2 Gallon Brewery

[gdanby]

It's taken almost a month to put together, but I finally finished it today. Will hopefully use it in the next day or so:



I found my 1 gallon brewery a little too small and my 9 gallon a bit too big for everyday use, so this should be just right. It's mostly stainless steel with armaflex insulation. The HLT is electric powered and the boiler will be soon, but currently will sit on the gas hob. All being well, I'll put the electrics together properly if it all goes well on the first brew.

My labour of love was the spinning sparge arm, powered by a magnetically coupled chinese pump. I based it on a design from someone on the Northen Brewer forum and I can post pictures of it in more detail if anyone's interested. It seems to work really well in my tests so far and doesn't need a great deal of pressure to get it to spin.

I might have gone over my budget a little, I reckon all in, it's pushing the £200 mark so I need to get a lot of use out of it!

[VANDEEN]

That looks a nice little compact system
And probably given my usual beer consumption would have been an ideal size for me to start on, however with friends and family to provide beer for at Christmas & a spare fermenter that I couldn't get a replacement tap for I jumped straight in with a 5 gallon.

I'd be interested in a parts list and my engineering side is definitely curious about the sparge arm

[gdanby]

The arm is 8mm brass tube, with a 8mm solder ring tee and stop ends.

The idea was to flare a short length of the 8mm brass tube and have this freely spin inside a 9mm brass tube. The 9mm brass tube would be held in place with 3 rubber nitrile o ring washers, squeezed inside the 3/8 stainless steel nipple.

However, when I cam to solder it all together, the short section of the 9mm brass tube ended up soldered to the 8mm tube ! Luckily, a push fit pipe insert could be slipped around both tubes and if anything, it spins better than it would have done, as the 8mm tube inside the 9mm was quite a tight fit !

I only drilled 4 holes in the arm, otherwise the flow would have been too great.