My brew Space.

I live in a small 1930 semi. Only me and the two dogs but It's difficult to fit our life's acquisitions in. We have multiple interest and hobbies. No Garage our Shed is 3'x6' and need to hold home and vehicle maintenance items, garden equipment, camping equipment and other miscellaneous stuff into it.
Our spare bed room has 2 desks in and the 2 dog beds.
The kitchen only just fits what we need in for cooking and utensil storage.
The "Dining room" has to fit a dinning table a washer and freezer in.

The question is....where the hell do I keep my brew gear. I'm seriously limited in kit and capacity by storage. Maybe that's a good thing.

Apart from $$$ and maybe time, do you have any constraints on your brewing?

Here's my brew world.
Here's the kettle Storage/Possible Future Brewery set up.
I have 2 storage bins near the shed, one for pails and kit not in use and one for bottles.

My Outside Boil area

My Storage Cupboard. 50lb grain bag lives in a closet under the stairs with the dog food.

My work, fermenting and beer Storage area.(I use the table for measuring ingredients)


I just Have to figure out where to fit a kegerator!

I'm constrained. I brew outdoors on a small patio area surrounded by BBQ pits and no cover overhead. I'm forced to be a fair-weather brewer. My small house is overflowing with junk, so I ferment my beers in a carboy that sits in an ice chest next to the dog's bed in the den with a towel draped over the top to keep the light out. I have to condition my beers in my darkroom. I stack my cases of conditioning bottled beer in one of the bathrooms.

I've got my eye on a 38 acre ranch about an hour from here. That would solve everything for me, but I can't quite swing the $650k asking price.

You wouldn't happen to have a clone recipe for that Old Speckled Hen, would you?

I might just have.


I'll post it in recipes.

Man do I feel lucky, I have a 16x16 shed that I do my brewing in and store household JUNK in. I plan on adding on to it to make more room for the brewery.
As you can see there is quite a lot of room:



Hops-4-Life always as to kiss the MLT.....

Orfy, I tip my hat to you. To go thru that much to brew show how great your passion is!!

the UK and USA 2 people seperated by a common language. What is a "semi"
over here it's a tractor-trailer rig.

nkonkle said:

the UK and USA 2 people seperated by a common language. What is a "semi"
over here it's a tractor-trailer rig.

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Hummmm... I'm in the US and was curious what he meant - I think he just means it's small.

When I was living in town, my kitchen was a 6 x 6 room. You could stand in the middle hold your arms out and touch both walls, turn 90° and touch both walls - and picture this - IT HAD 2 WAYS TO GET INTO IT!!!! A 6' lenth of counter top with a double sink, a narrow stove and a full sized fridge. That was my brew area, everything was just an arms length away.

My landlord (even though he was a drunk) caught me brewing outside one day and told me if I ever did it again, he would give me 30 days notice and throw me out - funny thing, all he legally would have to do is give me 30 days notice and it would be legal - no reason, just a notice. He didn't care if it was legal or not (brewing) just stated he didn't want to ever see it going on, didn't care if I did it inside - people are crazy. I think he thought people would think I making "meth".

I'm guessing Orfy means semi-detached. Mine is fully attached and I also have a bit of a space constraint. I currently brew in my kitchen which is pretty damn small. I do have a small basement that is home to all of our extra stuff, w/d, dishwasher, water heater, furnace, etc. As you can guess, it doesn't leave much room for brewing stuff. I currently have a primary next to my bed and cases of bottles stacked on the washer and dryer. I'll have to get a pic and post it but it Orfy's pics give a good idea of what it's like.

I've got a pretty big old house- I store all my stuff with hundreds of bottles in the basement and brew in my kitchen. I'm brewing on my stove, but my stove is too far from the sink to use the wort chiller. I'd have to get a 15 foot hose connected to it. So, I'm planning on doing two 1/2 boils so I can carry the hot wort to the sink. My basment is too cold for fermenting ales, so I am doing a lager in a cooler in the basement (nice 40 degrees, and the frozen water bottles take it to a steady 34 degrees), ales in the office or kitchen, and I have 5 cases of beer here in the office because that's the warmest room in the house at 65 degrees. I store my conditioned beer in my laundry room because that's about 57 degrees by the door. Of course, in the summer, this is all reversed. The fermenting ales go in the laundry room or basement, etc. But it works for me right now.

Lorena

Most of us in the southwest are basement challenged, so most of the storage has to be in the garage. I brew outside. Even when its 118°.

I'm looking to create some sort of teirs with an outdoor fireplace and grilling area that we are planning in the back yard.

I have a basement. 3/4 of the room is finished nicely as a living room. There is a door on the back wall that leads into the other 1/4 of the room. That is the workshop/storage/brew shack. I am slowly downgrading the amount of storage and upgrading the amount of brewing space. it works for me for the day to day brewing activities, but the actual mashing and boiling occur outside on the deck.

Yup, semi detached house.
Mines very similar to this. (This is 2 houses)


They back garden is not much bigger than the front, No garage.

My brew set up is a mess. I'd be ashamed to post pics. All my stuff is in the basement and I brew outside on the patio. I'm really getting tired of lugging everything up and down the stairs.

I condition and ferment in bedroom closet,boil and heat mash water on my deck,
mash and lauter in kitchen.the hard part is carrying boiling wort from deck to kitchen sink to use immersion chiller

I don't really have a brew space...

The burner, propane tanks, and keggle live in the garage.

The remaining gear lives under the laudry room sink (near the kitchen) or in the basement.

In the cool season, I have room for two bauckets/carboys in a pantry closet in the kitchen. In the summer, fermentation moves to the basement.

I have a bit of space in an unfinished basement.

I brew outside: on the back patio in good weather, in the garage in bad weather.

I'm not constrained in storage of equip (got a shed) but am in fermenting in summer. My garage is a 2 car with a smallish shop in it and that's where I store my fermenting chiller. So in summer I can only have 1 batch going at a time as I'm not keeping the house at 72-74 as I couldn't afford it. Spoiled? yes but I want MORE BEER! . By May I gotta have 30-50g of beer done so I can take a break in summer. My beer sucked last summer .

desertBrew said:

So in summer I can only have 1 batch going at a time as I'm not keeping the house at 72-74 as I couldn't afford it.

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How warm do you keep your house????? I'd be sweating if my house was 74.

Summer it's at about 77-78 and 76 at night I think but when it's 105+ outside that feels not bad. Dry heat thing again also helps. I'd have a $350+ electric bill if I tried to do it too low. Worst last year was $260 but the pool doesn't help. Our summer is your winter when it comes to utilities. Winter I'm at 68 but the wife always bumps it up to 71-72.

todd_k said:

How warm do you keep your house????? I'd be sweating if my house was 74.

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Not DesertBrew, but...

We keep our thermostat on 77 or 78 in the summer. A couple things...

1. While it's not Arizona, it's less humid, usually, here in Kansas than it would be in Virginia. So one can tolerate a little higher temp.

2. It's freakin hot here: typical summer high is 93-95, 100+ is not unusual at all. If it's 100 outside, the AC is going to be running alot to keep the house at 78. Running alot = more comfortable (moving air, taking the humidity out) even if the temp is a little high.

Man, if the stock market would move up just a couple more dollars, my BrewHaus would become a reality. I should have it by the end of March though.

desertBrew said:

Summer it's at about 77-78 and 76 at night I think but when it's 105+ outside that feels not bad. Dry heat thing again also helps. I'd have a $350+ electric bill if I tried to do it too low. Worst last year was $260 but the pool doesn't help. Our summer is your winter when it comes to utilities. Winter I'm at 68 but the wife always bumps it up to 71-72.

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I always laugh when it's 108° and a zonie newb gets out of the pool and can't figure out why it's so freaking cold out.

Evaporative cooling. It's why a wet t-shirt and a fan on a carboy keeps your wort cool.

A semi is a duplex...

I have 6 rooms in my basement. One is the theater room with fireplace, kitchen, office/entertainment, bathroom and 2 for storage (my bottles and some of my brewing supplies are in one of them). I have a walk out basement (from the kitchen). It could actually be a 1400+SF apartment. The sink/washer/dryer/SS medicine cabinets (brew supplies)/furnace and water heater are also in the "kitchen" area. There's also 1 fridge, freezer, dining room table and chairs down there that we use.

The theater room has 2 couches and a German eckbank (table and chairs). We have about 30 people down there on the holiday dinners. Faily big place...then there's upstairs...nah, we try to keep everyone downstairs...then there's the 2 acres for the kids to run around in...

I keep most of my gear in the basement and have to lug it upstairs when I want to brew, then lug it all plus the filled carboys back downstairs to ferment. I usually brew on the deck, but in bad weather, I brew in the garage.

I dare not take full possession of the garage for brewing because I already commandeered half of it for the Firebird. I had to take more than halp of my basement shop away for my office and I hate to even think about what would happen if I took over any area of the kitchen.

Orfy, I have to hand it to you, you must have some system down to do all that you do with limited space. I bet you could show most of us a thing or two about organization.:rockin:

I have got it down to a short routine and up to now it's gone like clockwork.
By the time I've pitched my yeast the only thing left to do is empty the keg, rinse it and put it away.

i'm lucky i have a seperate brewhouse:



in which we recently brewed 70 gallons: http://tinyurl.com/yftbvt

olllllo said:

Most of us in the southwest are basement challenged, so most of the storage has to be in the garage. I brew outside. Even when its 118°.

I'm looking to create some sort of teirs with an outdoor fireplace and grilling area that we are planning in the back yard.

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The same is true for those of us in the Gulf Coast area. If I had a basement, it could only be about a foot deep before hitting the water table! I live in a 2 bedroom townhouse with precious little storage and no garage or covered parking. I brew in my very small kitchen. My beer ferments and conditions on the landing at the top of the stairs (the bubbling fermentation lock drives my wife nuts right outside our bedroom door, but I find it oddly soothing!), and my bottle conditioning happens on the floor of my closet. So far, I've only had to stack the 6 packs two high, but I can see the day coming...

That does it, I gotta revamp the basement!

No basements here, only the odd root cellar or storm cellar left over from the Cold War years and precious few old home still have those. Basements would be great, just not in this part of Texas.

i brew in my kitchen not to big or to small i would say the right size for now. the only thing that gets me is counter space. i do love that fact that the sink is not to far away so its really easy to hook up my wort chiller. i store all my carboys and bottles in my walk in closet. its not to bad but we all wish we had more room:rockin: