If you decide to do conventional all-grain, here is a basic set-up for outdoor or garage brewing. (See the attachment for a picture of an earlier system that I used.) It allows you both to control temperature and fine-tune your process to ensure proper sanitation. This is for 5 gallon infusion mashes.
10 gallon hot water tun
10 gallon insulated water cooler (Rubbermaid) - for sparging.
10 gallon boil kettle
2-Tier gravity stand
Two high pressure burners
Two propane tanks
Large, metal spoon
A good digital thermometer
Hydrometer ( a refractometer is nice, too, but not necessary)
High temp silicon tubing
Immersion chiller
Fermentation chamber (I use glass carboys and a temperature-controlled chest freezer)
Put your hot water tun on a burner at the higher tier. I built my two-tier system out of an old children's workbench salvaged from my school, and some 2x4's. It;s ugly but it works for me. I load mine one gallon at a time and fire it up first thing in the morning. A sight glass and a thermometer are convenient but not necessary. I always leave a smaller, second pot on the stove with hot water - because you never know when you're going to need hot water, and it also helps with clean up. If I need to transfer water, I use 1 gallon plastic water jugs.
A ten gallon insulated cooler will allow you to brew beers with a higher gravity. You won't regret the relatively small initial investment over a 5 gallon cooler. I put in a digital thermometer from Brewhardware.com because I like to know what my mash temps are without having to open the cooler.The installation is a bit tricky but you can probably purchase one pre-made from somewhere if you want. Put in a bazooka screen and you can both batch sparge and fly-sparge. I rest high temperature silicon tubing on the top of my mash when I am ready to fly sparge and go
very slowly; as long as there is a least an inch of water on the top and I go slowly, I don't run into issues with channeling, because the pressure of the water level on top remains fairly constant.
Don't bother getting fancy with your boil kettle. You're boiling wort. A sight glass and analogue thermometer are not necessary. Figure out your levels and mark them on a large metal spoon using a grinding tool of some kind. I used a dremel tool and a metal grinding bit, but a drill will work here too (or a metal file). A digital thermometer will let you know when the temperature has fallen sufficiently after cooling the wort to start transferring to the fermenter. The only heavy lifting that I do using my gravity process is to lift the cooled boil kettle onto the first tier so that I can transfer to fermenter. Six gallons of wort is heavy but not impossible to lift to the level of my waist. Just make sure that you’ve cooled it down beforehand…
You can mash in the insulated cooler by adding hot water to the grain and stirring it. Programs like BrewSmith will allow you to figure out how much water to add to how much mash, etc. (Add hot water to raise the temperature, or cold water to lower the temperature, if you need to. The goal, though, is to mash for 60 - 90 minutes without having to adjust the temperature.) Lately I've been mashing-in with cold water in my boil kettle and slowly bringing the temperature up to two degrees higher than my mash temperature. When I transfer the hot mash into the cooler, it generally falls back to the temperature that I want, and only falls a degree or two further during the mash. I clean out my boil kettle during the mashing process, and then I'm ready to sparge.
I put a small bazooka screen in my boil kettle because frankly, I suck at whirl-pooling. I also use Irish Moss finings 10 minutes before the end of boil, and gelatin before cold-crashing my fermenter and transferring to a keg. I ferment in glass carboys, using a temperature-controlled chest freezer as a fermentation chamber.
I am moving away from infusion mashes and am learning how to do decoctions - but this is just another aspect of controlling temperatures for specific times during the mash, and employing a longer fermentaion and aging process. Decoctions are also more labor intensive and involve more toys. The outline above is more than sufficient for ales.
Yes, my gas manifold is dangling. I am tinkering on it. ![IMG_0291[1].jpg](https://cdn.homebrewtalk.com/data/attach/183/183107-IMG-0291-1-.jpg "IMG_0291[1].jpg")
