Aaron's beer brewing equipment

Most of my brewing is done with my brew-buddy. Frankly, brewing is easier with a second person involved; there's a lot of crucial small steps that are easy to screw up.

What I'm building is a small-batch rig -- set up to brew either one or two gallons at a time. This has two purposes:
  1. brewing styles of beer Kevin doesn't like.
  2. experimentation (for SCIENCE!!!!)
Here's what I own, and am going to experiment on, for small batches:
  1. 3-gallon glass carboy (primary fermentation)
  2. 1-gallon glass jug (secondary fermentation)
  3. Bottle-filling wand and 3/8" tubing
  4. #6 stopper
  5. 2x 3-piece airlock (easier to clean than the 1-piece, and only $0.10 more)
  6. Funnel
It's a simple setup which costs less than $30. Since this is for very small, experimental batches, I'm thinking of going with the flip-top style bottles. But I may just do regular capping. I'll try capping first. I have a capper anyway, and I've been saving/cleaning used beer-bottles for years. Here's the other equipment I have that you don't necessarily need, but is kinda nice:
  1. Bench-style capper. Makes bottle-capping a lot easier than the accordion-style
  2. Hydrometer - used for reading the specific gravity of your wort and beer
  3. Syphon-starter/racking cane. Starting syphoning manually really sucks
  4. Sink-mount bottle/carboy washer
  5. Beer 'thief' - used for taking samples from the carboy, for gravity readings
  6. Thermometer. I have a digital probe thermometer I plan on using. You can use any thermometer that will give you good readings between 90-212F.
  7. Bottle washer. Hooks up to a utility sink, and sprays water at high pressure into your bottles for washing/wrinsing.
  8. Bottling bucket. 6-gallon bucket with spigot. This means you don't have to siphon beer into your bottles, making the whole process a bit easier.
  9. carboy dryer. It's a little stand that you hang a carboy upside-down on, and it drips dry.
  10. hose clamps - standard plumbing supply I'd use to clamp the 3/8" tube to the racking cane during siphoning, to prevent oxygenation of the wort.
Stuff I plan on getting to streamline the process and make it easier:
  1. Bottle tree and sanitizer injector. Makes it easy to wash, dry, and sanitize your bottles.
  2. Refractometer - can be used to take initial gravity reading of your wort, but uses drops instead of 6-8oz like a hydrometer.
  3. 6.5 and 5 gallon carboys. I want to step up to big batches someday.
  4. wort chiller - a coil of copper tubing you stick in the wort, and then run cold water through. Brings the wort down to pitching temperatures real fast. Absolutely necessary for full 5-gallon boil
  5. 8 gallon brew kettle with built-in thermometer and spigot. Nice to have for a full-gallon boil. Do you want to lift a brew-pot filled with 5 gallons of liquid and pour it through a funnel? I don't. The built-in thermometer makes things easy.
  6. false bottom for said brew kettle. This would be a step towards all-grain brewing, allowing me to use my brew kettle as a mash tun
  7. kegging equipment. Bottling kinda sucks. It would be nice to re-rack the finished beer into a keg, add some pressure, and be done.
Absolutely crazy stuff I want, because I'm insane:
  • a magnetic stir plate - makes making yeast starters easy and more effective
  • digital scale with a 0.05 gram accuracy. I'm doing small batch brewing, and my scale is only accurate to about 2g. Since I use 2-4g of yeast in a small batch, that is bad.
Where do I get my supplies? A combination of sources:
  • Corrado's Beer and Wine in Clifton, NJ — Equipment is cheap, but ingredients are expensive, and stock is random.
  • Gaslight Brewery in South Orange, NJ — They don't have a catalog, so you have to call ahead and ask for what you want, but they're just around the corner from me and have tasty food and beer.
  • Austin Homebrew — good prices on ingredients, flat rate $6.99 shipping.
  • Norther Brewer — good prices on ingredients, flat rate $7.99 shipping for anything that's not too big and heavy.
  • More Beer! — a ton of high-quality equipment and ingredient options, but website sucks and it's a pain to find what you need. Also, free shipping on most orders of $59 or more.
Beer brewing info:
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Any problems, questions, or comments, email aaron@traas.org