All-in-one All Grain Brewing For Your Kitchen Counter

All grain brewing is a labor and equipment intensive endeavor, but it produces the highest quality beer compared to partial mash or extract brewing. [Jeff Karpinski] started out with the latter two methods, but as his enthusiasm for the hobby mounted he found himself brewing all-grain batches with just an electric kettle. He developed the system seen above as an easy method of automating the all grain process, and he managed to make it tidy enough to do in the kitchen.

All-grain brewing usually involves five or ten gallon (or more) boils. This type of volume is usually what demands that the brewing process move out of the kitchen. But since [Jeff] is the only beer drinker in the house he limits his sessions to three gallons. This means all of the equipment takes up less room. Here he’s got a five-gallon bucket, cooler, and brew kettle on just one small piece of the counter. In between the kettle and bucket you can see the controller box he built. This is responsible for switching power to the heating element in the brew kettle, and the electric pump in the bucket. The bucket has a permanent counterflow chiller which brings the wort down to a suitable temperature before pitching the yeast. It’s pretty amazing how well contained the liquid is from start to finish!

[Thanks ScottInNH]

10 thoughts on “All-in-one All Grain Brewing For Your Kitchen Counter

  1. I don’t spend much time on HBT, but I did read about it in BYO and then I went and read the entire HBT thread. JKarp’s obviously a great guy and has spent a lot of time answering people’s questions.

    This is just such a well-designed system – functional, easy, cheap, and portable.

    For a couple of years I’ve had the parts list in my Google Documents. I just cant decide if I should build it “as is”, or if I should adapt it to use BrewTroller (instead of the PID).

    1. Do you brew already? If so, do what you want with what you’ve got! If not, make sure that you try brewing before you drop a lot of cash on a nice controlled setup. Get a turkey fryer kit and do some extract batches, or even partial mash batches so that you can get a hang of it.

  2. >But since [Jeff] is the only beer drinker in the house

    >he limits his sessions to three gallons

    I don’t see the connection between those two statements… ;-)

  3. great timing for me to read this. ive been wanting to try home brewing for years now. just finally got started last weekend. started out with a five gallon batch using partial mash. i allready want to do my next using all grain. hope this batch come out ok. long time to wait just to see if i botched it or not.

  4. For the record, it’s not really accurate to say all grain produces the highest quality beer. Extract and Partial Mash consistently do well in competitions. All grain does however give you the most control over the final product and allows the most flexibility.

  5. I just made my first batch of beer last night. I used an extract kit but I really want to do all grain.

    I’ve made some wine/ mead/ kombucha before but beer is my true favorite of fermented beverages.

    I could see myself replicating this setup later on down the road (budget permitting of course) good post.

  6. Very cool to see my old Brew Your Own article on Hack A Day. I still brew on this very system. If anyone has questions on brewing systems, feel free to hunt me down on G+ or HomeBrewTalk (I’m jkarp over there).

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