Brewing in the Bush
I am a full mash brewer with a twist. My beers are boiled in a wood fired boiler.
Here is a picture of my boiler in action. The immersion chiller is visible on top of the bbq. When it is time to chill and put the fire out I use a shovel to move the coals rather than dousing with water, this avoids a cloud of sooty ash.
In the distance behind the fence, the black blob is a chook, the end consumer of the grain. Now I am full mashing the chooks don't get through all the spent grain so it goes in the compost.
The only hiccuph with the setup is the boiler is 10 meters from the kitchen
down 6 very rustic steps.
There are a few other factors that make my brewing a bit more challenging
than others. Our house is powered by solar power so I cannot have another
fridge. We are an eight hour return trip away from mash brewing supplies.
Let me tell you a bit about my brewery in the bush.
Getting supplies is not as easy as driving to your local shop. There are three options, drive there yourself, convince visitors to pick up a package and bring it out, or by mail order. I have bought yeasts by mail order in winter and they have all arrived sucessfully. I do this in winter as the yeasts may protest sitting in a hot postie's vehicle in the summer. Delivery costs would be expensive for bulky grains. Even a simple litre of milk is a 2 hour return journey so it is important that I have everything to hand including a backup thermometer. Recipes are often a compromise between what's in the cupboard and what I want to brew. The rare visits to homebrew shops tend to be rather expensive but well worth it.
Solar power means that all power is budgeted and accounted. Definitely no heating of beer or water by electricity. Fridges consume a lot of power and I cannot have a spare for kegs or fermenting in. So all my beer is bottled rather than kegged. I brew ales in summer and lagers in winter.
The grain is stored in large plastic drums. Make sure that when you buy your drums you give them the sniff test. One smelt of perfumey soap, it had been used to transport hair shampoo so I didn't buy that one. One use of all that carbon dioxide coming from your fermenter would be to fill your grain bin with it for long term bug stopping.
The grain is crushed with a Little Ark grain mill. This is actually a grain grinder for flour adjusted to a coarse setting. I already had this mill for making freshly ground flour for bread. It is motorized with a 12V motor and pulley. The steel mill seems to do a better job compared to the stones in crushing rather than grinding the grain. Eventually a proper crusher rather than a grinder is on the shopping list.
Mashing and sparging is done in a bucket-in-bucket wrapped up in towels. The house hot water system runs hot as it is heated by the wood stove. The hot water is at about 50 degC so needs a bit of extra boiling water to bring it to strike temperature. My sparge water is heated on the stove using a large saucepan I bought for partial mashing. Eventually I would like a stainless steel mash tun and sparger. The mash buckets are food grade but I do have concerns about plasticizers leaching into the mash at high temperatures.
While mashing is occuring, I take the wheelbarrow for a walk into the bush near the house and fill it full of firewood. The fire is set so that it is ready to light once sparging is completed.
The boiler can take from 20 minutes to 40 minutes to come to the boil depending on how long the sparge took, how cold the air temp is, how long a hot fire takes to become established and how windy it is. Boil-overs could be a pain as they would dampen the fire. There is no brewing during total fire bans, it is usually too hot anyway in the brew room and we are more concerned in imbibing cold drinks to stay cool.
The boiler is an old stainless steel copper from a second hand shop. It has a volume of about 50 litres. It was set up for boiling with two elements and mains power. The elements were removed and the holes sealed. There was a drain at the bottom running through a pipe and spigot to the outer edge. There are a few large rocks propped up to give the fire some shelter from the wind. We did a "dry" run with boiling water and everything looked ok. Boiling wort for the first beer showed up a problem. The wort in the drain pipe boiled first, evaporated and left the sugars behind as a solid mass. This blocked the drain permanently. The drain was removed after that first batch and to get the wort out of the boiler into the fermenter, I use a sanitised bailer. To put the fire out the coals are shovelled out into the bbq located next to the boiler. Next Christmas may see some puddings cooked in the boiler. The boiler could be easily run off gas, but wood is free and close to hand. The cylinder refillers are 55 kilometers away via dirt road.
The woodfire boiled wort is chilled by an immersion chiller. Half-inch anealed copper pipe suitable for chillers is supplied in flat coils. It costs not much more to buy a whole roll rather than part of a roll so the total length of pipe is 16m. A bit long but if we ever need a bit of pipe a few coils will be lopped off the chiller. The coil was gently expanded into a rough cylinder. For fittings on and off, go to your local watering shop. Half-inch black polypipe fits straight over the copper after dipping the polypipe in boiling water. Pick up some half-inch plastic pipe clamps to seal it on the copper properly. The water flow rate through the chiller is fairly slow so we do not loose too much of our valuable tank water. About 100-200 litres chills the brew to room temperature.
Speaking of tank water, it was the source of many brew infections for me. The water is very soft but does contain bugs. Not enough to make humans ill but definitely bad news to a kit brewer. To cure this, all my rinse water and topping up water is boiled and stored in a sanitised fermenter on the kitchen bench. This container is cleaned and sanitised once a week and refilled with fresh boiled water. It is important to remember that this boiled water is deoxygenated and if used for making up kits, it must be reoxygenated. It is ideal for topping up water in a fully fermented brew as it won't add any extra oxygen to stale the product.
After bailing the sweet wort into a fermenter from the boiler, the sg is taken, any topping up is done to give a volume of around 25 litres or the correct og and the yeast pitched. The wort stands for an hour or so to allow the crud to settle, then the wort is dropped into another fermenter and racked off the crud. This is done two or three times. This gives plenty of dissolved oxygen. Within 6 hours there is some evidence of foam and by the next morning, there is a nice layer of foam on the wort.
Temperature control of the fermenter is simple. I move it to the end bedroom where the temperature is very stable day and night, about 3 degrees variation. I use a yeast suitable for the current room temperature of the brew room. In spring and autumn it is ales, winter is lager time. I try and make sure we have enough beer stocks to last through summer so I don't have to brew in the heat. In winter, the brew room temp is around 10-12 degrees C. Outside the temperature gets down to -6 degrees C overnight. Definitely lager weather. The fridge keeps things warm rather than cold.
Any high gravity beer for long term keeping is stored inside the house. The rest is stored outside on the southern side of the house under the veranda in a covered box. Not ideal for storage but there is a cellar on the drawing board. There was a snake sliding amongst the homebrew bottles one afternoon.
The brewing equipment is cheap but works. The most expensive part was the grain mill but I already had that. The copper pipe was the next most expensive part, it was $60 from the town plumbing supply shop. Further plans for my bush brewery are a stainless steel mashtun and sparging vessel, a grain crusher, a cellar, grain roasting, hop growing and a yeast station. I have planted some hop rhyzomes and they are progressing well but not producing flowers yet.
Brewing in the bush has some drawbacks, but also many benefits. There is plenty of local free fruit for country wines. The neighbour has a few hives so I have honey for mead. I have the space to grow hops, fruit trees and grapevines for wines. Plenty of room for free range chooks who love the spent grain. The local produce store has cheap adjuncts such as wheat and corn and also rice hulls.
My brewing apprenticeship has been in little chunks. Kit and kilo, kit and LME, using liquid yeasts, storing and reusing yeasts and making starters, extract brewing, partial mashing and now full mashing. Still lots more to learn and many more beer styles to brew. The same as my brew equipment. I have gradually built up my equipment rather than leaping out and ordering a heap of stuff by mail.
So that's my bush brewery. Hope I have inspired someone out there to turn an unloved copper into a much used boiler.
Happy Brewing,
Phillipa.