Their size also allows mashing and lautering in the same vessel. A cooler’s built-in insulation provides better mash temperature stability than a bucket can provide. Picnic coolers, on the other hand, offer significant advantages not available with buckets, adding both simplicity and efficiency. Meanwhile, Pot B heats sparge water on the stove. The now-empty pot will be used to collect the wort from the mash/tun and, later, to boil the wort in. The total investment for a home canning–type or crab cooker–type propane burner is usually less than $100, including propane tank.Ī typical kitchen setup: Pot A is used to heat the mash water, which is then added to grain in the mash/lauter tun (cooler). A gas stove will usually do the job, but it is often more economical to buy a propane burner. With larger kettles, many brewers find that an electric stove is not up to the task, unless they can sit the pot on two burners at once. You could split up your water and wort and use two smaller pots if that’s all you have available. A typical 5-gallon batch will require a brewpot capacity of 6 or 7 gallons 8-gallon ceramic-on-steel pots will also do nicely. You will need two appropriately sized pots in which to heat water for the mash and sparge, and to collect and boil the wort. Though simple, this method is vessel-intensive - you mash in one vessel, lauter through two more, and yet another vessel is needed to heat water for rinsing the grain (sparging). This setup has served home brewers well over the years and continues to do the job for many. Using two food-grade 5-gallon buckets, the inner bucket is drilled with lots of small holes to form a false bottom that holds the grain and allows the liquid to run off the sweet wort passes into the outer bucket and is drawn off through a hole in the side. This setup is fairly effective and very cheap to assemble. The original (at least the most popularized) home lautering sysrem was probably the bucket-in-a-bucket false bottom championed by Charlie Papazian in the Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Ten years ago, the most popular all-grain method was probably mashing in a large pot on the stove and then transferring the mash to another vessel for lautering (the process of separating the dissolved sugars from the grain, which produces the wort). Kick the “Bucket-in-a-Bucket” Method Good-ByeĪll-grain brewing differs from extract brewing in that you use various vessels to mash the grain, collect the sweet wort, and boil the full volume of wort. My goal is to illustrate why this method of mashing is truly the easiest way to step into all-grain brewing. It presents basic information on the construction of a picnic cooler mash tun and, at the same time, some usage tips from my own experience. Instead, it provides tools you can use to move into all-grain brewing with equipment adapted at home. This article is not intended to be a complete tutorial on all-grain brewing. It is with this assumption in mind that I present this article on how to construct (and use) a mash/lauter tun adapted from an ordinary insulated picnic cooler. Most of you have probably brewed several times already and are looking to educate yourselves about new techniques. I am making the assumption that a brewer who reads this article will probably not be a beginner.
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