I obtained a couple of used kegs (legally, of course) and converted them to brewing kettles. Marc already had the mash kettle, so one of mine became the sparge kettle, and the other the boil kettle. I found some stainless steel lids at Costco that had about an eleven inch diameter. I cut a hole out of the top of the kegs with my Dremel. They were not fully converted right away, so I drilled a hole close to the handle on the sparge kettle so we could use a racking cane until it was fully converted. Bob at Bob's Homebrew Supply did a great job finishing the conversion. He added thermometers and spigots to both kettles and a false bottom to the boil kettle.

After we had the kettles converted, I started thinking about a brew table. Sabco makes a great brew table complete with computer and everything, but it is a bit expensive, so I looked into building one. I found some photos on the web of some other people who had built one, and from those I drew up some plans to make one out of steel. Once I got done with the plans, I mailed them to my dad and he constructed the table. I found some Bayou Classic 185,000 BTU high pressure jet cookers at Ace Outlet online for $35, and decided they would work well for the burners. The burners run on propane, so my dad added three propane tank hangers onto the brew stand. As you can see from the images below the burner shoots a flame over a foot high when there is no kettle on the stand. We brewed our first batch with the brew table on 02.26.2006. It worked great. It is nice to not have the mash tun and boil kettle share the same burner. Moving a large pot of hot liquid up onto a somewhat shaky burner was not fun. Being able to start heating up the boil kettle before the sparge is over should save us a bit to time too.

We were using a rather old Phil's sparger that worked okay, but it started to show signs of old age and would quit spinning, usually on days when it was raining the hardest. I had some left over copper tubing from making a racking cane, so I decided to try to make a new sparger. I got the idea from some other ones I had seen on the web. There are about sixty hand drilled holes in it (power tools kept breaking the bits). I used a pretty small drill bit, probably around a thirty-second of an inch. It works pretty well, it does not disturb the grain bed. The valve on the kettle is used to control the flow and keep the total sparge time between forty-five minutes and an hour.

The sparger shown above works pretty well, but out conversions have been dropping off, so I thought I would try another one. In order to get the sparge water temperature high enough in the mash it needs to be at a fairly high temperature in the kettle. The water drops 10-20°F from the sparge kettle to the top of the mash. We figured the long copper tubing was giving the water a lot of time to cool off, so this sparger is more compact and closer to the original Phil's sparger we were using. It doesn't rotate, but it also does not disturb the grain bed. It works a little better, as far as keeping the sparge water at higher temperature in the grain bed, but our conversions are still not where we want them.

When we first started brewing we were using a wort chiller that Marc had made out of six inch PVC and copper tubing. It got the job done, but it used a lot of water. I finally broke down and bought Blichmann Engineering's Therminator and ThruMeter. The wort chiller was pretty expensive, but after a couple of uses, I would say it is worth it. Our chilling times went from over an hour to less than fifteen minutes, and the wort ends up at a lower temperature. We cut the amount of water needed to chill way down, and probably use about twenty-five gallons or so.