I'm not very photogenic

Sam's Budgo Brewery

(or How to go all-grain without spending $$$$)

Looking at the all-grain breweries already detailed on the craftbrewers website, the common thread seems to be that they are all complex, expensive, stainless steel marvels of modern technology - I wanted to do an article to show beginners that it doesn't have to be that hard.

I first started mashing with an esky, a pool scoop and a couple of stock pots - and it worked, but it was a pain in the rear end. I've upgraded bits and pieces here and there and I've now got a system that is workable, didn't cost the earth, is reasonably easy to use, and most importantly, makes good beer. Mind you, I still lust for a sexy all-copper computerised (Mac of course) brewery on wheels, but that can come later (it will be mine, oh yes!).

As an introduction to my system, I'm going to walk you through a typical brew day. Today I'm making a brown ale that is going to annihilate the competition at the West Coast Brewers' April comp (for recipe see inset). The day began quite disasterously as I discovered ants and weevils in pretty much all of my speciality grains. I put some malt in the oven to roast and made a mental note to buy more tupperware containers.

Home roasted amber malt - mmm, yummy

Northern Brown Ale
(for 23L) 2.8 kg pale malt 200g unmalted barley 100g rolled oats 500g amber malt 100g crystal 70g roast barley
Mash @ 68C Steep RB for 5 mins only
40g Goldings Pellets (60 mins)
yeast from Fullers 1845 Celebration Ale

	First step is to start heating the water in my hot liquor tank. This is a 30L stainless steel urn I bought out of the Quokka (free ad newspaper in Perth) for $60. It appears to have belonged to the Duncraig Uniting Church at some point, however God obviously had a higher purpose intended for it.

Now I need to crush the grain. If you have a homebrew shop that's happy to crush grain for you, you could skip this step, but I buy my malt in bulk these days and need the convenience of being able to do the milling myself. I use a 'Porkert' corona-type mill and haven't had any problems with it except when I forgot to pull it apart once before using it and ended up with finely milled cockroach in my malt.

	I love the brown ale/mild ale style because it allows me to be creative with the grain bill. This is a cereal mash with 200g pale malt, 200g unmalted barley and 100g freshly toasted rolled oats.

This is really the heart of my system - my mash/lauter tun. It is a 5 US Gal (20L) round Igloo with a slotted copper mainfold and brass ball valve. The esky cost me $80 from Barbeques Galore and the manifold bits (1/2" ball valve, 1/2" soft copper pipe, t-piece and 1/2" female compression fitting) about $12 from Tradelink. Today I couldn't find the original rubber washer I use to seal the fittings, so I hooned off in my trusty 1963 EH Holden utility to Bunnings and picked up a packet of garden/house tap fibre body washers (the red ones) - these work even better.

	Mashing in - requirements: thermometer, spoon, strong arm. I don't really bother testing the mash pH these days - just sprinkle in some CaCO3/CaSO4 if it's a dark beer - but when you're starting out it's a good idea to check this sort of stuff until you get a feel for it.

Beginning the lauter. The astute amongst you will notice that my boiler looks very similar to my hot liquor tank. In actual fact, as well as looking identical they both occupy the same spatial coordinates! This saves me storage space in the shed, but it means I have to tip my sparge liquor into some other containers (a couple of stainless stock pots) before starting to sparge. You can't really see it in the photo, but there is a length of plastic hose attached to the ball valve just in case the HSA doomsayers are right. My highly teckernogical & refined sparging technique

Because of my dearth of darker malts, I used some home-roasted barley I had lying around. Now I just wanted colour & perhaps some vague coffee notes for added complexity - no roast or burnt flavours, so I did a short (5 min) hot water steep. I couldn't find anything to strain the steep with so I just chucked it on top of the grain bed.

	<- The boil - experience has shown me the best setting for the urn to avoid boilovers, but I turn it on full at the start to bring the sweet wort to the boil more quickly. That means I have to watch it carefully when it first comes to the boil rather than stuffing around taking pictures.
	-> My mighty immersion chiller in action. I can't remember how much this cost me, probably about $30. It's a soft copper coil with a male compression fitting and a standard garden hose tap fitting. I could put another fitting on the outlet and use the waste water to water the lawn, but that's Illegal thanks to water restrictions here.

From there it's pretty much as per your usual extract/kit brew. I think the best thing to do when brewing with a new system is to practice with it - do about five batches before you try and make any more drastic changes - this will tune your technique for your system, and you'll end up with a much better idea of what sort of improvement the equipment needs.

So to break it down, my brewery consists of:

igloo mash tun - $92
boiler - $60
porkert mill - $80
immersion chiller - $30
thermometers, buckets, hose, spoons, stock pots etc - most brewers already have these

In other words, you could put together a system similar to this for not too much more than $250, depending on what sort of bargains you manage to find.

Epilogue: The West Coast Brewers can breathe easier as tragically, the beer became infected (thanks to my dodgy yeast culturing techniques). Not too easily though - I might take it to a meeting and pass it off as an Oud Bruin or something.