electric heating elements may not be able to heat five or six gallons of wort to boiling). Nontoxic plastic boilers (polypropylene or Teflon) equipped with integral heating elements also perform satisfactorily, although they are more difficult to maintain.
Calibrate your kettle by making one-quart additions of water to it and etching calibration lines with each new addition into the handle of a long-handled spoon.
The brew kettle is commonly used to boil the brewing water where carbonate salts need to be precipitated.
Wine thief: For taking samples from the kettle or the ferment. It should be of Pyrex or glass manufacture.
Hop scale: Used to dispense hops by weight. An inexpensive plastic “calorie-counter” scale suffices. Calibrate it with an object or substance of known weight.
Wort chiller: The usual practice of cooling the wort by setting the kettle into a tub of ice or cold running water is woefully ineffective. Slow cooling doesn’t precipitate the cold break well, and prolongs the time the wort must spend at temperatures conducive to bacterial growth.
Running the wort through twenty-five feet of three-eighths-inch inside diameter copper tubing coiled into chipped ice will reduce wort temperature from boiling down to at least 90 degrees F (32 degrees C). A concentric-tubing cooler can be made by jacketing such tubing with five-eighths-inch inside diameter tubing or garden hose, using a “running tee” for the connection where the inner tubing emerges, and filling the space between with pressurized tap water running in counterflow to the bitter wort. Wort run through a concentric tubing cooler can be cooled to within 10 degrees F (5 degrees C) of the tap-water temperature.
The arrangement is more simply constructed than might be expected. However, it is difficult to rinse the cooler free of extract deposits and impossible to know whether or not one has. The copper tubing must be thoroughly flushed with water immediately after use, followed by rinsing and storage with iodophor or an acid sterilant solution.
An immersion wort chiller can be made up of fifteen to thirty feet of copper tubing coiled so that it can be set directly into the wort kettle. Because tap water is run through the tubing, not wort, it is easier to sanitize. It allows the cold break to be precipitated in the kettle, eliminating the need for running the wort into a separate cooling and settling tank. Wort cooling is, however, less efficient than running the wort itself through copper.
Wort-storage jars: For a five-gallon brewing, vacuum seat canning jars of half-pint, pint, or quart capacities should be used. Several quart jars are needed to hold wort for kraeusening or topping-up. Otherwise, ordinary beer bottles may be used.
Yeast-culturing equipment: This equipment is needed to culture yeast to pitching strength by repeatedly doubling volumes with sterile wort. Unless the yeast strain is very strong, for a five-gallon batch, half-pint, pint, quart, and half-gallon glass containers or Erlenmeyer flasks are needed. Preferably, containers should have constricted necks and should be fitted with a stopper and fermentation lock. Culturing from a single cell requires petri dishes and test tubes, a stainless steel loop, and culture medium (agar-agar or pure vegetable gelatin). A 600X to 1200X microscope fitted with a precision graduated stage, as well as slides and cover glasses, complete a professional lab. A good-quality used lab microscope with glass lenses is superior to any department-store model and can be bought for about the same price. The expense, however, can equal the cost of all other equipment combined. If you want to avoid staining cultures to differentiate lactic-acid bacteria, you will need a phase-contrast or dark-field microscope, and such specialty scopes are expensive.
Culturing from a single cell is usually approximated by thinning the parent culture with wort and streaking a nutrient, bacteria-inhibiting culture medium with the parent culture. Any isolated colonies that develop can be assumed to be from a single cell. Streaking the culture onto a yeast-suppressant medium to disclose bacterial contamination largely eliminates the necessity for a microscope. Prepared staining, yeast-or-bacteria-suppressant nutrient agar in sterile petri dishes is available.
Glass bottles or jugs for culturing yeast to pitching strength should be fitted with fermentation locks; for twelve- and sixteen-ounce bottles, you will need No. 1 and No. 2 drilled-and-tapered rubber stoppers; for quart bottles, use a No. 3 stopper.
Pump-spray or squeeze bottles: These are for dispensing freshly made-up cleaning and antiseptic solutions.
Primary fermenter: The primary fermenter should be constructed of easily cleaned material.
For closed-fermentation systems, a six-gallon carboy with a fermentation lock is preferred. For “blowoff” systems, a five-gallon carboy fitted with three feet of one-inch-interior-diameter flexible tubing is used. This Burton-Union inspired arrangement was developed to separate top-fermenting yeast and trub from the ferment.
Inverted-carboy single-stage fermentations reduce the risks of contamination and oxidation and allow for easy trub separation and yeast collection. These carboy kits allow the homebrewer to mimic commercial unitank fermentations, with similar benefits.
An “open” fermenter should not have a constricted neck, but must be of up to 25 percent greater volume than the beer and be covered by a close-fitting lid equipped with a fermentation lock. Food-safe plastic pails are inexpensive, but are a nuisance to clean and sterilize after a bit of use. They must be replaced or relegated to use as mash-tuns or the like as their surfaces become badly abraded.
A fermentation lock must be fitted through the cover of the primary fermenter so that all exchange between the fermenter and the atmosphere takes place through the airlock. It should be of adequate size to allow the release of copious amounts of carbon dioxide produced during the primary fermentation without splashing the liquid within the lock. The concentric type serves best. The traditional chemist’s airlock is more appropriate for use during the less volatile secondary fermentation and for yeast culturing.
An inexpensive adhesive-backed liquid-crystal thermometer strip should be attached to the fermenter so that the temperature of the fermentation can be easily monitored.
Refrigeration: Unless the heat produced during primary fermentation is attempered by an appropriate ambient temperature, a refrigerator is necessary for controlling lager fermentation temperatures. Serviceable but cosmetically second-class refrigerators may be found at reasonable prices. Tighter temperature control can be had by adding an after-market controller with a wider and higher range of set temperatures and tighter differential than a refrigerator’s internal thermostat is capable of.
Carboy Cap and Chemist’s Lock
Siphon tubing: To rack wort or beer off its sediment, a four-foot length of flexible tubing is affixed to Pyrex or rigid-plastic tubing fitted with an end cap. Plastic tubing should be replaced as it becomes discolored, cracked, or stiff with use.
Secondary/lager fermenter: This should have a constricted neck to reduce airspace above the ferment. Glass presents the most readily cleaned surface. For five-gallon brewings, the traditional glass carboy is the uncontested choice (and presents a compelling reason for brewing in five-gallon batches). Use a carboy cap or No. 6 ½ or No. 7 tapered neoprene or rubber stopper to seal the carboy and hold the fermentation lock.
For lagering under pressure, use a Cornelius keg that is equipped with a pressure-relief valve.
When selecting any closed fermenter, bear in mind that its capacity determines the relative sizes of all other brewing vessels.
Cornelius Keg System
Carboy brush: Used to scour the inside of carboys or other closed-neck containers. It should be roughly two feet long.
Reducing-sugar analysis kit: This positively identifies when aged beer has fermented out. Dextrocheck and other urine-sugar reagents are inexpensive and available at any pharmacy. Glucose-specific analysis kits can be useful indicators of the glucose content of worts and green beer.
Priming bucket: For rousing priming solution into aged beer in preparation to bottle. A fermenter can be employed, but a bucket equipped with a spigot is vastly preferred.
Keg: For draft beer, a five-gallon pre-mix syrup tank (Cornelius keg) used by the soft drink industry is the first choice of homebrewers.
Bottle filler: When the priming tub has no spigot, the beer will need to be siphoned into bottles. A bottle filler with a shut-off valve opens only when it is pressed against the bottom of a bottle. This reduces foaming and oxygen uptake by the beer, and makes bottling less messy.
Bottles: Bottles should be clean, with unchipped rims. Heavy “bar bottles” are preferred over the lighter gauge retail bottles, but in a carefully controlled fermentation, the latter are sufficient. Bottles with porcelain/plastic swing-tops and PET plastic soft-drink bottles with screw-tops are also commonly used; a cap designed to fit PET bottles allows the homebrewer to artificially carbonate beer in the bottle.
Bottle Filler
Bottle brush: A brush that reaches the bottom of the bottle is used to scour them during cleaning. A bottle-washer faucet attachment or a multiple-bottle washer made from copper tubing may also be handy.
Bottle rack: A bottle rack holds inverted empties after the work of emptying them is done. A Christmas-tree type rack conserves counter space.
Caps (or other suitable stoppers): Crown-type caps are commonly used for sealing bottled beer.
Capper: To secure crown-type caps. It should be chosen for its ability to evenly seal bottles without chipping their rims or cracking the bottle necks. The best arrangement is the bench-type; other cappers may not be so expensive, but neither do they work so well.