my new tiny brewshed

[lord groan]

Or at least newly set up for brewing properly. Having been brewing ag for a bit now and having put my original setup together with the "no more than £5 per part" I've decided I rather like ag brewing so I thought having learned a lot from putting together my original kit I'd do new kit without the £5 cash limit but still on a shoestring, plus fit out my tiny shed to make the whole thing a lot easier.
1st the shed

self built a few years ago the internal size is 1.45m wide by 2m long, none of your flash 4m x 5m jobbies like you experts have
Flaming cold through the winter and too hot to store bottled beer in the summer - insulation was called for;

I managed to get a load of 25mm insulation board so I lined the roof and walls and now seem to have some sort of mock tudor beer shed, but a much more stable temp.
A shelf to sit my HLT on, then lower to the left another for my new mash tun and the new boiler on its stand below leaving just enough room to put a fermenter on the floor under the boiler tap.
The four 12cm PC fans have a removable piece of shiplap cladding behind them and suck all the steam straight out of the shed. After my first brew with the new setup the walls around the boiler were bone dry, no condensation in the shed at all. result! I did fit a sloping piece of plastic under the fans to catch the condensation from them and let it run outside so the shed stays dry. Even the cold metal side of the fridge stayed dry.

Then a storage chest running the length of the shed, two beer crates high and one deep topped with scrap floorboards and the side from pallet wood, more insulation board lining the inside. It makes a bench to sit on while watching the boil and the seat is hinged for access to the "cellar"

At the near end 3 small shelves to hold boxes of empties, Lidl's sweet pepper boxes are ideal for 20 pint bottles!

The new mash tun - an old foam filled steel cased Coleman coolbox. After using more of the insulation board to build a case for it I've discovered that after 1 3/4 hrs with 10l hot water in it my digital thermometer says the temperature inside was unchanged.
Not forgetting the electrics - 6mm SWA cable from the house connected to the previously unused 45A cooker mcb, coming to a garage consumer unit in the shed with a 40A RCD, two mini ring mains running off 32A mcbs, the first supplying the 3kw HLT, light, and fridge. The second powering the 2 boiler elements - 3kw and 2.6kw -(the 2 single sockets in the pic) and a twin socket to supply the 12v supply for the fans and the pump used to circulate water from the water butts outside through the immersion chiller.
My 1st brew with the new setup using the brewfridge for the 1st time


So - a 3 pot setup and big brew fridge along with an insulated storage box that holds 10 crates, or an awful lot more if you don't use the crates all squeezed into part of a shed 1.45m x 2m. I'm chuffed!
The best bit out of all of it is having electrics installed means I can fit a timeswitch to the HLT so it's ready to go when I get up in the morning with no delays while it heats up!

[6470zzy]

Very nice indeed

[themadhippy]

If you was to cut the bench seat in half you could access the cellar without having to stand up

[Fastline]

Great job, i just moved and need to build a brew shed to do all grain brewing, this is really good motivation, really good use of the space and the electrical details are food for thought, using the cooker outlet will make it easier to get power out there.

Really like the cellar seat cupboard

[lord groan]

If you was to cut the bench seat in half you could access the cellar without having to stand up

True, but i only had 2 hinges!

[Fil]

great use of space. well done.. wish i had your woodworking skills..

[Haydnexport]

cracking use of space , mine's 3x as big with half as much in there !!

[Dave-Leeds]

nice work

how do you ventalate the steam out when the boiler is on?

[Stewb]

That is really smart and organised- I'm hugely impressed and will definitely be stealing some ideas when I get the chance to do my permanent setup in dec/ jan
very jealous!

[steambrew]

Well thought out brew shed do you barrel as well as bottle, like the bench to sit on but a good soft cushion if highly recommend

[lord groan]

nice work

how do you ventalate the steam out when the boiler is on?

Hi Dave, the four PC fans on the wall above the boiler have a removable piece of shiplap cladding behind them, when I unscrew that the fans push all the steam out of the shed. They shift so much air that on my 1st run they worked so well that there was zero condensation build up inside the shed, even on the cold metal of the fridge. The only place which got wet was the fans themselves and I've put a piece of plastic under them which is slanted to the outside so the drips from the fans run outside rather than down inside behind the insulation.
An old PC power supply is screwed to the underside of the mash tun shelf and the 12v supply from that is wired to the 2 phono sockets you can just see above the right hand 13A socket. I have wired a phono plug onto the fans and another onto the pump I use to circulate the IC water so I can plug them in when needed

[lord groan]

Well thought out brew shed do you barrel as well as bottle, like the bench to sit on but a good soft cushion if highly recommend

I have barrelled in the Autumn and Winter before now but recently have just gone with bottling because I can put one in the kitchen fridge to chill properly. I was barrelling because bottling was such a faff but having discovered Starsan and the little polythene temporary bottle caps I now clean the bottle when I drink the pint, squirt of starsan, plastic cap and into storage then when I start bottling I have 40 bottles which are already clean and sterile and ready to go. So much easier!
Also by bottling I can get a stock of different beers built up and get to choose which one I fancy, with a barrel I have to drink those 40 pints before the beer begins to go off.
As for the cushion - SWMBO is threatening curtains, cushions and general fripperies.

[lord groan]

Great job, i just moved and need to build a brew shed to do all grain brewing, this is really good motivation, really good use of the space and the electrical details are food for thought, using the cooker outlet will make it easier to get power out there.

Really like the cellar seat cupboard

Thanks, slightly concerned you might have misunderstood me when you say cooker outlet? - I didn't use the cooker outlet in the kitchen I took the power straight off the MCB in the consumer unit itself as it was unused.

[meursault]

how stable is your shed temperature LG? be interesting to hear how it copes through the 'summer'

i have a 12 x 8 shed but the temp issue is main reason why i've not considered a set up like yours (yet)

[lord groan]

how stable is your shed temperature LG? be interesting to hear how it copes through the 'summer'

i have a 12 x 8 shed but the temp issue is main reason why i've not considered a set up like yours (yet)

Temp stability? Too soon to say yet, I only finished it last weekend, The insulation has been in for a couple of months and I did notice a couple of weekends back when the outside temps hit about 20c that it stayed noticeably cooler inside, but that was with 1 hot day. I'm sure it'll get hot in the summer when we get a week or two of hot weather and the nights are warm too but I'm optimistic that the cupboard/cellar store with its additional insulation will remain fairly cool.
I guess what will happen is the insulation will make temp changes much more gradual so I'm hoping the store will protect the beer. Like you my concern was how hot and cold the shed got and how quickly, I've no room in the house to store lots of bottles so for the past 2 yrs I've brewed until early June then stopped until late september or so because I had no way to keep fermentation cool enough and no way to keep the finished beer cool enough
I'll try and sort out a way to do some basic temp recordings