A fermenter is the single most important piece of equipment a brewer owns. Second-hand brewpots and bottle cappers can be used to make first quality beer, but a scratched, leaky, or flimsy fermenter will guarantee a spoiled product. So always get the best quality fermenter you can. I don't recommend plastic fermenters at all. Not in the least. If you want to know about plastic fermenters, see the section on junk.
Glass carboys, or water bottles, are by far and away the best fermenters for the homebrewer. Some commercial brewers even use them! Glass is easy to clean, since you can always see the spots you missed, and there are no corners to evade a brush. They are scratch resistant, and don't harbor the odors of long lost brews.
Carboys come in a variety of sizes. The small two and a half gallon size is good for half batches, or for meads, where you don't neccesarily want to make a full five gallons. The standard five gallon size is great for secondary fermenters, but for primary fermentations, use a six and a half or seven gallon carboy if you can. When you put in five gallons of wort into a seven gallon carboy, you have plenty of headspace. If you use a five gallon model, you must either use a blow-off tube or reduce your wort to only four gallons, topping it off with a gallon of water when you bottle or rack to the secondary.
Another alternative to fermenters is to use five gallon soda kegs. With a little work, an airlock can fit on the "in" line. Like a five gallon carboy, make sure you have plenty of headspace. One advantage to using soda kegs is that you can use CO2 pressure to transfer you beer instead of starting a siphon.
I've seen fermenters made out of old copper milks cans and other dairy equipment. If you have access to them, great.
A brewpot can be a five gallon stainless steel pot, an eight gallon canning pot, or anything else that will hold the wort and sit on a burner. It is best to boil your full quantity of wort, so the ideal size of brewpot would be eight to ten gallons, for a five gallon batch. If you boil in a smaller size, your wort will be concentrated, resulting in poor hop utilization. Plus, you have to do a lot of topping off in the fermenter.
Brewpots should be as rugged as you can find them. Lids and handles are a necessity. If you can find one with a spigot installed at the bottom, great. Ones with thermometer probes are even better. Enameled pots should be free of chips. Copper brewpots are the best if you can afford, or even find, them. Stainless steel is very durable, can be scrubbed with brute force, and resist dents. However, stainless steel doesn't conduct heat very well, so your wort is prone to scorch in spots. By all means, avoid aluminum, as it reacts with the acidic wort, causing strange and unpalatable flavors in your finished beer.
They should be able to fit on your stove top, even if they have to fit over two burners. Gas stoves are preferable to electric. If you can't use your brewpot on a stove, see the additional equipment section for outdoor burners.
I have seen plastic brewpots! They have an electric burner built and insulated from the plastic. By all accounts, they work well, and are relatively inexpensive. On the down side, boiling wort produces deposits on the walls of the brewpot, called beer stone, that takes scrubbing or oven cleaner to remove. Plastic can't hold up to this kind of cleaning.
Of course, you equipment has to be clean. Old fashioned elbow grease, sponges and nylon scrub pads will do most of the work for you. But cleaning in places where your hands won't reach requires specialized tools. Bottle brushes and carboy brushes are a necessity. Even if you have a jet-type bottle washer, brushes are still needed to do the scrubbing. There is even a tiny bottle brush made for cleaning out airlocks.
Cleaning may get the dirt off, but you need a sanitizer to get the microbes off. The two most common sanitizers for homebrewing are chlorine bleach and iodine sanitizer. Campden tablets are also used, but more suited towards wine and mead making and I would advise against using them. If you decide to use chlorine bleach, it must be unscented. Iodine sanitizer is sold under many different brand names. B.T.F. and Iodophor being common brands.
If you use chlorine bleach, add one to two ounces to five gallons of cold water. Sanitize your small equipment in this solution for at least a half of an hour. Then pour your solution into your carboy to sanitize it. Rinse off the solution from your equipment with clean, sanitary water.
If you use iodine sanitizer, mix two ounces into five gallons of water. Let all equipment remain in contact with the solution for at least five minutes. With this type of sanitizer, you can let your equipment air-dry without rinsing.
I can not stress enough the importance of sanitizing. Don't kill yourself over it, but if you neglect it, your beer will let you know by way of strange odors, foul tastes and exploding bottles.
Beer is susceptible to oxygen, so pouring fermented beer from the primary to secondary fermenter, or into bottles is not allowed, as the splashing will cause oxydation and stale flavors. Siphoning will need to used instead, unless you have a setup with lots of spigots.
5/16 inch inside diameter vinyl tubing is the normal siphon tubing used by homebrewers, although larger diameter tubing allows for quicker siphoning. Make sure the tubing is food grade. The tubing you find in the tropical fish section of your local pet store isn't always food grade. You don't want vinyl flavors in your finished product. The tubing is next to impossible to clean on the inside, so keep spares around if you find out a bit of mold took a liking to the tubing. A piece about three to five feet long should be plenty.
Siphon tubing doesn't stay straight inside a carboy, so a racking cane is needed. It looks like a shepards crook, with a removable tip on the end. The straight end goes all the way down to the bottom of the transfer vessel, the crooked end connects to the siphon tubing, and the other end of the tubing goes to the receptor vessel. Make sure your tubing fits your racking cane.
Racking canes can be acrylic plastic, stainless steel, or copper. With acrylic, you can see if there are any mold spots on the inside, but they are fragile, and tend to shatter just when you get a siphon started. You can't inspect steel or copper canes for wayward fungi or microbes, but they can be put in dishwashers, or have boiling water poured through them.
If your brewpot, bottling bucket, and fermentor have spigots at the bottom, you can avoid siphoning altogether, but make sure your spigots don't cause a lot of aeration. Ball valves are preferable to other kinds.
Even though you don't want to use a plastic bucket to ferment in, they are great for bottling buckets. Just be extra careful in cleaning and sanitizing it. Siphon your finished beer into the bucket, add your bottling sugar, and gently stir, being careful not to aerate your beer. Buckets with spigots at the bottom are great time savers, since you don't have to start a siphon. If you bucket doesn't have a spigot, you can get them cheaply, and they're easy to install.
A bottle filler allows you to fill your bottles with a minimum of fuss. Plastic fillers are the most common, but the brass varieties will last a lifetime. Avoid fillers with lots of little parts and springs, as they tend to wear out and stick, and are hard to clean. Stick them on the end of your siphon hose. When you press down on the filler, beer flows, when you lift up, the flow stops. Much easier than using a clamp or valve.
Bottle cappers come in a bewildering variety of shapes, sizes and forms. Wing cappers are hand held: simply place on top of bottle and press down on the levers. These are the cheapest, most common, and they don't take up a lot of room. Bench cappers take up a lot more room, but are easier to use, especially if you are capping a lot of bottles, all the same size. Just put a bottle on the stand, pull down lever, done. If you use bottles of different sizes, you have to keep readjusting the bench capper height. If you perchance find a hammer operated capper at a flea mart, leave it there!
Your bottles should be brown glass, and non-threaded. Avoid clear or green bottles, as they will promote light-struck beer. Bottles with Grolsch type swing tops work well, just make sure the rubber gaskets are good. The easiest way to get your bottles is to buy them with the beer already in them! Drink them up, clean off the lables with plenty of elbow-grease, and use. Most homebrew supply stores will carry cases of empty, new 12 and 22 oz. bottles.
There are two basic variety of bottle caps, the first being the plain cap, the second being the oxygen-absorbing cap. This type of cap is good for barleywines and other beer needing a lot of aging, since these caps will absorb any oxygen out of the headspace. Since they are activated by water, place what you need in a cup of sanitized water right when you are ready to bottle. Don't use the very inexpensive caps you can find at the soda distributors. They are not as strong a cap, and we used them on one batch, only to have them bulge and break the seal.
You will need an airlock of some kind, with a stopper to fit your fermenter. Airlocks come in two basic varieties, the three piece and the "S" type. The three piece is much easier to clean, but they both do their job well. If you can find the pyrex lab quality ones, go for it.
A good thermometer is essential. It should have a range from 70 to 212 degrees, and be suitable for sticking in boiling liquids. Most candy thermometers will work, but their range tends to be too high.
Other equipment you will need are muslin or nylon bags to hold crushed grains or hops, a long handled brewing spoon (not wood), an postage style scale to measure hops, and various kitchen utensils such as funnels, strainers, teaspoons, etc.
In order to get the most out of your grains, they must be properly crushed. A grain mill makes this much, much easier than the rolling pin method, especially if you're crushing twelve pounds of grain for a mash. Many homebrew shops will crush the grain for you, but for maximum freshness, they should be crushed the day of brewing.
Corona type mills are the least expensive and most common. They have a tendency to grind more than crush. This is okay for steeping, but for mashing, a proper crush is tantamount to a good yield.
Roller type mills crush malt the best. They may be made with single or double rollers, and some can be adjusted while cranking, and others not. The ease of cranking can be a major factor in selecting a mill, especially if you're crushing a lot of grain. If you can, try out a mill before you buy. You should expect to pay about 80 to 120 dollars for a good grain mill.
A good wort chiller can be one of the best investments made in homebrewing. It is essential that your finished wort be cooled to pitching temperatures as quickly as possible. Setting your brewpot out in the snow bank takes too much time. Besides the risk of infection, long cooling times can cause greater amounts of DMS to form (which causes vegetable like flavors).
Immersion wort chillers are simply coils of copper or steel tubing that is set inside the brewpot. Water running through the chiller cools off the wort. They are very easy to sanitize, just put the cleaned coil in the brewpot ten minutes before the end of the boil, and the heat sterilizes it. Most immersion chillers have fitting to fit a garden hose, so if you brew inside, you will need a kitchen faucet adaptor, or have to snake your hose in through the kitchen window. Chillers tend to come in 25 or 50 foot lengths, for five and ten gallon batches, respectively.
Counterflow wort chillers operate by flowing the hot wort through a tubing that is surrounded by a larger tubing with cold water running in the opposite direction (hence the name). These chillers can cool wort as fast as it can flow from one end to the other. Usually, the wort is siphoned from the brewpot, through the chiller, and directly into the fermenter. Some even have valves to inject oxygen for aeration enroute. Counterflow chillers are more expensive then immersion chillers, but you can buy the fitting seperately and make your own with a length of garden hose and copper tubing. One drawback to counterflow chillers is that they are difficult to clean and sanitize, and some brewers resort to running boiling water through them.
Just about every book on basic homebrewing lists hydrometers as mandatory equipment. They are not mandatory, but they are usefull in two areas: knowing your beer's strength so you can place it in the proper judging category, and for batch logging to record what you've done so you can repeat it again.
Hydrometers look like thermometers, but they measure specific gravity, or how much your beer weighs, instead. Water has a specific gravity of 1.000, with wort having gravities of 1.020 to 1.150 or higher. As a point of comparison, wort for a pale ale tends to fall between 1.035 to 1.050 gravities. Hydrometers are calibrated to read at a temperature of 60 degrees fahrenheit.
Some people, especially spouses, parents, children and roommates, object to the smell of brewing beer. I am baffled as to why. It's no worse than the smell of canning vegetables. But if you and your hobby have been banished from the house, then you need an outdoor cooker. These cookers operate on propane, and put out enough heat to bring your brewpot to a rolling boil. They are sometimes known as Cajun cookers.
Your cooker should have a minimum of a 30,000 BTU heat output. The higher outputs will bring your wort to a boil quicker, but the lower rated ones are great for the fine control needed for mashing. Try to get one with a ring shaped burner. The single-jet burner types tend to scorch as a lot of heat is applied to one small spot on the kettle. If you can't get five gallons of wort to boil with one of these, you may be using a gas-grill type regulator. Switch it out to regulator that came with the cooker and you'll be fine.
Culturing your own yeast is a great way to get just the right yeast for your beer. Yeast can be bought in slants, or cultured from the bottles of bottle-conditioned commercial beer. There's a lot of stuff you can use to culture your own yeast, so only the basics will be listed here.
Canning jars and lids are great for making up enough starters to last all year. Just make up a batch of starter twelves times a big as normal, and can it in twelve jars just like you're canning jelly. If you don't can your starters, you'll need a small pot or erlenmeyer flask to boil up your individual starters. If you prefer to use airlocks with your starters, make up a lid with a hole in it the right size to hold an airlock and stopper. Make sure everything is sanitized! If you are only going to use smack-packs and vials, this is all you need.
If you will be growing yeast from slants or bottles, a nichrome culturing loop, alcohol lamp and a test tube are essential. Yeast nutrient is can be added to plain wort to grow the yeast in, or you can buy wort specially made for growing yeast. Petri dishes, extra test tubes or blank slants, and agar medium are necessary if you'll be keeping yeast cultures for extended periods of time, or if you want to purify your culture.
For the most part, your brewpot can double as your mash tun. It holds your grains and liquor (water) at the precise temperature needed to convert starch into sugar, and to break down proteins. If you want a separate mash tun, a five gallon stainless steel pot with a lid works great, but you might need something larger if you are mashing high gravity brews. Picnic and water coolers also work great. You can also get a combined mash-lauter tun. This is discussed below.
A mash tun should retain its temperature well. Wrap flexible insulation around the tun, or rest the tun in a preformed box of styrofoam. You can also set the tun on the stove, monitor the temperature, and give it short bursts of heat to maintain the temperature.
A lauter tun is used to hold the mashed grains while the wort is sparged. Like a mash tun, it should be insulated. A false bottom or manifold in the lauter tun hold the grain back while the sweet wort is drawn off from the bottom. There are many different varieties of lauter tuns. Picnic cooler style tuns have a manifold of slotted copper pipe in the bottom. Gott cooler types have plastic false bottoms that are perferated with myriad tiny holes. Lauter tuns made from kegs or large kettles also have false bottoms, but they are made of stainless steel or copper. Some have circular slotted copper manifolds. Thousands of years ago, lauter tuns were wooden troughs with a bed of clean straw or twigs to act as a false bottom.
Many homebrewers prefer to combine their mash and lauter tuns into one unit. This is simply done by just using the lauter tun to mash in. If you do this, make sure your tun is very well insulated, or made of metal so you can apply direct heat to it. The reason why very few commercial brewers combine their tuns is because while they use the lauter tun for one batch, they can be cleaning the mash tun, and mashing in it while the sparge is still taking place. Commercial brewers have their time and labor scheduled for the utmost efficiency, while we homebrewers can do what we want.
A sparger is a unit that gently and gradually adds hot water to the lauter tun. Most spray the water on top of the grain bed, while others drip the water, and still others gently pour the water in through a tiny tube. The sparger should let the water flow slowly enough to let the entire process last for forty-five minutes.
A hot liquor tank holds the hot water needed for sparging. A simple bottling bucket will do for five gallon batches, but you'll need to insulate it, and install a spigot if it doesn't have one already. Some brewers use their mash tun as a hot liquor tank. Don't use your brewpot, because that's what you'll be sparging into.
Of course, you'll need tubing to go from the the hot liquor tank to the sparger, and from the lauter tun to the bottom of the brewpot. Don't let the wort splash into the brewpot or you'll get hot-side aeration, which is not a good thing.
Commercial style beer kegs are too hard to use for homebrewers. If someone gives you a beer keg because they've heard you make your own beer, thank them profusely, and use it to make a mash tun instead.
What homebrewer's use to keg their beer are soda kegs. They come in a variety of sizes, but the five gallon is the most common. Used soda kegs are becoming more common as time goes by since many soda distributors are switching to syrup-in-a-box systems. Used kegs run about forty dollars, but check around. I've seen them as low as twenty dollars. Sometimes you can get them for free if you know where and when to look.
When you get your keg, make sure it is free of any soda smells. You do not want your porter tasting like Cherry Coke! Replace all the o-rings and poppet valves if they haven't been already. Its a good idea to replace them once a year anyway. TSP (trisodium phosphate) is the best cleaner to use on kegs, but wear gloves. Do not use bleach sanitizers with stainless steel kegs. Use iodine solutions instead, or (carefully) pour five gallons of boiling water in them to sanitize.
Kegs will have either pin-lock or ball-lock fittings. Either one is fine, but if you get more than one keg, make sure they're all the same.
To dispense your beer from kegs, you will need to use a CO2 tank. These can be pricy to own, which is why the small five pound model is popular. However, the five pound model is also the most difficult to find. CO2 tanks have to be recertified every so often in most places.
Along with your tank, you need to get a CO2 pressure regulator. Most regulators have a range from zero to 100 PSI, which is much more than you need. The best kind to get have a pressure range of zero to fifty PSI. A "gauge cage" is a steel cage that clamps around your regulator to protect it if your tank falls over.
To run the CO2 from the tank to the keg, you need a gas connector. To run the beer from the keg to your glass, you need a tap. Both of these will have fittings for the keg. The fitting for the inlet will not fit on the outlet, and vice versa. There is a huge variety of fittings, hoses, rings, manifolds, etc. available for kegging. Instead of trying to decide what you need, just get a kegging kit.
Kegging is convenient and easy, but sometimes you need beer in a bottle, for a competition for instance, or for delivery to a friend. In these cases, a counterpressure bottle filler lets you bottle beer from the keg.
There are many different C.P. bottle fillers out there, but they all work on the same principle. Fit the filler into the bottle, equalize the pressure, ease off the pressure to let the beer flow into the bottle, stop the flow, cap. You must practice, practice, practice this sequence on plain water before you try it out for the first time on your favorite batch. Once you get the rythm down, its easy.
Kegging and kegging equipment can be expensive. Even if money is no object, sometimes you want your beer in the fridge, and your keg won't fit. The most popular keg alternative is the mini-keg. These are five-liter systems that originated in Germany. These tiny kegs are reusable, and their beer is dispensed with either CO2 cartridges, or a hand operated pump. A mini-keg will last about ten uses, if you care for them properly.
The Party Pig® is also a favorite. It is a two gallon acrylic plastic jug with a tap, that will fit into a fridge. Instead of using CO2 or a hand pump to dispense the beer, a special pack is used. This is fitted into the pig before racking the beer inside. When activated, the pack swells, pressurizing the beer.
These items are in no way necessary to brew beer, but they have been invented to save the time of the brewer, who usually has little to spare. These are great to add to your christmas or birthday lists.
When a bottle or carboy has been sanitized, it needs to drain before use. Setting them upside down in your dishwasher is the usual method, but sometimes the dishwasher is in use, or you don't trust its sanitation.
Bottle trees are poles with little prongs sticking out to hold bottles upside down to drain. They screw apart so that the pieces of the tree can be sanitized. And since all your fifty-plus bottles are in one spot, bottling go by that much quicker. An alternative to the bottle tree is the bottle rack, which is a board with holes in it to hold the bottles by the neck.
A carboy stand holds your carboy upside-down while drying. For ten to twenty dollars, they tend to be pricey for what you do with them, but it's better than holding them upside-down in your hands for fifteen minutes! Plus, it's easy to make one yourself.
Full carboys are very heavy objects. And if you've managed to spill some wort on the outside of them, they're slippery too. Carboy handles and straps help you to manage the load safely. Handles fit around the neck of the carboy, but I don't trust them to hold the entire weight of the carboy, and recommend them only to steady and balance the thing. They are several kinds of straps, but the nicest one I've seen is actually a nylon carboy bag with strap-handles, that does double duty as a carboy insulator.
Since the days of Archimedes, the intrepid inventer has been searching for new and different ways to start a siphon. The popularity of homebrewing has only hastened that search, and a menagerie of siphon starters in all sizes and shapes can be had. Some are more complicated than they are worth. Others work only some of the time. But some are simply fantastic time-savers. My advice is to ask your homebrew supplier on his or her opinion. If you can, try them out before you by.
After you've cleaned out your bottles with soap and water, do rinse the soap out, rinse again, then again, and yet again? You definately do not want sopay tasting beer. A way to speed this process up twenty fold is to get a bottle washer. These items fit onto your kitchen faucet. When you push a bottle onto them, a spray of high pressure water quickly rinses them out. They're also great for dislodging the stubborn yeast that has dried on the bottom of your used homebrew bottles. Some models come with a double jet system, that makes your work go by twice as fast. If you bottle your beer, they are certainly worth looking into.
Not everything that you find in a homebrew supply store is worth your money.
While I won't argue to merits of closed versus open fermentation, it is agreed by all that plastic fermenters are unsuitable for either. They may work for one batch, but sooner or later you will have to scrub them with a gallon of elbow grease, and then you'll have scratches. Scratches are the perfect place for bacteria to hide in to avoid your sanitizing solution. Glass carboys, though more expensive, will last a lifetime, and are a cinch to clean.
Unfortunately, most prepackaged homebrewing kits include a plastic bucket fermenter, to save money. In my opinion, when they cheapen the kit, they cheapen the hobby! Use the fermenter as a storage container for all your stuff, and buy a carboy instead.
There is a lot of equipment meant for making wine that's jumbled up on the shelves with the beer making stuff. Sometimes they are even labeled as suitable for homebrewing. Don't be fooled. Titration test kits are useless in brewing beer. Corking systems are great for bottling magnums, but unless your hobby spills over into meads, don't even bother with corks or anything associated with them. Most wine sanitizers are meant to work with the acidity of wine, and do a poor job with beer. And all those vials and packets of strange chemicals...ignore them.
Okay, there's one exception: if you want to use real wooden kegs, wine making supplies are often the only source for the stuff you need to care for them. But know what you're doing first. Wooden kegs are not for the faint of heart. In the days before stainless steel, there were people who did nothing else but clean and care for wooden kegs.
If you keg your beer, or want to make a lager, a refrigerator is almost a necessity. And even if you don't keg or lager, an extra one is nice to store your aging beer or yeast cultures. Used refrigerators tend to run about $100 in this part of the world. Shop around and you might find one for about fifty. But check them out. They're being sold for some reason, make sure it's not because they won't keep cold!
If you do get a brewing fridge, a brewing thermostat is definately the next item to get. They will keep your refrigerator at the exact temperature you need, and they'll save you energy too.
For those who want to make crystal clear beer just like the big boys do, a beer filter will take you there. Homebrew filters are placed between two kegs. CO2 pressure is used to transfer beer from one keg, through the filter, and into the other keg.
Use finings before you filter. Don't throw your money away by clogging your filters with yeasts and proteins that could have been removed with a teaspoon of isinglass. Think of filters as the final step in perfecting your beer, not as whitewash to hide your mistakes. Crystal clear beer is very recent development in the history of beer, and many beer styles allow a certain amount of haze and cloudiness in the glass to account for it.
©David Johnson, Stephen Lowrie, 1997 - 2008
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