A Brew Tank customer alerted me to the ingenious device that is The Steam Condenser, and as soon as they did I knew it was going to change my brew day forever.
A lot of you, me included, don’t have a spare shed or garage we can claim as our own - although we have tried. Oh, we have tried! Instead, we have to share our much loved brewing space with another hobby or use, or with a special person in our lives. Usually this other person doesn’t take kindly to five plus litres of water vapour floating throughout the house when doing the crucial boil. Steam settling on the in-laws’ heirlooms? Not great. Or the lighting system making you wish you had the latest smart tech to switch it on wirelessly.
So you will be glad to read about this miracle add-on called a steam condenser which turns the steam created from your kettle during boil back into a harmless trickle of water that can then be collected safely in a bucket or directed down a plug hole.
The steam condenser sits very neatly on the side or the top of your tank. So if you were ever wondering what that additional port at the top of the Brew Tank was for, now you know. It is easy to secure with a 1.5†tri clamp, but if you want to secure it onto the lid you would need an additional 90 degree elbow and straight. I prefer connecting it to the side of the tank as it means you still get easy access to the tank for hop additions.
You then attach one end to a cold water source, which can be either pumped in or attached to the cold water tap. On the other end, you simply attach a hose into a bucket of cold water or straight down the drain. Before I used the condenser, my main concern was that running a tap for 60 minutes might not be the most efficient use of water. But much to my surprise the vapour/mister used in the stream condenser is so fine that even with a cold tap fully open, only a small trickle of water was released via the waste pipe.
The water vapour/mister within the condenser is a very effective and simple system to turn the steam created from the boil-off within your tank back into water. By spraying cold water over the steam it quickly cools it down and turns it back into good old H2O. There is an additional valve so you can dial in your equipment, thereby making sure all the steam is converted.
On my last brew day using the steam condenser, I boiled for 60 minutes using a 20L bucket half-filled with cold water and submerged the waste pipe into the bucket. I only needed to replace this bucket twice during the 60 minutes - remember this was with a cold tap fully open, plus around 6L from the wort reduction. So an estimate of around 20-30L of water was used in total. Not bad at all! Which means not only do we have one happy brewer, but also a happy person lucky enough to live with a homebrewer brewing epic beer.
The steam condenser fits both 40L and 60L Brew Tanks as well as other tanks with tri clamp fittings and is available from darkfarm.co.uk. Scan the QR code below to jump straight to it!
