Can someone explain this....

Sorry I had to hijack the pic, but can someone explain the purpose of each keg?

I've seen quite a few setups similar to this but none that were so high up.

This is a three-tier all grain system. Top is the HLT (Hot Liquor Tank), the middle is the MLT (Mash/Lauter Tun), and the bottom is the boil kettle.

Hot water for the mash and sparge are heated in the top. Gravity brings that down to the mash tun where the grains are mashed, gravity will drain that into the boil kettle, while more water from the HLT sparges the grains. When that is all done, the wort in the kettle is boiled just like any other extract or AG batch.

Edit: Like I mentioned the reason it is high up is to allow gravity to drain it. The flat ones you might have seen use pumps to move the water and wort around.

Thanks for info. I really appreciate it!

hehe, that thing looks like waaaacky shaaaack.

Oh, I know whose set-up that is!

Yeah you need three* containers to start grain brews, one to mash the grains in ie mash/lauter tun - that's the middle one (can be a bucket, cooler, or keg.)
Another one to be your hot water supply, (hot liquor tank HLT), to be your water supply to your mash/lauter tun when you need to sparge (rinse) the grains with extra water, again that can be anything.
The last one is the brew kettle to boil the wort with as the final process.

* you can get by with two vessels. Having all three of them means minimum fuss and moving stuff about on brew day. There's no reason why your brew kettle couldn't double as your hot liquor tank if the insulation was easily removable. You'd just have to move it from a shelf above the mash/lauter tun up and down a lot
You can also brew in a bag. The brew kettle is the mash/lauter tun as you boil it and have the grains in a massive nylon bag, like a giant hop sock, so no need to lauter or sparge

That's the old standard extract brewers rig...


j/k


It's tiered so water/wort can transfer using gravity instead of pumps.