Investigating to start my own "picobrewery"

There are a good few guys down in Cork city who homebrew. They meet up about once a month. They can give you advice and such.(Im guessign your in cork if you can get Beamish)

Stouts are good fun. I just finished the last of a all grain batch. I have never made a red though.

As oblivious pointed out, you could go for a ready made one. Save you a lot of trouble. Here is a 100l one from Mossbrew


It comes with plastic fermentors, but I'm sure you could pay extra to get stainless ones, or tell him to keep them and source your own fermentors.

When it comes to chilling your wort, at the scale you are talking about, you would be looking at getting a counterflow wort chiller or plate heat exchanger.

My information is a year or two old, but Mossbrew were charging £2,500 for the pilot system. Don't know what shipping is or what it would cost to turn the plastic fermentors into stainless steel.

PBC do their 1BBL (163 litre) system for £3,400 and want an extra £500 for stainless fermentors. No idea of delivery here either.

Wallacebiy wrote: »

The Morebeer Brewsculptures are a little along the lines of what I'm thinking of building, Although I can't for the life of me think why one would want to go through a separate boiler and do all that sparging .

You need to heat you water, this can be done in the mash tun. But you need a second volume of water, similar to the first to wash (Sparge) the sugars that a left behind in the grain.

Wallacebiy wrote: »

Surely if you have enough liquid heated and a proper false bottom the liquor itself will extract through the mash .

I know in the commercial brewing set up I've seen they do pump the liquor through the mash once or twice , to get absolute max out of it , but then they're brewing super efficiently and brewing to a high finishing gravity ( 6.5 - 7.5 % ) before watering down to retail strength.

Yes this is a gravity system and is very common, but there is the option of using a pump to set up a R.I.M.S (Recirculating Infusion Mash System)

To hit efficiency of around 70% extraction of sugar from the malt you will need to wash or sparge a second time.

Wallacebiy wrote: »

I'd imagine in my home set up , as long as the hot liquor passes through the mash once on it's way to the hopping kettle it should be grand . Or am I wrong ?

There is the option of doing a party guyle method to make a intial strong beer (8-10%) and the second runnings to produce a week beer (3.5-4.5%). its a little tricky and it would be best starting with a standard batch sparging

Here is a good link for batch sparging and there will be loads of You tubes out there http://hbd.org/cascade/dennybrew.

Two bits of advice 1) I would get the book How to Brew - By John Palmer to cover the fundamentals. 2) Having a load of of shiny equipment will not make you a better brewer, that you to you alone with time and practice

Wallacebiy, sparging is not just something commercial breweries do to get a few extra gravity points out of the mash, everyone who does all grain brewing sparges. A very large percentage of the sugars generated during the mash are do not come out with the first runnings from the mash tun, so you really do have to rinse out the grain with hot water.

I mash in an insulated plastic bucket, in my back yard and the first runnings from my mash tun only make up about a third of the pre boil volume, with the other two thirds coming from two batch sparges.

Have a look at www.howtobrew.com. It's the first edition of John Plamer's book made available for free.

You might also have a look at my article describing a simple all grain batch. It's there to give people an introduction to the basics and does not address water chemistry, efficiency or any of the more complex elements of all grain brewing.

Wallacebiy wrote: »

But if tank size is not an issue ( as in if I have a 100l tank , and I'm putting in 80l to mash and I want about 60-70l of sweet wort) , and you have a good Tun plate and intend to strain all your first liquour ( full preboil volume ) through the grain , I reckon you will extract sufficient sugars . I could be wrong , in which case I'll have to Recirculate . ( which is more complex )

As I said , the Commercial brewery I visited , didn't sparge as far as I saw , but recirculated the Hot liqour through the grains 2- 4 times , to ensure full saturation of the Liqour , before sending it on to boil. After fermentation they would water down to retail strength ( the beer would be in the 6.5-7.5 % by volume range prior to watering down )

Now I think that in a home set up , without recirculating and adding my full volume of water at the start of the mash , I should be able to brew a beer that comes out at about 5% (give or take ) .

You can certainly do a no sprarg mash, most people do it for high gravity beer with the option off a second beer. It would be quite wasteful for as standard beer but its your money.

I would be very surprised if a commercial brewery does not sparg as the difference in a few % extract is their profit margin. I would love to know what brewery could throw away 30-40% extract and survive, my money as that where doing a party gyle method and getting a second beer from a second mash,fullers do this method.

Recirculating will increase some extract but its not going to replace a sparge, and is used a lot to do step mashes. I would implore you not to do high gravity brewing, one its can be difficult (ester formation in fermentation) and more importantly its as nasty practice from mega brewers

BeerNut wrote: »

Bloke down the pub told me high-gravity buggers up your head retention as well.

That probably with be higher alcohol production

As you say capacity won't be a problem, but your efficiency will be down, so you're using more grain for the same end result. Obviously you're aware of this, so best of luck. Keep us posted with your updates.

Wallacebiy, I can guarantee you that that commercial brewery sparged. They may not have explained it very well, but I will bet you anything you like that they sparged.

The recirculation of wort you described is also a standard part of the brewing process and it happens before the sparge. The purpose of the recirculation step (also know as vorlauf) is to use the grain bed as a filter to remove certain lipids and other elements of the wort which have an adverse affect on beer stability and flavour.

You could mash with the whole pre boil volume of liquid if you wish, but you would be diluting the diastatic enzymes, which are responsible for converting starch to sugar. Now, with an all malt grist and good pH and temperature control, you could probably get away with that. But if you want to make a traditional Irish Stout, for instance, your grain bill would probably be something in the region of 70% malted barley, with the rest being flaked barley and roasted barley, neither of which bring any diastatic enzymes to the party.

Another thing to consider is that you are leaving a significant part of the sugars you created behind in the grain. If you examine the calculations in the BYO article you posted a link to, you will see that. I should point out that that article is by John Palmer, who's book both Oblivous and I recommended. In the latest edition of his book, published since the article, he recommends sparging and describes both batch and fly sparging techniques.

You are right that sparging is only a couple of hundred years old, but there is a reason that is has been universally adopted in that time: it works. Also note that before the invention of sparging (mostly known as fly sparging), they did something called re-mashing, which is basically what we now call batch sparging or they did party gyle brewing, which Oblivious already mentioned, making more than one beer out if a single mash.

Have you considered that the fact that a no sparge system means that you are literally throwing away the makings of that second beer?

I know several people who have tried no sparge brewing and it is an interesting thing to do, but they always go back to sparging.

Why are you so dead set against sparging? You are talking about getting a serious setup, which will set you back quite a few quid, why lock yourself into an inefficient no sparge system? Is is just to save the cost of the Hot Liquor Tank?

Have a good think before you invest. Ask yourself why every all grain system out there is set up to sparge and why every brewing book written in the past couple of centuries includes sparging as a matter of course.

The grain is actually the most expensive ingredient and I am including energy costs.

An average brew making 23 litres of 4.x% Vol. beer on my system breaks down as follows:

1 Pack of dry yeast: €2.
50g - 60g Hops: About €4.
4Kg of Pale Malt: About €8.50
(Assumes it was bought in a 25kg sack. Smaller packs are more expensive per Kg as are speciality malts.)
10 Kilowatt Hours of electricity: €1.60
(Assumes my 2.4Kw element running for 4 hours, which is longer than I have ever actually used it).