What's the benefit of a spigot on your brew pot?

I'm thinking of upgrading from my 5g brew pot to a 9g one.
Like this one:
http://www.homebrewing.org/ONE-WELD-9-Gallon-Stainless-Steel-pot-_p_1683.html

I've brewed 50+ batches, but I'm not really into the whole equipment obsession thing. I try to only buy stuff if I think it's going to improve my beer. So I don't really know the answer to this question: what's the point of a spigot on your brew pot?

What I read here is that it makes it easier to drain your wort into your carboy. But it's already easy to just pour my wort into a funnel on top of my carboy. 4g isn't that heavy, and I don't imagine 5g would be that much worse. Plus pouring through a funnel gets some extra airation. Obviously 10g batches would need a spigot, but I don't plan to ever do 10g batches.

The disadvantage of a spigot is that it's a crevice in your brew pot that is harder to clean. I'd go from a brew pot with all smooth surfaces with no spots for bugs to hide, to one with a nice spot and threaded fittings for bugs to hide in. I could probably clean it relatively easily if I'm careful, but if there's almost no benefit to a spigot it doesn't seem worth even the slightest hassle.

Am I missing something? To drain from a spigot I would have to hook up plastic tubing to it right? (like the tubing I use with my racking cane). So then I need to sanitize tubing on brew day.

If the benefit of a spigot is you can use a false bottom with it to screen out hops, that's not a plus for me because I use hop bags. And it doesn't seem like the spigot will screen out trub, so that's not it either. Any other reasons why I should like a spigot?

I would imagine it would be a benefit for an all grain setup. that way you can mash, drain the water, and sparge. I'm just starting to read into all grain but that's what I'm thinkin

I never clean my brewpot outside of a good rinse before and after brewing, all that heat and boiling tends to kill any bugs. I drain through a funnel using the spigot without a hose. I sometimes do 10 gallon batches, I believe this was the initial driving factor I installed a spigot. I've never had an infection from my brewpot.

All that being said, stick with what works for you.

I bet it will grow on you. Not hard to clean and comes in handy.You could drain out of it into your funnel and still aerate along the way.

Are you brewing extract or AG? As mentioned before you can make a false bottom for it, but it sounds like you want a brew pot not a mash tun.

in the BK, the only advantage of a spigot is that you avoid having to deal with a siphon. If you are not using an immersion chiller (and therefore need to transfer hot liquid), then a spigot is gong to be more reliable and safer. Also, spigots are way easier to clean than siphons... wit a spigot, you just drain your rinse water through it and be done.

Miod you, this is only for a BK... for All-grain brewing, a spigot is almost mandatory on your MLT and HLT.

If you get the Jamil whirlpool immersion chiller, the spigot is for attaching a pump to recirculate the hot wort back into the kettle to create a whirlpool action thus cooling faster than a standard immersion chiller.

For cleaning the siphon, I just spray the outside with StarSan and then siphon some StarSan through it. Then it's sanitized.

Ok... so I could run off the wort through the spigot straight into a carboy with funnel? How would I do that? The picture shows that the spigot is parallel to the ground - 90 degree angle off the brewpot. Is there some attachment that makes it go down? The website also offers a "hose barb" and "close nipple". What are those?

I don't deal with cleaning a siphon on brewday now anyway, because I don't whirlpool and rack off - the couple times I've tried that, it didn't reduce the amount of trub that got into the carboy.

The benefits for using the pot as a mash tun are interesting, but I use the brew-in-the-bag technique, so this would primarily be a brew pot. Though I might consider using it for mashing if I can find the right sized false bottom.

You would have a hard time using a CFC or Plate Chiller without a spigot. It also allows me to use a false bottom to filter out all the hops and a vast majority of trub.

And I fill my fermenter while sitting in a chair, drinking a beer. That's important stuff.

I can't pick up my 20 gallon kettle to pour through a strainer.

agusus said:

Ok... so I could run off the wort through the spigot straight into a carboy with funnel? How would I do that? The picture shows that the spigot is parallel to the ground - 90 degree angle off the brewpot. Is there some attachment that makes it go down? The website also offers a "hose barb" and "close nipple". What are those?

I don't deal with cleaning a siphon on brewday now anyway, because I don't whirlpool and rack off - the couple times I've tried that, it didn't reduce the amount of trub that got into the carboy.

The benefits for using the pot as a mash tun are interesting, but I use the brew-in-the-bag technique, so this would primarily be a brew pot. Though I might consider using it for mashing if I can find the right sized false bottom.

Click to expand...

Gravity. You would have to place the BK up higher than the fermentor. I did this by placing the cooled BK on my kitchen counter and the fermentor on the floor.. the funnel catches the stream that flows from the spigot. A strainer fits perfectly in the funnel too.

A hose barb is a pipe fitting that screws into a threaded fitting on one side and allows a hose to be clamped on to the other side (the barb side of the fitting).

A close nipple is a threaded piece of pipe (about 1 1/2" long) that joins two female pipe fittings together... like a valve to a coupling.. or serves as the part in a weldless spigot (valve) kit that actually goes through the hole in the side of the container and joins the inside pieces to the outside pieces.

agusus said:

Ok... so I could run off the wort through the spigot straight into a carboy with funnel? How would I do that? . . . . .

Click to expand...

Pick it up, place it on a table or stand of some sort.

I would get a pot with a spigot 1st to save your back and 2nd so you can whirlpool to drop out the trub so you wouldn’t have to use a strainer. It’s also less of a mess to hook a hose up to the spigot vs. dumping it into a funnel which can clog up and overflow.

Ah, thanks for the picture. I brew in my kitchen and my counters are about 1 foot higher than the top of my carboy, so I was imagining trying to shoot the wort out of the spigot and somehow have it end up arcing into the funnel would be pretty difficult. But I could raise the carboy on a box or something and then it could work.
Cool, I think I'll go for it.

It doesn't need to shoot right into the carboy... You can use a piece of tubing on a hose barb, put the other end of the tubing in the carboy.

Gravity is a brewers friend.

lschiavo said:

Gravity is a brewers friend.

Click to expand...

Nice pun...

Yeah, it's generally used with a hose (preferably silicone tubing), with the other end sitting in the carboy.

The advantages I find with it are that...

1) it allows a false bottom, hopblocker, bazooka screen, or other form of trub filter, less likely to become plugged (because of greater surface area and better designs) and even if it does get plugged, it won't make a mess like a strainer would by overflowing.

2) if you're using an immersion chiller, you can use one of those whirlpoolers that recirculates wort across the chiller to decrease both water usage and time to get to pitching temperature. But you'd no longer have to limit yourself to an immersion chiller anyways, since...

3) it also allows you to use a counterflow or plate chiller, as already mentioned, but this also provides another benefit because...

4) it allows you to use a hopback!

5) with a few extra pieces, you can put in a sight tube, which is a fantastic tool for keeping track of your volumes, if consistency is important to you

6) another benefit with all-grain brewing is that I use it to heat my strike and sparge water, and can fill an HLT or mash tun with HOT water much more safely and easily (again using a hose), also providing the benefit of minimizing hot-side aeration if that's a concern for you

And it just makes things a lot easier overall. I couldn't imagine going back to a regular pot, even if I was brewing a kit and kilo beer. Sanitation is not really an issue with a boil kettle since it's on the hot-side of the process anyways.