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The essentials of brewing are extremely simple:
1. Malt is steeped in hot water for a period. The temperature of the water is fairly critical, but that control comes later and with experience.
2. The water is separated from the grain and retained - this is your sweet wort, the grain is now known as brewers grains and is spent, so if you have chickens, well you have a use for spent grain!
3. The sweet wort is boiled and hops are added. Again the hopped wort is separated from the hops and the hops discarded.
4. The wort is now cooled to pitching temperature and the yeast is added.
5. Fermentation takes place and the wort is turned into green beer. This needs to be bottled or casked and conditioned and it is ready to drink.
Now can anyone see any difficulty there? I hop(e) not, because it really is that simple. The equipment you use to carry out the procedure can be simple or complicated, but essentially you are mashing the grains, extracting the wort, boiling in the hops, cooling and fermenting the beer and bottling it.
You need a boiler and I found a 70 litre (15 gallon) stainless steel tri-wall commercial stock pot online - this fits neatly on a 7.5Kw gas burner. You need a sparge vessel. I started out using a food grade plastic bucket fitted with a tap. You need a couple of plastic buckets to act as your collectors, I use plastic buckets. You will be collecting around 30 - 35 litres of wort, so a single 25 litre bucket is not large enough. That really is about all you need in the way of a brewery. The refinements are important though.
The boiler when full of wort (35 litres) will weigh about 45Kg. This is a lot of weight to carry around - and dangerous when filled with boiling wort. So it needs to be sited at a high enough level so when fitted with a tap it can be used for the purpose which we will need.
The sparge vessel needs to be fitted with a tap, the ordinary plastic spigot that comes with most brew buckets will be quite good enough. but it needs to be fitted with a stainless steel perforated false bottom. This domed spigoted insert will fit in the bottom of the sparge vessel and act as a filter to allow the wort to run off while holding the grains back: exactly as it does in a real brewery.
The collectors can be any food grade plastic buckets. I use two brewing buckets that I obtained from the local home-brew shop.
You will need pipes and these are best bought from a home-brew shop and they should be silicone plastic and should be sized according to the outlet size of your ball valve tails.
I am using some terms that you will not yet be familiar with. I'll explain more as we go along the route of building a kitchen brewery. Don't worry, all will become clear.
In the image we can see my brewery in operation, actually making a dark ale of some kind, from memory I think it was a milk stout. Not to worry.
My boiler is at the top centre of the image. This is a 70 litre stainless steel stock pot, it is mounted on a 7.5Kw gas burner which is connected to the gas bottle on the floor.
A pipe is running hot water off into the top of the sparge vessel. My sparge vessel is a re-purposed stainless steel boiler.
Both of these vessel are fitted with 12.5mm full-bore ball valves. Silicone pipes are attached.
The actual process being carried out is the sparging of the mash. Sparging (from the latin asperge) means to 'sprinkle' and in the image you can see clean hot water is being run from the boiler into the top of the sparge vessel, and at the same time, the wort is being run off into the collector which is on the floor.
By siting the gas heater on the drainer, with the boiler on top, then the sparge vessel on a coffee table, and the collector on the floor, I am making full use of the power of gravity in moving water around. the whole process becomes a matter of turning on taps. Water then flows where you want it to go.
As the clean water is run in at the top, it washes the sugar (wort) from the grains through to the collector. The grains themselves act as a filter bed, and after your first stuck sparge (I'll explain later) you will understand the filter mechanism fully.