It’s been a fun three months. I’ve finally found some time to brew up a few batches, giving me inspiration on how to set up my brew dungeon. Making big and important choices, especially when it comes to planning one’s brew space, takes a lot of consideration. As with life, you have to do a few test runs before you settle down.

“I hotwired my old test Brew Tank and turned it into a fermentation chamber.” 

The main turning point was switching from a plastic fermenter to stainless steel. I was getting a lot of dodgy tastes and quickly found that no matter how hard I was cleaning my old plastic fermenter I was still getting some sour off tastes. So as a quick fix, I hotwired my old test Brew Tank and turned it into a fermentation chamber. 

Knowing the cold was settling in I had to add a heat source somehow, but didn’t want to use our large elements that come with the Brew Tank for fear there would be too much power which would harm the yeast. So I opted for a small 150w radiator heating element for £20 and attached the thread to a tri clamp and popped it in.

Anyway, I can happily say I’m enjoying my first brew successfully fermented in my converted tank whilst writing this. It’s a lovely grapefruit infused IPA, and it’s a belter.   

And I’ve had a very interesting conversation with another happy customer whose brews have become so good he’s now making that big decision to go semi-pro and sell his brews to the local pub. He requested a second Brew Tank with the intriguing idea of running the two tanks in parallel. Bear with me on this one. The concept is to connect the 2 outlets from each tank with an equal tee, then to the pump, through the RIMs and then another equal tee and back over the grain bed in each tank via the sprayers. Suffice to say, I’ve now ordered 2 equal tees so I can try this out. 

 This concept should work perfectly with my idea of turning a second Brew Tank into a fermenter. You can safely brew 2 batches of say 20L using the joined tanks, and then after the boil combine and ferment using the full volume of one tank, in this case 40L.

So this decision to run 2 tanks side by side was the launching pad to the new Brew Dungeon. The second major consideration was to extract the steam during the boil. This solution was easily achieved using the tri clamp fitting on the lid and securing an extractor hose with an inline fan. We are also looking into adding a condenser, but a little cautious on water usage for this. 

The third and final consideration is I’m very keen to hook up a reflux still I picked up last year. This unit fits very nicely on the top of the Brew Tank. We have been chatting with a distiller in Devon who is hopefully going to give me a few lessons and some insightful articles in MASHED! In return, I’m offering some advice on making the “wash” from all grain brewing using our tanks. Hopefully by next issue the Brew Dungeon will be complete and I’ll give you all a walk around. 

The festive season is upon us, and I can’t thank you enough for your continuing support - our customers have been outstanding. Even though we are in hard times, it is good to know life is always better with a larder full of homebrew! Happy brewing.