Crabnut
Active Member
I had rather good luck last week, using a weed burner and a pile of fireplace bricks. Honest. My turkey fryer burner was not up to the task for my old three gallon boils in a six gal pot, much less for the eight gal boil of my first all-grain. I couldn't afford real burners right now, but had plenty of time to experiment, so I basically build a burner and stand around my old picnic table and the weed burner I had. No regulator on the weed burner. Just a straight feed from the tank. About a 12 inch tall chimney of brick around the weed burner, and about an eight inch separation between the end of the burner and the boil pot. I have no idea what the BTU output was but it was impressive. The flame had to be turned up quite a bit, just to pull in enough air through the nozzle to get rid of the yellow combustion. Anyway, on to the results. Boiling eight gal of water took under thirty minutes to get a rolling boil going. Used up a fair amount of propane, but it was impressive. Talk about thinking outside of the box, but it paid off.
Will be doing another AG batch in a couple of weeks, and will sneak in a few pictures of the burner and pile of brick. This time was my first AG, and in all fairness, I didnt want any pictures or witnesses, incase the worst happened and I had to destroy the evidence. It was a three step mash of about 1/3 unmalted wheat, so I didnt start out with the easiest, and I ended up with too thin a mash and could only batch sparge once. My efficiency was way down, and I have not actually run the numbers yet. Kind of afraid of the results. But I did learn a bunch and the weed burner system was the surprise winner of the event.
Fritz
Will be doing another AG batch in a couple of weeks, and will sneak in a few pictures of the burner and pile of brick. This time was my first AG, and in all fairness, I didnt want any pictures or witnesses, incase the worst happened and I had to destroy the evidence. It was a three step mash of about 1/3 unmalted wheat, so I didnt start out with the easiest, and I ended up with too thin a mash and could only batch sparge once. My efficiency was way down, and I have not actually run the numbers yet. Kind of afraid of the results. But I did learn a bunch and the weed burner system was the surprise winner of the event.
Fritz