My first Brew Kettle

Well, as with many things, my good intentions of catching up to where I am at in my brewing experiences has gone out the window, but I hope to catch it up sometime .. kids, work, sun in my eyes, taxes, sandman beating on me .. all that good stuff is conspiring to keep me off the blog. 

As a gadget nerd, who always like to get the equipment or tools that people use to do things the right way, I am already drawing blueprints in my head of a brewing structure (tree style) that I know I can't afford for a while yet.  Nevertheless, step 1 is when I buy equipment, to make sure that I plan ahead and get stuff that is adaptable and can be used in my grand evil plan/scheme of a brew tree.  Therefore, as I just don't have enough friends coming over for some brew, and I can only take brew to work to pass off to coworkers on rare occasions, and I can only drink so much myself, I chose to stick to 5 gallon batches, at least for now, before moving up to 10 gallon batches.

Thus began my shopping for a Stainless Steel pot to do a full boil cook for a 5 gallon batch.  They always say to assume about 1.5 gallons to evaporate during the boil and cooking, so you need 6.5 gallons minimum, I chose to start with 7 gallons and then account for some free-board when boiling so it doesn't splash or boil over; add 1 gallon and I ended up with an 8 gallon brew kettle.  I also wanted to get it ported (holes in it with threads so you can add accessories), but wanted to price the difference between one that came with welded plugs on it that you screw right into, or one where I create my own holes and then use weld-less fittings. 

When researching these options on various home brewing boards, it seems to be like the HP versus TI conflict amongst my fellow engineers, it is pretty evenly split, even though the HP side is the right one in the engineering world !   Bottom line, when pricing the similar kettles, I found that the one I selected that came with ports manufactured into it, and with a SS Ball Valve and plug for the currently unused port, was within a few dollars of one where I would have to drill and weld or drill and buy similar SS weld-less equipment, I went for the less hassle option and got this (see below) from Morebeer.  They sell this same one at my local brewpub, and I prefer to throw business their way, plus the benefit of walking out the door with it, but with free shipping it was almost $20 less so I got it from the internet.

And something to think about as you can see from the pic .. if you are still cooking inside, make sure you have clearance for your selected pot .. I got 2" of clearance from the microwave, but it only is restricted on the back half so I am good.  So far so good, performed 1 cook in this new pot.  Kettle in action:

You can see the grain bags in there.  The largest impact I noticed with the full boil was that it seemed to take forever to get from removing the grain bags to where the brew was boiling.  Some things I need to check with the experts:  should I in fact be doing full boil with extract ?  Typically you boil down to about 3.5 gallons and when adding your mix to the fermenter, you add a frozen 1 gallon block of spring water (to cool it down and add volume, then I would wash some water through the hops to bring it back up to a total of 5 gallons. 

The benefit i wanted from the ball valve was to just drain out via gravity directly to the fermenter.  As usual, I forgot the 1 gallon frozen block of ice, and elected not to use my ice cubes, so I drained it hot through the 1/2" food grade hose I had.  I also cheaped out and did not yet buy a screen filter to screw into the port with the ball valve, thinking I could hand screen the hops out (whole leaf hops).  Well it didn't work that way .. the hops got into the ball valve, and while draining out it got plugged which created an instantaneous drop in the volume going out through my hose, so the pressure difference collapsed the hose, and the high heat temp of the brew softened the hose such that now it is permanently deformed in a collapsed state and is almost unusable :( .   What I learned ... get a wort chiller and a filter screen !  I bought the parts from Home Depot to make my own wort chiller, btw, this is a wort chiller ... http://morebeer.com/search/102204/beerwinecoffee/coffeewinebeer/Immersion_Wort_Chiller_-_Standard ... which is running cold water through some copper coils to cool down the brew, but found I could just buy one cheaper and pre-assembled, and not have to bend it from Mainbrew (the local brew pub).  I also bought a bazooka screen filter instead of making one from Mainbrew .. though some people have taken a braided SS hose used for plumbing in hooking up the water supply to the sink, gutted it, and stripped off the SS braid, put it on a nipple with a hose clamp and use that as a filter (the SS braid).  The next brew will work much smoother and not take so long to complete.

This virgin batch in the brew kettle was a cream stout.  Tastes good !  Nice color and flavor.  The next style is unknown at the moment, though I am leaning towards another Citra IPA, with which I will use the wort chiller and bazooka screen.  The only thing I am nervous of is transferring the hot kettle over to the sink area to run the water through the wort chiller ... ah to be outside with a garden hose ! 

Additions to the kettle in the near future ... I want to mount a temp gauge in the extra port so I can have continuous real time monitoring of temp without removing the lid and sticking in a thermometer, which is more important I think when doing the all grain method and rinsing water through the grain where the temperature of the rinse water is very important.  I would also like to get a sight gauge mounted .. which will require drilling my own hole in the kettle and using a weld-less kit to install it .. .nervous about that.

Here is the buckets I keep my wash and sanitizer in during the brew for cleaning everything.