I finally got round to building my 70l stock pot brew kettle last week, after several months of gathering the various bits and pieces I needed. The following is a little gallery of the build and first brew
Larger versions of all pics can be found on http://scratch.turbinado.co.uk/
This is the stock pot - a 70 litre nordic optical pot I got back in March:
Marking up the pot for drilling and hole punching:
I wasn't sure how well I would be able to clamp it down, but this arrangement worked quite well, with the workmate gripping the handle and clamps pulling down in the vertical plane:
First hole drilled:
Testing out the ball valve hole. The orange/brown seal is a silicone o-ring, however these didn't work too well at sealing the joint due to the curvature of the pot toward the base.
The punched hole for the ball valve:
Two more holes punched for the elements, with one element in place. These are everyone's favourite Tesco Value kettle elements
The final hole drilled was for this earth point:
I discovered that the elements wouldn't seal when screwed in place, as the pot itself isn't thick enough, being only about 1mm thick. I needed to pad out the joint, and this was my solution:
These things are made out of silicone and will stand up to three or four hundred degrees C.
My idea was to cut out a 40mm circle and use it like a washer tucked into the element's own seal, padding out the 1mm of stock pot with another 1-1.5mm of silicone. The result looked like this, and works a charm. Note also the other earth point attached to the earth pin of the left-hand element:
I then fitted shrouds made from bike water bottles and trimmed down some of the excess bits of flan case. I originally intended to cut them all the way round, but ended up leaving the top bits in place to act as a kind of splash guard
This is the only picture I took of the inside, which didn't come out too well:
After a test boil, it became evident that the silicone o-rings I originally planned to use to seal the ball valve joint weren't going to work. If I was careful, I could get it down to a slow drip, but the o-rings would slip whenever any lateral force was applied to the tap (e.g. by opening it), which would increase the leak to a steady dribble. The eventual solution was to get some proper stainless washers, which - in combination with a silicone washer fashioned from one of the flan case offcuts - did the trick:
So what to do with the finished product? Make some beer
The brew is a 5 gallon pale ale, 90% maris otter, 10% light crystal, target OG 1.045
First task for the pot is to be a HLT:
Sparge in progress:
Nice pic of the whole 'brewery': New boiler on left, medium stock pot acting as the HLT, mash tun in the middle with small stockpot acting as an underback (and slightly more convenient container for collecting the wort
). Note the cloth under the ball valve - the join is unfortunately still very slightly leaky, letting out the odd drip now and again.
Mmmmmm, wort
Cooling setup: the hoses run to a copper pipe immersion chiller sat inside the pot.
The now cooled wort being transfered to the fermenter - perhaps slightly more frothy than necessary
And finally, the pre-pitch sample I took for gravity:
The brew clocked in at a whopping 1.060, way over my target of 1.045. I think it's a result of my having underestimated the efficiency of the mash, and boiling off significantly more liquid than expected - I budgeted 0.5 gallons of evaporation over a one hour boil, but I suspect I lost closer to an entire gallon. But at the end of the day I got a good test run on the pot, and what seems to be a very promising brew, if perhaps a little on the strong side
--
Phil
