FAQ

 

We receive hundreds of questions every month about our Electric Brewery. Below are some of the more common questions with our answers.

 

What were your main criteria in designing The Electric Brewery?

Our all-grain brewery had to meet the following criteria:

  • 100% electric for indoor brewing
  • Safe, easy, and enjoyable to use
  • Not limit the brewer in any way
  • Provide extremely repeatable and consistent results
  • Use industrial quality parts that last (all stainless steel, limit the use of plastics)

Note that price is not included on this list. When we weighed price vs. performance vs. safety vs. convenience, price was considered as the least important factor. That is the complete opposite of what most home brewers consider when they put together a brewing setup. For most, price is always the overriding priority and sacrifices have to be made. That's completely acceptable of course as everyone has different needs, but this is not how our brewery setup was designed.

While cost savings were not the primary criteria in designing our Electric Brewery, we didn't (in our opinion) spend money for no reason. Every expenditure was a conscious decision of price vs. quality/performance/convenience. The Blichmann kettles are a great example of this as some consider them overpriced. We don't agree. Even if you could buy bare kettles and add on all the options to get to the same quality product, it would likely cost you the same amount in the end. The problem is you can't even do that. For example, we've yet to see any sight glasses as well designed, well protected and easy to clean as the ones Blichmann uses. Had we used different kettles with unprotected sight glass added on later, we would have broken them ten times over by now banging around the kettles as we clean them. Kettles are heavy, brewers are clumsy.

There's an old saying "Only the rich can afford to buy cheap things" (because you end up buying them over and over again). In designing our brewery we did not want to continually replace components because we were not happy with the performance or because the parts were cheap and broke. Buy once, use it a lifetime.

It's been nearly 2 years since we designed and built the Electric Brewery. We're happy to report that there's absolutely nothing we'd change if we had to do this all over again. Having brewed with it over two dozen times (as of this writing in Fall 2010), there's nothing we look at and think "We should have done that differently". We waited this long before publishing our build information as we wanted to make sure we were 100% happy with the setup, thus ensuring that others would be as well.

Our setup may not be for everyone, but those that do follow our instructions to build their own Electric Brewery, we think, will be suitably impressed with the outcome.

 

How much will it cost me to build a brewery like this?

The number one question we get asked is "how much?". Below is a price breakdown of part costs based on Fall 2010 prices. This is based on you buying all the parts and assembling them yourself (as we did).

Total cost: $ 5118 - 6123 USD, not including shipping/handling/taxes/duties (these can be significant when sourcing parts from dozens of vendors from all over the world)

Also not included: 

Remember, this is a one time sunk cost for a setup that will last you a lifetime. A brewer who already has some of the parts or components would of course be able to reduce the cost considerably.

Some are quick to point out that a lot of beer may be purchased for that amount of money. That is very true but that is not what this is about. Brewing for us is a hobby and a passion, not a means to save money. We enjoy the art and craft of making beer and being able to call it our own. We received an email recently from a fellow brewer that we think sums it up nicely. He wrote: "Your build is a prime example of the direction home brewing is going and definitely invites people to take a more serious interest in our hobby and craft."

The cost of the consumables required to make beer on an all-grain electric setup such as this is very inexpensive. All things added up (electricity, grain, hops, and yeast), a standard 12 oz glass of beer costs us approximately 8-10 cents to produce. We purchase our grain in bulk 50lb sacks to keep the costs low.

Everyone will use different criteria when designing a home brewery. What's right for one person may not be right for another. If cost savings is your overriding priority then you're in luck as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of websites that will show you how to make beer for the lowest price possible. Our setup is for the brewer who may have already "been there" and "done that" and now wants to upgrade to something more professional that offers greater control and will last a lifetime.  

We've never run into any issues or problems with our Electric Brewery setup. We've never had a stuck sparge, missed a target gravity, had over/under temperature issues or had clogged valves or pump priming issues. Our setup just works. This allows us to focus our attention on recipe creation instead of worrying if the equipment will work correctly. Because of this, we really look forward to the days when we brew. Isn't a hobby supposed to be enjoyable, after all?

 

What sort of brew house efficiency do you achieve with your setup?

For standard gravity beers (3-8% ABV) we achieve a consistent brew house efficiency of 95%. By comparison, most large scale commercial breweries achieve 92-98%. Most other home brewers achieve 65-75%.

Efficiency is how well your brewing system is able to take the starches in the grains (and other adjuncts) and convert them into sugars. The higher the number, the more efficient the setup. The more efficient the setup, the less grain needed. The less grain needed, the less money that needs to be spent in making beer.

For what it's worth, efficiency (in our opinion) is given far too much weight by home brewers. We consider consistent efficiency much more important than high efficiency. At the home brew level, a 5-10% efficiency increase is usually only going to mean a few dollars in savings on a typical batch of beer. Given the option, we'd rather have consistent, but low, efficiency all the time, than having higher efficiencies that vary from batch to batch. When we formulate a recipe for a 7% ABV India Pale Ale, we want it to be 7%. Not 6%, not 8%.

With careful attention to design, detail, and our brewing process, we've been able to achieve not only high efficiency but also consistent efficiency. The best of both worlds. This means that a sack of grain in our setup will make almost 50% more beer than on many typical home brew setups.

 

How much beer can you make with your setup?

We use 20 gallon Blichmann BoilerMaker kettles in our setup which allows us to brew between 5-10 gallons of beer per batch, regardless of style. If pushed, we can get to 13-14 gallons, but most times we try and aim for 10 gallons. This is enough to fill two 5 gallon kegs. Whether it's a 3% ABV (alcohol by volume) lighter beer or a 12% Barley Wine, having 20 gallon kettles allows us the flexibility to brew up 10 gallons of just about anything we can dream up.

Someone who only intends on brewing 5 gallon batches may consider smaller 10 gallon kettles. Someone who thinks 15 gallons is more to their liking should use the larger 30 gallon kettles. Want to brew 20 gallons or a full barrel (31 gallons) at a time? The massive 55 gallon kettles are what you'd need.

The amount of time it takes to brew is (generally speaking) the same regardless of batch size so most home brewers look for a good balance between how much work is involved, the amount of beer produced, and how long it's going to take to consume. For most home brewers 10 gallons of finished product per batch is the perfect balance between not having the drink the same beer for months on end and getting the most out of the work involved. Even 10 gallons of beer may seem like a lot at first, but once your friends and family find out what you're up to you'll be surprised how fast it disappears!

 

Did you get any of your stuff for free?

Nope! All of the equipment we use was purchased at retail cost from the various vendors we list in our Parts List for Building. We did not ask to be given parts for free nor did any of these vendors know that we would end up writing about them. In fact, in many cases we tried multiple parts before we settled on the ones that worked best and listed them on this site. We probably have enough spare or reject parts left over to build another small-scale brewing setup!

Some of our leftover parts after designing/building our brewery:
 

 

What are the benefits of brewing with electricity vs. gas?

There are many benefits to brewing with electricity vs. gas:

  • Easier precise control of temperature
  • Safer for indoor brewing (no poisonous gases, no emissions)
  • Absolutely silent (the bigger gas burners required for brewing sound like jet engines)
  • Much more efficient use of energy (our 5500W heating elements produce ~20,000 BTUs of heat and will outperform an 80,000 BTU propane burner)
  • No tanks to refill
  • Cheaper to run (use $1-2 in electricity instead of approximately half a tank of propane per batch)

We don't know of one brewer who, after switching to electric, wished they were still using gas.

 

Where is your brewery located?

Our brewery is located in a basement cold storage room under the front steps of our house. Other than a vent or two, from the outside it's not obvious what lurks under those front steps. The brewery room is fairly small at only 5.5 feet wide by 11.5 feet long with a 7 foot ceiling. It's accessed through a door in the basement.

Our brewery is located in a small basement cold room:

 

What kind of beers do you brew? What have you brewed?

We've brewed various styles of beer from 3% Ordinary Bitters to 12% Barley Wines. All our beers are brewed with fresh (sometimes organic) ingredients and are created to be full-flavoured. No shortcuts, no compromises. 

Below is short list of the beers we've brewed in the first two years (in chronological order from first to last). We typically brew about once a month.

  • American IPA (7.4% ABV, 60 IBU, 13 SRM)
  • American IPA (6.5% ABV, 55 IBU, 12 SRM)
  • Organic Lager (5% ABV, 17 IBU, 4 SRM)
  • Blonde Ale (5.2% ABV, 17 IBU, 4 SRM)
  • [clone] Pliny the Elder (8.3% ABV, 260 IBU, 8 SRM)
  • [clone] Fullers London Pride (4.3% ABV, 30 IBU, 11 SRM)
  • Ordinary Bitter (3.3% ABV, 29 IBU, 10 SRM)
  • [clone] Fullers ESB (5.6% ABV, 40 IBU, 15 SRM)
  • Blonde Ale (4.7% ABV, 20 IBU, 5 SRM)
  • Munich Helles (4.8% ABV, 17 IBU, 4 SRM)
  • Vienna Lager (5.0% ABV, 23 IBU, 11 SRM)
  • American Pale Ale - 100% Cascade hops (5.4% ABV, 38 IBU, 7 SRM)
  • [clone] Pliny the Elder (9.0% ABV, 260 IBU, 7 SRM)
  • Hefeweizen (5.0% ABV, 11 IBU, 3 SRM)
  • Munich Helles (5.5% ABV, 19 IBU, 5 SRM)
  • American Barley Wine (12% ABV, 101 IBU, 16 SRM)
  • American Wheat (4.8% ABV, 11 IBU, 3 SRM)
  • American Pale Ale (5.9% ABV, 30 IBU, 6 SRM)
  • American Pale Ale - All late addition Amarillo/Centennial (6.0% ABV, 37 IBU, 6 SRM)
  • [clone] Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA (7.2% ABV, 58 IBU, 9 SRM)
  • American Amber Ale (4.8% ABV, 33 IBU, 14 SRM)
  • Organic German Lager (5.2% ABV, 21 IBU, 3 SRM)
  • Organic Blonde Ale (5.2% ABV, 21 IBU, 3 SRM)
  • Cream Ale (4.4% ABV, 11 IBU, 2 SRM)
  • Organic German Lager (5.0% ABV, 21 IBU, 3 SRM)

(ABV = alcohol by volume, IBU = bitterness level, SRM = colour where lower is lighter, [clone] = a clone of the commercially available beer)

We'll be listing some of our favourite recipes in our upcoming 'Recipes' section of the website.

Fresh whole hops. Hops are used in beer to offset the sweetness of the malted grains.
 

 

Why does most store-bought beer all look and taste the same?

To quote Worth Brewing Company:

In the late 1800s, thousands of small breweries were making beer to satisfy their neighbourhoods and small towns in the USA. By 1970, Prohibition, post-war mass marketing and transcontinental transportation had whittled the number of breweries down to 40, with a handful accounting for 90 percent of the beer. This trend was anti-consumer, leaving the market with only a fizzy, bland product. The home brewing and craft brewery movement of the past 25 years has reinvigorated the industry and once again provided a choice for discriminating drinkers.

 

Can you make Miller/Coors/Bud light with your brewery?

Yes you most certainly can. You can make any type or style of beer imaginable with this setup. The principles we apply are identical to what a major brewery would use. The only noticeable difference is that we do not use any highly processed ingredients like hop oils and typically limit the use of adjuncts like corn and rice (done by major breweries to keep costs down and keep the beer extremely light tasting). We also do not use any additives or preservatives.

Most brewers who go to the trouble of building such a home brewing system however are not interested in brewing these light beers. They may start off as Miller/Coors/Bud drinkers but upon discovering that beers with interesting flavours and aromas exist, most never go back to making these run of the mill varieties.

That said, we do try to keep one lighter style of beer available on tap at all times to keep all of our visitors happy. Even our lightest beers are (purposely) made with more flavour than most mass-produced beer, however.

 

How do you serve your beer?

Our beer is kept in stainless steel Cornelius kegs (old soda kegs) that are popular with home brewers. The beer is served on Perlick taps in our basement bar where we typically have four styles on tap at any given time. A C02 tank is used to dispense and carbonate the beer.

Stay tuned for future articles where we will describe our kegging and serving setup in detail and show you how to do the same.


   

How long did it take you to build this brewery? How long will it take me?

Approximately one year (on and off) was spent researching, designing, and building our Electric Brewery. The entire process was photographed from start to end. 60-70% of the time was spend on research and design, 20% on the photographing, and then less than 10% on the actual building. Documenting the build process after the fact has (so far) taken many months of work.

If we had to guess, if someone had all of the parts laid out in front of them it would probably take them two to four weeks of working evenings to assemble a similar Electric Brewery based on our instructions. 

 Work goes faster (?) if you have helpers:

 

What kind of camera equipment do you use? 

We used a Canon 30D digital SLR camera with a variety of lenses to take most of the photos you see on this website. This is an older discontinued model that has been superseded by the newest Canon 60D for the same price. The lenses we used the most (from most to least used) include:

An external Canon 420EX flash (superseded by the newer 430EX for the same price) with a Gary Fong diffuser was used to flash fill for certain shots. The tripod is a Manfrotto 055XPROB with a Manfrotto 322RC2 head. All photos were shot in 'RAW' format and then developed using Phase One Capture One Pro 5 software for ultimate control of colour balance and exposure. Some post-processing work was also done with Adobe Photoshop.

 

I don't have time to build this / I want to buy a setup like this. Will you sell me a setup like yours?

In addition to DIY kits and hard to find components, we are working with a US based manufacturer to offer completely built systems for those that do not want to build their own system.

New products are continually being added to our Products page so check back often.

Don't see something listed that you're interested in? Email us and let us know. We are continually working to bring special products on board at special discounted prices.

  

Can you lend me some of your tools to help me build my brewery?

No, sorry. (We get asked this question quite a lot). While we've never met an untrustworthy brewer, this is not something we want to get into. Given the high cost of shipping to and from Canada, it would likely cost more to ship the tool back and forth than for you to purchase it outright using the links on this website. You may always ask in the Buy/Sell section of our brewing forum to see if anyone close to you would be interested. Another option is to purchase the tool and then offer it up for sale in our forum to recoup some of your costs. Some stores also have a tool rental section.

 

I can't seem to have some of the items shipped to my location. What can I do?

Some of these parts are nearly impossible to source at locations other than the ones we list on our site (we tried) and unfortunately some sellers do not ship outside the USA anymore. If you live outside the USA (like us), we recommend using a forwarding service such as Shipito.com. We've used them to ship to Canada. The good news is that shipping within the USA is very inexpensive or often free. You then simply pay a small forwarded fee plus the cost of whatever shipping method you choose (USPS, FedEx, etc). They will even consolidate multiple packages into one to save on shipping. We recommend USPS whenever possible to minimize brokerage fees.

 

Why didn't you add more automation using BCS-460 or similar?

At the end of the day, we don't see any added benefit. 

Semi or complete automation is actually something we never wanted for our Electric Brewery. Some people have asked if it's because we didn't know how to do it or because we didn't want to spend the extra money, but neither is the case. We wanted to keep things 'simple' with what can best be described as manual dials and controls. We still want to feel like we're doing something on brew day. It's a hobby and we want to be part of it. Having a computer adjust some or all of the controls for us just wouldn't be the same.

We do use automation however: The PIDs we use are automated in that the brewer dials in the temperature and it is automatically maintained. That sort of automation makes sense to us. We let some components maintain certain control aspects of the system where it would be difficult for a human to do it, but for actually controlling the process steps, we want to be pressing the buttons and turning the valves ourselves.

We also feel that the time required to program the automated steps at the start of the brew day could or would likely take just as long as 'manually' changing certain settings when needed. For example, with today's highly modified malts, most times home brewers (including ourselves) are only brewing with single infusion mashes (a single mash temperature is used) so no special process steps are needed. On our setup, we simply set the mash temp and then an hour or two later when the mash is done we press the "up" button a few times to go to mash-out temperature. An automated system could automatically do this after the one or two hour period but what exactly is that saving? 

Every other operation in a brewery requires disconnecting/re-connecting hoses so we have to go into our brewery for a few minutes regardless. Even this could be automated with valves and controllers but in our opinion that would be a lot of design/implementation/testing (plus added costs) to save only 5-10 minutes of work on brew day. It just doesn't make any sense to us and results in a more complex setup, which means it's just more things that may cause problems or break. 

Feel free however to experiment and build your brewery any way you like using as little or as much automation as you feel is necessary. After all, it's your brewery!

For more information see our 'Control panel with discrete PIDs or BCS' thread in our forum.

   

Do you have any videos of the entire setup running?

Our Brew Day: Step by Step article includes many videos that show our setup in action throughout the brew day. You may also visit our YouTube channel.

  

How can I know when new information is added to the site?

Sign up for our newsletter. We'll send you an email periodically with a list of the new information that has added. Newsletters are typically sent out once a month.

Want immediate notification when something new is added to the site? Follow our Facebook page or our Twitter feed.

Another option for immediate notification is to sign up to our free Electric Brewery discussion forum and subscribe to the Announcements sub-forum as we post news there as well. Simply log in to the forum, surf over to the Announcements forum and then click on the 'Watch this forum for posts' link. You'll be automatically emailed as soon as anything is added to the site.

 

Do you have a full schematic of your control panel available?

We do not. Sorry! We did not follow any schematics or instructions when we built it as it was our own design. The wiring is actually really straight forward so there was no need for us to draw up anything beforehand. The simplified wiring diagrams on our site are provided so that others without Electrical Engineering experience can understand how to do it. We appreciate that a “real” schematic would probably be easier for someone with electronics experience but at the same time someone with this experience should find the build very straightforward. 

 

Why didn't you use <some part name> instead? Wouldn't it cost less?

The best way to understand why we designed our brewery the way we did and used the parts we did is to read the corresponding 'Building your Brewery' articles. We provide detailed information on the design choices we made and often compare our choice to the other options available.

Remember as well that (within reason) cost was the last factor we considered. Functionality, ease of use, safety, and durability were placed before cost.

We firmly believe that a properly designed system using quality components will far outlast one made with cheap components and end up costing less in the long run.

 

How long does it take to brew beer with your setup?

Similar to other all-grain home brewing setups (gas or electric), it takes anywhere from 5-8 hours to produce the sugary-sweet malt/hop liquid called 'wort'. This is what our Electric Brewery produces. Yeast is then added and left to ferment this wort into beer (1-3 weeks typically). The beer is then kegged and left for 2 weeks to carbonate under pressure from CO2. Lagers and stronger ales may be left to age or condition for a month or more to smooth out the flavours. Every beer is different. Our upcoming recipes section will provide detailed instructions on what to expect and what to do.

 

How much electricity does it take to brew beer with your setup?

We've never measured but it isn't much. Probably similar to what it takes to run your clothes dryer for a load or two. It is considerably less expensive than using propane or gas (and there are no tanks to fill). In most locations the cost to brew with electricity is about 1/5th to 1/10th of the cost of using propane.  

 

Is it safe to drink beer in a hot tub?

Moderate your intake while in a hot tub. Many hot tub manufacturers recommend never drinking alcoholic beverages before, during, and/or after soaking in a hot tub. Alcohol expands your blood vessels and increases your body temperature. So does your hot tub. The combined effect may raise your body temperature too much, leading to a stroke or heart attack.

The beer spa at Landhotel Moorhof in Franking, Austria. Soak in beer while drinking beer. Mmmm, beer.

(A somewhat off-topic question but I couldn't resist including this great photo).

 

Have you written any guides similar to this one?

Yes we have! We're big home theater buffs (we drink most of our beer in our home theater) and have written a guide that helps you get the absolute best picture out of your TV/projector called the Greyscale & Colour Calibration for Dummies. This is a free guide meant for beginners with no prior knowledge or understanding of what display calibration is or why it may be required. It works on any TV or projector.

If you're curious, give it a read by clicking on the banner below:

You may read more and see pictures of our home theater here at our CurtPalme.com Home Theater website.