After having gleaned hundreds of great tips and techniques off this forum, I thought I'd add my own ideas.
I've been doing all-grain along the lines of Revvy's boil-in-a-bag stovetop method with great success. However, I found that the pot was not keeping the temperature very well. I read Dave Line's Brewing Beer's Like Those You Buy and he mentions something called 'the Floating Mash Tun'. Where you have a bucket within a bucket. That sparked off the inspiration brain cells, and I came up with my mash tun. Plonk the pot in a sink of 68 degree Celsius water and drape a blanket over the whole thing. Check on it every 20 minutes or so and add boiling water if needed. It's served me well for two batches.
My other innovation is the carboy carrier cum water bath. Some people on here use milk crates to carry their carboys around to decrease the chances of dropping and doing serious harm. Some people put their carboys in a container with water to keep the fermentation temp down.
Synthesis!
I put a black garbage bag in the milk crate, put the carboy in, fill the carboy with wort, pitch yeast, then fill the milk crate with water (only after having moved it to it's storage location; that thing's heavy enough with 20 litres of beer in).
It has to be quite a beefy bag, though. I place the crate's edge against a tile in the kitchen and rock it back and forth to aerate the wort. The bottle rubs the bag against the bottom of the milk crate and can put little holes in it.
Work for me.
I've been doing all-grain along the lines of Revvy's boil-in-a-bag stovetop method with great success. However, I found that the pot was not keeping the temperature very well. I read Dave Line's Brewing Beer's Like Those You Buy and he mentions something called 'the Floating Mash Tun'. Where you have a bucket within a bucket. That sparked off the inspiration brain cells, and I came up with my mash tun. Plonk the pot in a sink of 68 degree Celsius water and drape a blanket over the whole thing. Check on it every 20 minutes or so and add boiling water if needed. It's served me well for two batches.
My other innovation is the carboy carrier cum water bath. Some people on here use milk crates to carry their carboys around to decrease the chances of dropping and doing serious harm. Some people put their carboys in a container with water to keep the fermentation temp down.
Synthesis!
I put a black garbage bag in the milk crate, put the carboy in, fill the carboy with wort, pitch yeast, then fill the milk crate with water (only after having moved it to it's storage location; that thing's heavy enough with 20 litres of beer in).
It has to be quite a beefy bag, though. I place the crate's edge against a tile in the kitchen and rock it back and forth to aerate the wort. The bottle rubs the bag against the bottom of the milk crate and can put little holes in it.
Work for me.
