TypicalNerveCell
Active Member
Decided to make a little build log of my ongoing electric brewery build. This will be my second brew setup, although the first one was always intended to be more of a prototype consisting of a plastic bucket with arduino controlled heating elements. It works well enough, but I don't like using a brew bag, and I wanted something more cool looking!
The basic idea was to have something that could work just as well as some commercial solutions, while being cheaper, and having cheap, readily available spare parts. I'm aware that there are cheap, ready made solutions out there, but I enjoy the DIY approach a lot.
After googling some I decided on a 50L stockpot for the boil vessel, and a 33L stockpot as a malt pipe, both from Angel home brew in the UK.
Most of the other hardware is from Aliexpress or Ebay.
The two stockpots and some hardware.
Made a hole for the 3500W heater using a Q-max hole puncher. It worked effortlessly compared to drilling the pilot hole.
The worlds cheapest circle marking jig?
My first real meeting with an angle grinder. Went well enough. Cut out a lot of the bottom and shaved a few centimeters off the height, so I can use a lid on the boil vessel when mashing.
This is where I am at for now. Will use a combination of a fine mesh and the bottom filter plate from a 65L brewzilla in the malt pipe. Perhaps overkill, but should do the job.
Need to make holes for the sight glass and thermowell (Perhaps someone could recommend me a nice thermowell on Aliexpress that fits an ds1820b? ), and decide how I want the malt pipe suspended in the boil vessel. Also need to decide if I'm going to make a solution that holds the malt pipe in place when sparging.
If there are questions like "why did you go for that solution? Seems weird to me" The answer is most likely because I am stupid, didn't plan well enough, or simply because trying to keep it cheap means I am somewhat limited in hardware choices.
For the controller I'm going to use ExBrewManiac, but that will come later.
The basic idea was to have something that could work just as well as some commercial solutions, while being cheaper, and having cheap, readily available spare parts. I'm aware that there are cheap, ready made solutions out there, but I enjoy the DIY approach a lot.
After googling some I decided on a 50L stockpot for the boil vessel, and a 33L stockpot as a malt pipe, both from Angel home brew in the UK.
Most of the other hardware is from Aliexpress or Ebay.
The two stockpots and some hardware.
Made a hole for the 3500W heater using a Q-max hole puncher. It worked effortlessly compared to drilling the pilot hole.
The worlds cheapest circle marking jig?
My first real meeting with an angle grinder. Went well enough. Cut out a lot of the bottom and shaved a few centimeters off the height, so I can use a lid on the boil vessel when mashing.
This is where I am at for now. Will use a combination of a fine mesh and the bottom filter plate from a 65L brewzilla in the malt pipe. Perhaps overkill, but should do the job.
Need to make holes for the sight glass and thermowell (Perhaps someone could recommend me a nice thermowell on Aliexpress that fits an ds1820b? ), and decide how I want the malt pipe suspended in the boil vessel. Also need to decide if I'm going to make a solution that holds the malt pipe in place when sparging.
If there are questions like "why did you go for that solution? Seems weird to me" The answer is most likely because I am stupid, didn't plan well enough, or simply because trying to keep it cheap means I am somewhat limited in hardware choices.
For the controller I'm going to use ExBrewManiac, but that will come later.
