A couple of weeks ago, while on holiday in East Anglia, I took a tour of the Adnams brewery in Southwold. It was a fairly expensive tour at £30 a head, but it was excellent and the beer samples at the end were generous. In the tap room was a piece of equipment that made me stop and completely revisit my home brewing setup. It was nothing more than a well organised three-tank small batch brewing system.

I’d seen these systems before of course, but something about that setup made me think. My own brewing has got a bit inconsistent recently and I realised that it was time for a rethink of my processes and systems. When I got back home, I pulled out all of my brewing kit and got a pen and paper for a redesign.

The thing is, I had most of the gear I needed, but I wasn’t making the best use of it. For example, I was using an immersion chiller – a glorified piece of coiled copper pipe through which you use as a heat exchanger – but, because I was running water through it, it was really messy and hard to manage indoors. I could have a much tidier setup by sitting the coil in cold water and running the hot wort through instead. This also meant I could properly chill the wort immediately after boiling, leading to a good ‘cold break’ and hopefully cleaner beer as a result.

I had other stuff that had fallen out of use, too. An old pump was stripped, cleaned and brought back to life, and I found some connectors to make it easier to use. By changing some fittings I found I could also attach it directly to my mash tun and boiler instead of having it halfway along the hose, saving a few additional extra leaky connections. I worked out how to use and calibrate an iSpindel that my brother gave me a couple of years ago – this will sit in my fermenting beer and update me every 15 minutes on how fermentation is progressing.

I needed to make one extra purchase, of course. My old boiler was sold to a local cricket club where it will go back to being a huge tea urn, and I’ve replaced it with a Digiboil 35 litre digital boiler – a definite upgrade that will allow me to use my coil to keep mash temperatures where I want them to be. A quick thanks to Paul at Angel Homebrew who initially sent me the wrong boiler but had the correct one with me less than 24 hours later – highly recommended service!

I spent a bit of time last week putting the system together and having a couple of dry runs, and as it all seemed to go smoothly I was ready to use it for the first time.

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My first recipe on this new setup is an (almost) single hop centennial IPA. It’s almost exactly the same recipe as the last beer I made using my old setup (currently awaiting bottling), so it’ll be interesting to compare and contrast the two. For anyone interested, my system runs like this:

• Mash water is heated in the HLT (my new Digiboil boiler) and transferred into the mash tun. The sparge water is then heated to 75C in the hardworking HLT. Every 15 minutes the wort is transferred back through the coil which sits in this water, which maintains the mash temperature exactly where I want it. After an hour I use this same system to raise the mash temperature to 75C to end the mashing process and loosen up all those lovely sugars!
• After an hour the first runnings are pumped into the boiler and the sparge water is emptied into the mash tun. I do a straightforward batch sparse at the moment.
• After another ten minutes the sparge is pumped over into the boil, and is boiled for an hour with hop additions according to my recipe.
• At the end of the boil the boiler is switched off and the water is pumped back through the coil, which is now sitting in cold water in the HLT. The first pass heated the HLT water up to 50C and this water was used to clean the system. A second pass brought it down to 25-28C and with ice added on the third pass we got down to 18C (and could have got lower easily). This was clean, no spillages and took about half an hour with minimal wastage of water.
• The cool wort is tested and transferred over to the fermenter, yeast added and fermentation commences. The iSpindel will keep me updated remotely on temperature in the fermenter and the specific gravity of the wort, so I know without any further testing that the beer is done.
• When fermentation is complete I verify the gravity of the beer manually to check it agrees with iSpindel, dry hop, cold crash and bottle.

I’ll let you know how the beer turns out!