I bought this all-in-one system from Say Wee from Homebrew Singapore, which perfectly suited my needs. It's a fantastic system which holds 50+ L of fluid, and has an electric heating element. Only problem though was that there is a massive 9L of dead space at the bottom. This presented quite a challenge when it came to mashing and sparging. With the regular mash water-to-grist ratio of 2 (2L water per kg of grains), the dead space takes up so much fluid that there is barely enough to cover the grains and result in good conversion. In order to combat this, I could have increased the ratio, but this leaves me without enough water to do a proper sparging. In other words, I was screwed. I fiddled around with the latter method but efficiency would always be on the low end, and it was frustrating knowing that I had a good system which could be utilised at its max.
A nice compromise came with the idea of full volume no-sparge brewing, after reading an article about it on Brew Your Own magazine. As this is a directly-heated tun, I could easily heat up the water using the heating element without having to add any hot water at all. What's more, no-sparge is also known to produce richer, better-tasting beers, albeit at the expense of efficiency. Although it's reported that efficiency can drop by as much as 20-25% using a no-sparge technique, I found that by milling my own grain and recirculating, I only lost out by 10% efficiency max.
For the recirculation, I was initially contemplating dropping a few hundred $$ on a March pump. Thankfully, my brew buddy John hooked me up to this neat little device. It's actually a motorised pump meant for coffee machines, and apart from being just affordable, it is silent, food-grade, and can handle hot fluids as well. Of course, it is nowhere near as powerful as the March pump, but with only 3 feet of headspace to pump up, it's been a most valuable addition to the rig.
The mash tun also functions as the boiling kettle. To make it easier to clear out the mash tun, the grains are mashed within a large bag. Once conversion is complete, the bag of grains is lifted out, allowed to drain and discarded. The thermostat is then adjusted so that the wort reaches a boil. As the vessel's output tap is in the middle of the vessel, this makes clogging by hops a possibility. As such, hops are usually placed in hops bags before being dumped into the boil. Makes cleanup a breeze too!
For cooling, we previously used a recirculating immersion copper chiller. As the local tap water is at 28C most of the time, tap water is first run through the chilling coils, until the wort reaches 40C. This takes about 5 mins. The chiller intake is then hooked up to a large water pump, which pumps iced water from a reservoir basin through the chiller. The output returns back to the reservoir. This process usually takes a much longer time, usually 15-20 minutes to reach 18C. We generally run through 5kg of ice per 5 gallon batch in order to reach a wort temperature of 18C.
However, I have since switched to no-chill brewing. The ingenious Australians have been doing this for years, initially as a water-conserving measure. With my crazy schedule however, I find that no-chill is fantastic! I have ditched using the immersion chiller. Once I'm done with the boil, the wort is hosed into a HDPE container (a "Cube") and the heat pretty much kills all the bad stuff in there - I've had beers sit in there for 2 months with absolutely no problems at all. The day before I decide to ferment the beer, I just place the entire Cube into the fermentation chamber to chill it down. After that it's simply pouring the wort from the Cube into the fermenter, pitching the yeast and we're golden.
We have a large chest freezer, which was converted into a fermentation chamber using this external thermostat control from Say Wee. Using this neat gadget, the freezer temperature can be set to anywhere from freezing temperatures, up to 50C. Most of our ales are fermented at 18C for the first few days, after which the temperatures are raised slightly to 20C to allow the yeast to finish cleaning up the beer. The fermentation chamber's temperature is then dropped to 4C at the end of fermentation in order to force the yeast to drop out of suspension. There are of course exceptions, such as saisons and beers fermented with other yeast strains - take a look at the individual beer pages for details!
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