New Brewing Structure

So, I've been brewing with all grain for some time now, and I've always used a gravity-feed system, preferring not to mess with pumps and such.  When we lived in Seattle, I built a "3 tier" stand out of scrap lumber that worked pretty well, but what I never really realized that we were actually using 4 tiers.  We set the 3 tier stand up on our deck, and then sparged from the Hot Liquor Tank (HLT) to the Mash Tun and into the Brewkettle, finally running off (yes, the 4th tier) to the fermentation vessel (glass carboy) on the ground.

After a stint in England where we weren't able to bring our brewing gear, we moved to Hanover.  After a while I built a new brew stand, making a solid 3 tier structure from repurposed steel channel and some MDF countertop from the local scrap heap:

So, from left, we have the HLT (10 gal blue cooler), Mash Tun (5 gal orange cooler) and Brewkettle (converted keg).

This system worked fine, but left a few things to be desired.  In the Hanover climate, we couldn't brew outdoors all season as we did in Seattle, so this had to be in the garage.  Thus it by its nature couldn't be up on the deck...  And the headspace in the garage will not allow us to go any higher.

And the biggest issue I felt like I faced was that, in order to run off the final wort into the fermenter, I had to lift the kettle, containing 5.5 gallons of boiling-hot wort, up to the next tier.  Astute viewers will note that the kettle has no handles, so lifting has to be done from the bottom of the kettle.  Note that the bottom of the kettle had propane flames on it until just recently, so will be quite hot.  And with a wort gravity of about 1.065, we're looking at just under 50 pounds to lift.

I felt that this was an accident waiting to happen.


I thought a lot about what to do, and how to do it.  I thought about clever systems that could rock and use leverage to get the kettle up high enough, and yes, I did consider just buying a pump.  I also didn't want to start with a new design from scratch, for a few reasons, but mostly because it's my style to repurpose existing stock.

So in the end, I constructed a more compact system with adjustable shelves, using the same channel, anchored to the support post that holds up the roof beam of the garage:

Less "counter" space, true, but it also takes up less garage space, which is a great plus.  The burner now sits on a shelf custom designed for it, and the HLT and Mash Tun have shelves with just a little space left over.
















But the great part of this new system is that the HLT and burner shelves can be raised using a hoist.  The hoist motor is salvaged from an old decommissioned borehole logging winch, bolted to the roof beam (Olivia wanted to be in the shot too):

 

The cable going to the hoist can be attached to either the HLT shelf or the burner shelf, using a grab hook and a loop of steel cable.  The shelves can be loosened from the channel by loosening two bolts, and can then slide freely.  If there's no weight on the shelf, it's easy to move by hand.  But the hoist is powerful enough to lift me, sitting on the shelf.













Here's a video of the first hoist of the brew session; bringing the HLT up to the height needed for sparging:





And a short clip of sparging with the structure:




And finally, hoisting the kettle at the end of the boil (at this point I've cleaned the HLT and Mash Tun and they're out drying in the sun):


And now the kettle is high enough to run off through the wort chiller into the fermenter:

And we're done!