I run a Grainfather, an all in one‘ish brewing system which can produce 30 litres of beer at a time. In essence, it will accurately heat water to mash temperature, ready to add malt grain. It has an inner system that contains the malt to be added keeping the beer bit free. It mashes the malt/beer keeping the wort circulating through grains and at the required temperature. It can also automatically step mash dependant on recipe and OG needed. Once the mash is complete the basket lifts out and locks in draining grains of wort and allow sparging with no grain escaping.

I have designed a sparge system to separately heat water to sparge temperature, say 77 degrees C. Once sparge has completed, I empty basket onto vegetable patch to keep in wife’s good books. Vegetables love it as they are secret beer drinkers! Once sparged, you will have required wort quantity and hopefully correct original gravity (OG) in the Grainfather. Set the Grainfather temperature to 100 degrees C for boil. Add hops in hop basket and wait for 60 to 90 minutes, depending on style beer. Once ready the wort needs to be cold crashed to 20 degrees C. Enter the Grainfather wort counter flow cooler which sends wort through a cold tap water (hose) assisted spiral pipe system. Lovely 20 degree C wort (say 25L) goes into my fermentation bucket, measure OG and adjust if needed (not often). Pitch yeast. Pop big old bucket into Mark’s homemade fermentation chamber. Set temp and leave yeast to munch its way to final gravity. Essentially the fermentation chamber is an old fridge that can heat and cool to within 0.5 of a degree to maintain all important consistency. I have put a greenhouse style heater in the fridge and then rigged an Inkbird controller which has a temperature probe to switch from heat to cool to get to say 18-20 degrees.

Once complete we cold crash (as I don't use clearing agents) and can bottle, barrel or keg.

The kegs take 19L and are force carbonated and once complete adjusted to correct PSI for pouring.

That’s it really, oh yeah then the best bit, the drinking.

The old fridge can also be used to bottle condition allowing the late added sugar to carbonate at a regular temperature.

By Mark Heard.