Brew big or go home. Meet my new kettle

On my lunch hour I swung by the scrap yard just for the heck of it and I found this.
I have no idea how much it holds yet but I would say that it's at least 55 gal.
It's stainless, thicker then my other kettles and it's freaking huge.

Now I will either need to mod my stand or go to a pump from the MLT. The top of this while on the burner is 15 inches higher then the MLT.
Not a bad score for scrap steel price.

Man, you could almost cut the top half off and still have 20+ gallons of boil room.

Holy crap! What size batches do you usually brew? You're not going to be brewing five gallon batches in that thing!

wow!
just wow!

two more just like that and you got yourself a nice 1.5 BBL system

im extremely jealous

I brew 10 gallon right now up to a 1.070 OG. Anything over that I drop to 5 gal just because I can't boil it. My old kettle was 15 gal. So What I will do is use the old kettle as my new HLT and then when I want to brew a 10 or less batch I'll use the old one as I have been.
I have been wanting two things lately, 1 being able to brew 15-17 gal preboil without boiling over and, 2 being able to brew 20+ gal batches.
I think I'll break this thing in by the end of the month with a 20 or 30 gal batch of my house pale.
Now I need to check and see what the most I can mash. lol

I will keep on the look-out for more of these.

That is a freakin enormous kettle! I have nothing further to say...

If you ran a hose down to the bottom of the kettle you could still run off (hoorah syphon effect!). Vorlaufing might be a bit of an adventure.

Jeez... what are you going to ferment in?

DrinksWellWithOthers said:

Jeez... what are you going to ferment in?

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I have two of these that I'm just about ready to use.



I just need to build my cabinet to control the ferment temps and a hose system from the outside of the house down into my fermenting room.

Or I could just use a bunch of buckets and carboys.

what are you going to mash in, the kettle itself?

I want to know what you plan on heating that thing with. With my turkey fryer it would take about twelve hours to bring that to a boil.

DANG that thing is a monster, nice score!

My gawsh, that is the biggest I have ever seen! haha Ummm, how long will it take to heat that thing.

I have a 20 gal cooler that I mash in. It will hold 52 pounds of grain and a 1.25qt/pound mash in.
So I could make a 25 gal batch of a 1.055 OG brew. If I drop down a little I could do more. Or I could mash, drain, sparg, empty, mash again, sparge and boil.
I don't know how my burner is going to handle it. Right now it boils 15 gal and takes about 20 minutes to take it from mash temp to boil. Once it's at boil I can almost turn it to the point of shutting off and hold the boil.

Before I try and brew in it I will fill it with like 30 gal and fire it up so see how it does.

If it can't do it, I guess it's time to upgrade. :rockin:

im jealous

It looks a bit like the 65 gallon kettle I found on a local craigslist. He only wanted $50 but I just didn't know what I'd do with that kind of volume.

Bobby_M said:

It looks a bit like the 65 gallon kettle I found on a local craigslist. He only wanted $50 but I just didn't know what I'd do with that kind of volume.

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I have had the thought of hacking about 10 inches off the top of this just because it's so damn big.

For that price I would grab it. Stainless is going for $2 a pound.

It would be nice to hack a little bit off of it and re-roll the edge if you could, heck you could probably hack off a bit, and also cut in some handles while you were at it, just don't let BierMuncher help

You're going to need a swimming pool to cool that thing down in!

Homercidal said:

You're going to need a swimming pool to cool that thing down in!

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No way... CFC or plate chiller is the way to go. I have never done an ice bath.

Well I'm working at getting this baby going this next weekend (22nd). I did a test run with 20 gal of water just to see how she does. My little SQ-14 burner is going to work it's ass off to do more then 25 gal. At 20 gal I started with a temp of 60* and in 30 minutes it was at 130* so I'm just shy of 2* per minute. I'm thinking that with the wort coming in at 160 or so it should take me 45 - 60 minutes to get to a boil at a 20 to 25 gal start.

I will be upgrading to the banjo burner soon.

Thinking that if I fire it up when I start the first runnings it wont be to bad.

You had better get some insulation on that thing or you will never get a boil. The bigger bottom surface helps retain heat and whirlpooling should work better too.

That's brewery porn right there. But what would *really* be awesome is some 250,000 btu/hr burner firing that bad mother up.

That reminds me, I should see if they still have that old 1 million btu/hr natural gas pilot burner laying around at work...it would run that kettle right nice.