So I'm going to brew some beer

Insulated boiler with a cooling spiral

I wanted to brew beer for a long time. I even got a birthday present of a beer brewing course in Erding. The course was cancelled due to (believe it or not in the land of beer) lack of interest. In the meantime I was otherwise occupied and had no time for anything else. So when things started to quieten down a little bit, I decided to do some more reading on how beer is actually made, with the short term aim of brewing a first 'Sud'.

The first thing I saw was that (irrespective of what many forums say), you need a lot of equipment. Many "brewing for idiot" guides say you can brew with things you happen to have lying around the house. In fairness, you probably can. You can also dig foundations for a house with a teaspoon. Some jobs need the right tools. Especially for the first Sud, I didn't want to be leaving everything up to chance. Which is why I ordered equipment and am now in the process of getting it set up.

What I have at the moment is the Silvercrest Einkocher from Lidl (the forum hobbybrauer.de gives this very high ratings - it is apparently one of the only Einkocher in this - or any sub €200 class - which can accurately hold temperature (critical when mashing). I also have a Bierspindel (for measuring saccharin) with a sampling cylinder, a fermentation keg (60L), two 30L plastic buckets, a Läuterhexe (with tap), a contraption for putting lids on bottles and some other bits and pieces.

To get ready for mashing/brewing, I needed to make some modifications to some of these purchases. The first thing that needed to be done was to mark up the litres on both plastic buckets. This will be important when measuring how much Bierwürze I get from filtering the mash. To mark the litres I added a litre of water, marked the height, added another litre, marked the height etc. The buckets can actually hold over 34 litres despite being sold as 30L buckets. I'm not complaining about that. I also had to drill a hole towards the bottom of one of the buckets to fix the Läuterhexe. The hole was not the issue - getting the contraption watertight was and still is an issue. I think I have it fixed now - but I'll try with a full bucket before actually chancing a filtration procedure.

The Läuterhexe is installed

Finally, earlier on I insulated the Lidl Einkocher. From what I read on the forum, the Einkocher itself is great, but it reaches its limit when you try to boil hops at 100°C for 60-90 minutes. For boiling hops, the water really has to boil hard - not just bubble lightly, but properly boil. Otherwise the alpha acids in the hops don't get released into the Würze. I insulated it with two layers of a foam exercise mat (again, a tip from the forum). I'll try boiling 27l of water in this as well before I use it to boil hops.

The next step are a cooler for the Würze (once the hops has been boiled, it is important to get the Würze down to about 30°C as quickly as possible, so the yeast can be added. I also need to get something organised to stir the mash constantly. I used a windshield wiper motor from a 1996 Audi. It is a 12V/50W motor which should be well able to deal with the heavy, sticky mash. I asked the fitter who installed our balcony to weld a rotor/propeller which I can hook up to the motor to do the stirring for me.