My last couple brew days have included a weird shuffling ritual about half-way through lautering where my sweet wort kettle is nearly full and my hot liquor tank (also my brew kettle) still have hot water that needs to go in to the lauter. What ensues is a silly, high risk game of musical pots as I pour liquids between 4-5 different kettles and stock pots trying to get all the hot water from my main brew kettle so I can collect the remaining sweet wort.
Another method I’d like to leave behind is the constant ladling and scooping from the hot liquor tank and pouring it in to the mash tun. I’m afraid I’ll mess up the grain bed. I think I’m going to have to build myself a 2 tier rack so that I can harvest gravity’s natural talent in making water go downhill. Luckily, there’s lots of examples for ideas at Brewhalla.
Now I’m just mentally building it. And watching craigslist for potential kettles and parts.
Nice Find, I need to get on that myself!
That’s what I’m plotting, too. Can’t really decide between two or three tier, but
I’ve always had a problem with getting the wort out of the kettle, through the counterchiller, and into the fermenter because the kettle isn’t elevated enough. This can lead to an even higher risk game of lifting the full kettle of scalding, sticky liquid onto a higher surface. Not fun!
I’d like to take a welding class so I can build a brew system from scratch. Ideally, 3 10 gallon converted kegs with burners and possibly a pump in there somewhere. This is something that has to be done little-by-little, of course!
Ok here are a couple weldless different materials that would be great:
Aluminum Extrusions
Unistrut
Looks like Bosch/Rexroth has some pretty cool u-build-em framing components too. I found some used on craigslist, but it was still way out of my price range.
yeah I was thinking about the material as well. We use it here at work and its great. Easy to assemble, extremely strong, but insanely expensive.
My set up runs on gravity. 2 5 gal rubbermaid water coolers and a 10 gal boil kettle. One of the rubbermaids is a hot liquor tank, the other a mash/lauter tun. I built tiers out of 2x4s for the rubbermaids with the second tier slightly higher than the bottom of where my kettle sits on the propane burner. Works great, no pump needed and wood is cheap.