Last night I helped my friend Jesse brew up his first 5 gallon all-grain batch of beer. With an array of gear that included a turkey fryer, beverage cooler, camp chair, cutting board, vegetable steamer and Diablo II jewel case, we created a successful fly sparge system. I snapped a few pictures of our Frankensteined brew system with my cell phone. I apologize in advance for the quality, the camera is horrid.
Here is a shot of the fly sparge setup in action.
The brew kettle is a 30 quart turkey fryer. The mash tun, an unmodified 5 gallon Rubbermaid beverage cooler. In the tun is a spring loaded stainless steel vegetable strainer that acts as a false bottom, keeping the grain bed above the spout.
Initially, our plan was to perform a batch sparge; draining the tun into a bucket while we heated sparge water in the boil kettle. But the steamer didn’t fit the bottom of the tun snuggly, so some grain made it into the spout, slowing collection of the initial runnings. The sparge water was up to temp long before we needed it, so we erected the 3-tiered fly sparge system in the picture above.
The turkey fryer, sitting on top of a cutting board, in a collapsible camp chair, acted as a holding tank for the sparge water. The oil dump valve on the fryer let us adjust the flow rate to match that of the tun’s spout. We kept the water in the kettle around 170(F) by adding small amounts of boiling water when it started to dip.
After a while of holding in the tun’s spout by hand, Jesse came up with an ingenious way to automate it.
With a beer cap keeping pressure on the valve, we were free to sit back and enjoy a few beers while we waited for the sparge to finish. In addition to a six-pack of Sierra Nevada’s Glissade, we also cracked open my Smoked Porter and poured one of the last bottles of my Belgian IPA. As for the Diablo II case mentioned above, it was used to stabilize the bucket collecting the wort; receiving not one, but two large cracks for its trouble.
I’m not sure about the efficiency of our set-up yet. I had to leave before the boil finished, but Jesse saved a few ounces of wort before he pitched the yeast. I will be taking a hydrometer reading tomorrow to figure out our original gravity. For our next go-around, I think we are going to line the tun with a large nylon bag to keep the grain from passing through the holes in the false bottom and clogging the spout. I got a spray of hot wort to the leg last night while trying to unclog the tun’s valve and would like to avoid that in the future.
If anyone is interested in the beer that was brewed, here is the recipe. Jesse decided to go with a pretty straight-forward Pale Ale for his first brew.
Jesse’s Pale Ale
Batch Size: 5.0 Gallons
9.5lbs 2-Row
0.5lbs Crystal 60L
0.5lbs Carapils
0.5oz Cascade @ 45
1.0oz Cascade @ 30
0.5oz Cascade @ 15
Safale S-05
Estimated Efficiency: 70%
Estimated OG: 1.054
Estimated FG: 1.014
ABV%: 5.2
IBU: 37
SRM: 7
Cheers!
Kevin
I can’t find my copy of Daiblo 2, assholes.