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TastyAdventure

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I just won a $50 gift card to Lowe's. I'm a partial mash brewer wanting to go All Grain. Here's a pic of what I already have. 5 gallon kettle, 10 gallon gatorade "mash tun"(nothing special added, no false bottom, trickle pipes, etc.) a 5 gallon fermenter, bottling bucket. So what should I get next? Bigger brew pot? Apparently if you wait til after Thanksgiving, they're Turkey Fryers are discounted well. Or should I get another cooler to be able to fly sparge? I've been doing batch sparges... Without bigger kettle though, I'd have to do smaller batches until I got a bigger one. Should I make a false bottom? Any advise/thoughts/comments welcome. Thanks.
 
Do you have fermentation temp control? If not that is the number one thing that improved my beer.
 
I keep my apartment at 72 degrees always.. Thats it haha. I have occasionally put my fermenters in the tub wrapped in wet towels to keep their temps a little lower, for the first week of fermenting. What would I need for better, lower temp control?
 
Chest freezer with temp controller, though that's more than 50 but I agree it will make your beer 100 times better.
 
+ 1 to the temperature controller. I have 2 of them so I can run multiple batches at different temps. Makes a huge difference for me.
 
You can get a chest freezer to fit 2 carboys for 150-170 new at lowes and a temp controller is like 30 bucks on ebay.
 
I just won a $50 gift card to Lowe's. I'm a partial mash brewer wanting to go All Grain. Here's a pic of what I already have. 5 gallon kettle, 10 gallon gatorade "mash tun"(nothing special added, no false bottom, trickle pipes, etc.) a 5 gallon fermenter, bottling bucket. So what should I get next? Bigger brew pot? Apparently if you wait til after Thanksgiving, they're Turkey Fryers are discounted well. Or should I get another cooler to be able to fly sparge? I've been doing batch sparges... Without bigger kettle though, I'd have to do smaller batches until I got a bigger one. Should I make a false bottom? Any advise/thoughts/comments welcome. Thanks.

Since you said you were wanting to go to All Grain, the one thing you'll need before you can brew 5-gallon batches is a bigger boil kettle. You'll need room for 7ish gallons of wort plus the room for boiling in order to get to 5ish gallons into the fermentor, unless you plan do do high gravity mash and boil and dilute with water. That's where I'd put my money...
 
At Lowes I would either go the fermentation chamber route (if you want to spend more than the $50) or the turkey fryer route (if you want to spend about $50). The benefit of the turkey fryer is that it'll come with a 30qt. pot (not the best pot in the world, but many seem to use them).
 
I decided to go with a DIY project of making an immersion chiller and a "bazooka tube" or metal braid for draining my mash tun. I'm not worrying about a larger pot bc I'm going to be doing 2 side-by-side 2.5 gallon batches from now on. I got another 5 gal kettle at the dollar store for $9.
 
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