To make great beer, you need a great brewing system. Heres a look at the 'WortMaster 2001'!.

My system is a HERMS type, and it does have some of the 'carmelization' effect due to my use of higher temperatures in the HLT that I use to step mash temperatures for rests. It is not as 'caramelly' as the RIMS type systems though. If you love big, malty beers, this is the system type for you!

Venturi Tube Wort Aerator

Ever wonder what to do with those old yeast vials sitting around the brewery? I dont. Turn one into a Wort Aerator. If you noticed, they fit the neck of your carboy very well, and screwing the cap onto it keeps it from falling into the carboy. Remember, this item must be used in a vertical position or it will leak wort from the tube, its a gravity thing.

Heres what you do. Take a 6 inch length of tubing ( vinyl, copper, brass, or stainless depending on your fabrication skills ), drill 4-6 small holes, about .020" diameter into the center 1.5" of it. I used a spiral pattern for the holes, believing that it causes more turbulence, but the aerator tube will work fine with holes period. Drill a hole in the top and bottom of the vial to pass the tubing through, make the hole small enough to fit the tubing snugly. Drill some more small holes for air entry into the cap of the vial, I settled with four one-eighth inch holes. Put a cotton ball just under the lid, this is to be an air filter to keep contaminates out of your wort as it draws the air through and into your wort.

No need to spend money on oxygen bottles or cleaning of those difficult airstones anymore! This is the brewers favorite price point here.... free oxygen! Only one very small warning, if you drill the aerator tube holes too large, wort will leak out of the holes and fill the vial over time. You need to pay attention to the vial if you are allowing pressure to build in the carboy (too tight of a fit in the carboy), wort will fill the vial, soak the cotton and quit working. I now am drilling a 1/16 inch pressure relief / drain hole in the bottom of the vial where it is inside the carboy, venting the air under pressure in from the carboy. They work well in usage, especially if you use a rubber band around the tube to raise it in the neck of the carboy, as I have been suggesting, to increase the fill space in the fermenter before the aerator touches the wort.

WARNING: Do not use this item unsupervised, as you will need to be around to shake down the foam as your fermenter fills, or it will overflow with frothy wort.

Since I started using this device on every beer, I have not had ONE beer finish with high terminal gravities. No stuck ferments, no problems, even when I underpitched my yeast. These are also able to be autoclaved if you use metal tubing.

Follow this picture and you should get one of these sweet gadgets done in less than one hour.

(BELOW) Heres a look at the holes drilled into the tube, there are 4 holes in a spiral around the tube. Only two are shown. There is also a ring of holes in the lid to let aeration air in through the cotton ball filter. More holes than needed (8) are in the shown part. You could use half (4) of that. If you still need to use your oxygen / airstone unit, blast your wort at about 4 hours post pitch, and again at 12 hours, this will give yeast some boost when it needs it according to the yeast doctors.

Beer Keg Fermenter

Heres another damn handy item around my brewery. Convert a keg into a fermenter and you will never go back to carboys. I now do a 1-2 week primary, then straight to kegs for finishing fermentation, spunding for carbonation, and into the cooler for aging and serving. If you can find an 50L import keg, you have found your starting point for this gadget. The keg I used was made to be easily converted by the modification of the diptube which screwed into the lid of the keg, and a hole cut into the bottom to accomodate a corny keg lid. Anyone handy with welding could improve on my technique, but welding is completely optional with this system. You will need a jigsaw and bimetal blades, and a dremel to clean, shape and polish the cut hole and cutoff dip tube ends as desired. If you havent cut stainless with a jigsaw before, the key is to go VERY SLOWLY and if you see your blade turn red hot, you have probably damaged the blade. You could fill your keg with water to cool and lubricate the blade but that isnt necessary.

(BELOW) This is the modified diptube assembly of the keg. Let the CO2 out of the keg! Then unscrew the diptube flange out of the keg and disassemble. Reinsert the diptube in upside down and reassemble. Shorten the tube to the length you desire, and reassemble to keg. Cut off the diptube top to drain better. I added a length of silicone tubing to the diptube and a pinchclamp to close it off. Obviously a welder could come up with some better options here, like cut out the metal retaining section for the diptube, weld in a 1/2" SS pipe, and install a ball valve. Or.... Bottom line, do what you can or want to. Cut up an old plastic bucket for a stand, and pass the tubing out the side or through the handholes on the keg for access.

(BELOW) The last remaining work is to cut a hole into the top of the keg and fit the corny lid to it. Looking for an appropriate lid that you can attach an air lock or blowoff tube to will save you fabrication efforts, or drill a 3/8" hole and plug your airlock in using tubing as a gasket. Remove the plastic tips on the lid latch so you can close down the lid, you might have to grind some off the end of the latch rods to fit well. That should get you started. I really enjoy this fermenter.

Chest Freezer Beer Cooler

The novel part of this design is to use a wood collar to support an 8 tap porcelain and brass tapper without cutting any holes into the unit. Since I bought a 10 year warranty on the chest freezer, I didnt want to cut any holes into it.

Some lessons learned: If you would use 8" wood rather than 6", you could put 2 full height 5 gallon kegs on the 'compressor hump', making it possible to put 10 cornies into a 15 cu ft cooler. If you use 6", you can put loose bottles, etc or (2) 3 gallon cornies there instead. But the 6" wood puts the top at the perfect height for a bar top arm rest. I ended up making a wood top for the cooler lid and wrapping some fabric around part of the cooler for better looks. Use some weatherseal gasket on the lower wood to cooler interface. I also put some wire 'closet organizer baskets' inside, which reside on top of the kegs, for storage of miscellaneous bottles and hops. You will need an external thermostat to set the temperature, I used a Hunter electronic unit until it died, now I have the highly reliable Johnson Controls unit available at finer homebrew stores. Or you could hack the existing thermostat by trying to recalibrate it.

A muffin type fan also runs inside the cooler to circulate air and improve temperature control. Dual regulators allow me to set different pressures to accomodate differing beer styles. Colored electrical tape is used to color code beer and co2 line numbers, after all it starts to get confusing with 10 beer and 10 co2 lines, which I used clear lines for all so I could see if the co2 path were to become contaminated by beer ( yes that has happened, hint: let the pressure out of your keg before hooking up the gas ). Check valves protect the regulators, they make them built into the regulator/gas line adaptor fittings, check some good beer/soda parts sources for them.

One other problem you will find out is that a freezer does not have a way to eliminate moisture buildup. The muffin fan inside helps reduce buildup, but another solution is available. Place a container of 'Dry Rid' into the cooler, just remember to empty it when needed. You will be surprised at the amount of water that will accumulate in the cooler.

Easy Counterflow Chiller

Heres my easiest design of a counterflow chiller. No fancy parts to adapt these hoses together to fittings, just cut the nuisance hose fittings off. Use some 1/2" copper water fittings and tubing, and its a done deal. The hardest part to find I found at Ace Hardware, its a 3/8" compression to 1/2" copper tubing fitting, often used to connect ice maker lines to your water lines. This piece is made of brass.

It might be hard to see in the pic, so I will describe the manufacture. Acquire (2) 1/2" copper 'T's, (2) of the described adaptors, (4) 3" lengths of copper water tubing and (2) 1" lengths. Clean and flux parts like normal. Assemble the 3" lengths to the 'T's at 90 degree angles. On the straight through that is left, assemble the adaptors and the 1" lengths of tubing. You should have 2 identical pieces if you did it right. Solder them together using lead free plumbing solder. Take your length of 5/8" garden hose, cut off the ends leaving sufficient length to reattach to the 90 degree end of the copper water tubing 'T' ( for your water inlet/outlet fittings ) and unroll, straighten, and feed the 3/8" copper refrigeration tubing through the garden hose, using dishsoap and water as a lubricant. Your length should be at least 25', and could be as long as 50' if you dont have cold water. Mine is 25" and works fine, but I also have an immersion chiller as a part of my HEARMS system. If you wonder how long it should be, make it 50' since the tubing and hose comes in that length, and if it is too much, make it into 2 units by cutting in half and make one for your brewing buddy. Leave at least 6" of copper tubing sticking out of each end of the hose. This copper tubing length may shrink as you wind the hose up into a coil. Use dishsoap to lubricate the hose end and insert the tubing through the adaptor and slide onto the end of the hose, secure with a hose clamp, and tighten the compression fitting. Install the cut off hose end to the 'T' and secure with a hose clamp. Do the same to the other end. Done. I probably shouldn't mention this cheat, but if you are not running water line pressures into the inlet/outlet you shouldn't need the hose clamps, but they are only $3 US for 4 of them. The hose does soften up on the outlet side from the heat, so I would not cheat here. Now all you need is the wort aerator and you are ready.

(BELOW) Close up of end of chiller assembly.

Hopback using Canning Jar

WARNING!! RUNNING BOILING HOT WORT THROUGH A GLASS JAR HAS OBVIOUS CONCERNS TO YOUR SAFETY! IF YOU CANT BE CAREFUL ENOUGH NOT TO HURT YOURSELF, DONT TRY THIS AT HOME! DONT BLAME ANYONE BUT YOURSELF! STUPID PEOPLE SHOULDNT BREW!

Ok lets get to the subject on hand. This is probably the most dangerous item I have made for my brewery. Not that I have had any problems, but the potential is there. This one probably also took the most thought to make one that works well. Acquire a 1 qt wide mouth canning jar, discard the lid and cut yourself one out using any metal you can join copper water tubing to. I used brass, and anytime I use brass I use the 'pickling' technique to remove surface lead. Take 2 parts white vinegar, 1 part hydrogen peroxide, mix, and soak part for 3-5 minutes, rinse.

Pic coming

Heres a close up of the main piece of the unit. For a hopback to work well, it needs to be airtight. We dont need to even think of the oxidative potential for a device like this. The inlet tube needs to be placed as high as it can get in the jar, since the air wont purge above this tube without being held upside down ( right side up? ) and purged. But if you were to build it so the inlet tube positioned downwards, it would purge just fine with no efforts. It all depends on how you can interface the hopback into your system. It is hard to give you specific instructions using the hopback since it depends on how you are going to fit it into your system. Just fill it up with leaf hops ( havent tried pellets yet ) and give it a go.

Yeast Bioreactor

For the best ferments, you need healthy, well fed and aerated yeast. Using yeast from this homemade bioreactor I can knock lag times dowm to 4-5 hours easily. It is important that the parts you use to make this can handle being autoclaved, as they need to be well cleaned and sterilized. Finding something that will fit 1000ml flasks isnt too easy, I use my All American 21.5 qt pressure cooker, as they are too large for my autoclave. Sterility is very important since it is possible to really cook up a batch of bacteria since many of them love to grow aerobically and will outgrow your yeast very quickly.

pic coming

Next you need a stir plate. This helps keep the yeast in suspension, allowing greater biomass growth. Filtered air is necessary, and if you have used the .22 micron Millipore filters, you are aware of the cost, and that all it takes is a bit of humidity in the lines to reach the filter and it will swell up and clog permanently. Theres $3 gone. So I have made up a unit from silicone tubing that uses cotton as a filter, I am not sure what the effective filtration is, but it has been working well for me. The pump is a rotary vane medical pump, with these filters on inlet and outlet.

Counter Pressure Bottle Filler

Heres a variation on the conventional wisdom on fillers. Mine is a '3 hole' unit. So how do you do this? Its tricky, but you can do it with some good tools and hard thinking. The trick is in modifying one of the compression fittings, the lower one has been drilled out to allow the gas to vent from the side port with a larger diameter tubing than it was designed for, and soldered in place rather than using the ferrule it once had. Stainless tubing is a pain to find, but theres a neat little engineering supply place called 'Small Parts', which is a dream for us engineering geeks. This one was made of brass as a prototype.

HEPA Filtered Air Hood

Take all the worry out of yeast ranching. Pour wort and HLP plates with ease. Im not gonna tell you how to make this, you can probably figure it out for yourself. Just make sure you are able to clean every crack and crevace of this workspace. I used a HEPA room air filter with ionizer to clean the air. Use the ionizer when you run the filter. Turn off the filter and give the air a minute to 'settle' when you are doing your work.

UV Sterilization Box

Another toy that makes life easier at times. I really haven't had problems with pouring plates without this item, but it is proper procedure to give your plates a finishing touch with the UV sterilizer. This is probably because I use my plates promptly. I keep things in there that I would like to keep clean and ready for use. Its a good thing.

Well, thats enough gadgets for now, theres more, but I dont want to make anyone toooo jealous...