I've long been on the look out for cheap boil kettle solutions, whether they be used equipment or something more creative.  Over the past few days I think I've honed in on my solution.  First, I'll say the cheapest option to date that I've seen for a 2bbl brewhouse has been from NABS.  I had been using this as a baseline for comparison for any brewhouse components I might cobble together myself.  Their kettle looks pretty nice; whirlpool inlet, closed top with venting, insulated, and has an electric element (I'm shooting for electric-everything so I can eventually offset this cost with renewable energy at some point).  The downside? 3-phase power requirement.  Why is this bad?  This is bad for me because the locations I'm looking at operating in - older downtown retail spaces - mostly don't have 3-phase power.  I would thus have to pay the power company a hefty fee to run 3-phase power, if it's even possible, or buy a $2K single-to-three phase power converter.  So essentially the list price of $4950 is more like $7000 plus shipping all told.

The alternative I'm piecing together involves two Blichmann 55-gallon Boilermaker kettles, heated by either single-phase electric immersion heating elements or ceramic "band" heaters.  I am working with a parts supplier now to hone in on the best option. The two kettles would be piped together with a T-fitting and boiled simulatenously to net a 2bbl batch. There are downsides.... they will ultimately take up a larger footprint. They are not insulated, so I will lose more heat; but I could wrap them with insulation.  They will be harder to whirlpool, but not impossible.  There will be more steam vapor, but they will be put under a restaurant hood anyway, so that's not a big deal. 

I've also been looking at restaurant stock pot ranges, but most of these are gas. There are also issues with gas piping in some of the downtown locations and venting requirements for make-up air from combustion.  The electric stock pot ranges I've seen aren't quite powerful enough. 

All told I am liking this alternative more and more. I should be able to piece this together for under $3K.  The $4K savings can buy me two fermenters.

Would you like to hear something a bit absurd?  Commercial kitchens require FIVE different sinks. One for clean, rinse, and sanitizing dishes (3 sinks), one for hand washing, and one for vegetable washing (prep).  On top of that, if their is a bar there should be a hand wash station for the bartender.  Oh, can't forget the seperate mop sink.  So I'm looking at potentially SEVEN sinks.  I'm all for proper sanitation, but it sure seems at least one should be able to serve two functions....*grumble*.

No doubt, the stainless steel conical fermenter is the workhorse of most breweries.  There are many good reasons for this: they are easier to sanitize and less labor-intensive, their shape encourages a faster fermentation, and the cone gives one the ability to dump trub and harvest yeast from the bottom, thereby allowing the brewer to skip racking to a secondary aging vessel.

Open, flat-bottomed fermenters, on the other hand, are often likened to scary, icky, cobweb-draped contraptions in some forbidden dungeon (that also happen to have been used just fine for hundreds of years). Rather than being forced to perform in a pressurized environment, the yeast are free to operate at atmospheric pressure. The very best, healthy yeast can be "top cropped" over several generations for the next batch, whereas conical produced yeast tend to be less healthy, and most breweries don't let them get past seven generations or so. Most importantly, open fermented yeast also tend to produce more esters and other flavor compounds than their pressurized cousins, and are thus prefered by many Belgian brewers, as well as German hefeweisen producers; both styles noted for their pronounced aromatic properties.

Another benefit? Open fermenters are cheaper. Much cheaper. Like, half. They have no need to hold pressure, and don't have the complex conical shape or other accoutrements of conicals.

If you haven't guessed by now, I will be using open fermenters at the Velvet Abbey. For the styles of beer I want to produce, they are simply the way to go, and fit my budget to boot.  I have found a supplier of off-the-shelf winery tanks, with an open top, cooling jackets, and a slight 5% slope to the bottom to facilate proper drainage, and nearly a one-to-one height to width ratio. Awesome.

One of the things I'm really looking forward to is barrel aging some of my Belgian beers in used wine barrels.  What I am *not* looking forward to is lifting, cleaning, and otherwise manhandling 60 gallon wine barrels, which can weigh 120 to 140 pounds empty, and are pretty much unmovable when full. 

The standard wine barrel rack you see in most wineries allows you to move them around with a forklift.  That's great and all, really, but I'm not going to have a forklift in my little brewpub, and I sure as hell can't lift a wine barrel with much ease all by myself.

Taking a cue from rotating compost tumblers, I got to thinking it sure would be neat if the racks had wheels on the bottom so the wine barrel could be rotated in place for cleaning, emptying, and stirring.  As is usually the case when I come up with a brilliant idea, someone has already thought of it!

Enter the Oxoline wine barrel rack system, made in France.

This lovely system does precisely what I had dreamed, allowing me to place a barrel in the rack, and LEAVE IT THERE!  Little wheels let me roll the barrel upside down, to fit a spray nozzle in the bung hole, clean it out drain it, then turn it right side up for filling, all with little effort. It even looks classy to boot.

The cost per barrel is about double what I would pay for convential stacking wine barrel racks; well worth it in my opinion.

It's a lovely Saturday afternoon, and I'm sitting here waiting for sparging to complete for my experimental Belgian Amber recipe.  It also happens that Wolfram Alpha went live last night, which is a very exciting thing in its own right, and useful for brewing calculations.  What is Wolfram Alpha, and how is it useful for brewing, you ask?  Excellent question my padawan!  Allow me to explain a bit.

In a nutshell, Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine... kind of like how you can enter simple math formulas, like "128 gallons = ? ounces",  into google and get a result.  Wolfram Alpha is like that, but on super mega steriods; it's made by the same folks who made Mathematica (if you've ever taken a college level chem or math lab, you may have come across it).  You can ask Wolfram Alpha all sorts of questions about astronomy, physics, economics... the list is massively impressive.  There is quite a bit of balleyhoo about it on the Intertubes lately.

So how to use it for brewing?  Well, I'll give you a relatively simple example from my present sparge.  I have a gravity setup for my sprage (see left), and I like to set the rate at which the wort drains to the rate at which the sparge water enters, to maintain a layer of water on top of my grain bed.  What I'll typically do is grab a measuring device, such as a pyrex shotglass or larger pyrex pint glass, hold it under the flowing wort, and start a timer (either officially with a watch or good ol' verbal "one-one-thousands").  I then adjust the sparge water to match this flow rate.  Then I need to figure out how long it will take, at that rate, to make my sparge run for about 40-60 minutes to gather 7 gallons of wort. 

Previously I'd use google and a calculator to convert ounces to gallons, and seconds to minutes, then various tabulations to figure out the total time to 7 gallons. Which isn't impossible, nor truthfully really *that* hard, but with Wolfram I can cut out a few steps with a query like so:

"1 ounce in 5 seconds = ? gallons per minute"

produces output like so:

How cool is that!?

Now I can take the result,  0.09375 gal/min, use it to divide  my desired 7 gallons to find out it will take about 74 minutes to complete.  Not bad eh? Maybe I want to increase the sparge flow a bit. 

That's just one example... I'll be playing around a bit to see how much it knows about beer brewing... it does know that 1bbl = 4032 ounces, but I've yet to figure out the syntax to see if i can get it to tell me how many 12 ounce servings are in a bbl.  Of course, that's simple for me to do myself, but you get the idea.  I would love to hear from other folks about clever ways to use this gem of a service while brewing.

Happy brewing!