Brewing beer at home is easy. You can make the process as simple or as complicated as you like. I started out brewing kit beers with my mate Paul, adding a few extra grains and hops, and they were pretty good beers. Then I tried some extract based beers and some partial mashes. They were all done on a stovetop with smallish pots, no major gear purchases.

As my palate started to get better at appreciating the individual flavours in a beer, and I starting trying a lot of imported beers, I found that I couldnt make exactly the beer I wanted using malt extract. But setting up a system to make beer from all grain seemed daunting. Then a mate gave me a couple of spare kegs ready to be converted into a brewing system which forced me to get a system together. And I am really glad that I did (thanks Batz). Although I am still not making exactly the beers I am aiming at, I can see that with an all grain system I am going to get to that stage soon. And, to my taste, even my not-so-good all grain beers have been a step above my extract beers.

An all grain brew starts with the grain, the base grain I buy in a 25 kg sack. I use about 8 kg of grain for a brew (35 l batch size), including some specialty grains like crystal, munich, wheat or chocolate.

I crush the grain the night before brew day using a Valley Mill I imported from Canada when the dollar was strong. I made a base to fit over a plastic crate. I crush most of the grain on about the 4th setting, and sometimes I run the grain through a second time on a finer setting. I drive the mill with an electric drill.

Note that it is important to drink a craft brewed beer while crushing the grain to make you think about last minute adjustments to the grain bill. You can design a beer in an excel spreadsheet, which is what I used to do, but I now use Promash to predict gravity, colour and bitterness.

Most of the grain contains starch, not sugar. So I need to mix the grain with water, and hold it at the correct temperature for the enzymes which are naturally present to convert the starch into malt and sugar molecules which the yeast can ferment. I do that in a mash tun. My mash tun is a 44 l willow esky. I drilled a hole and installed a tap using a threaded nipple, rubber washers and a ball valve. The slotted copper pipe is the manifold I use to drain the liquid from the tun. The pipe is slotted on both sides, and the manifold swings out for cleaning. The joins arent soldered, just tapped with a punch to stop them coming apart.

For a heat source I use a 4 ring cast iron burner, connected to a standard pressure but high flow gas regulator. I plan to eventually upgrade to a jet type burner. It is hard to balance a keg on the stubs on the burner frame, so I made a crude steel triangle from angle steel for the keg to sit on. It includes a flame shield to stop my rubber washers on the tap from getting too hot. I also wrap a metal strip around the burner as a windshield. It takes close to an hour to get about 40 l of water from tap temperature to 80 degrees.

This is the source of hot water for mixing with the grain, usually called a Hot Liquor Tank (HLT). It has a temperature gauge through the wall of the keg so I can see when the water is getting close to temperature without putting my hands in the top. There is also a pick up pipe on the inside so the HLT will siphon/drain to below the level of the tap. The stirrer paddle is marked up for measuring volumes. I usually light the burner under the HLT and then take the dogs for a walk while waiting. Normally I need about 22 l of water at about 73 degrees for the mash. I heat the water to about 78 degrees, then drain to the mash tun, and leave it for 5 mins while the mash tun warms up and the water cools to the required temperature.

Then I add the grain to the water and stir out all the dough balls. It starts to smell pretty good at this point. I check the temperature with a probe thermometer, and add a bit more hot water if I need to. The mash tun sits on polystyrene blocks to keep it off the paving and is wrapped in a blanket. My mash volume is generally around 30 l. I mash for between 60 and 90 mins, depending on how fast I can reheat the sparge water in the HLT. The probe thermometer in the middle of the mash drops about half a degree in that time, but there is a bigger loss of temperature at the edges and top of the mash.

At the end of the mash, the starch has been converted to malty sugars and I need to rinse them from the grain. I batch sparge, one batch if it fits, 2 if it doesnt. I have to batch sparge as I dont have a tiered system and I dont have a pump. Usually I add about 10 l of water at close to 100 degrees at the end of the mash for the first batch. This fills up the mash tun, gets the grain hot enough for the enzymes to stop working, and makes the sugars a bit more fluid. Then I mix the mash up, and lift the tun up on to the barbecue. I drain some liquid slowly to get a filter of grain material against the manifold and the drained liquid is returned to the tun, using a sheet of foil to stop it messing up the grain bed. When the runoff is nice and clear, I drain to the boiler, as fast as possible, it takes 5 to 10 mins to get all the liquid out. I get about 20 l from the first batch.

Then I add about another 25 l of hot water, mix, stand 10 mins, recirculate with the jug and drain again to the boiler.

The boiler is an 80 l keg. It is similar to the HLT, has a nipple and rubber washers to put the tap on the bottom, has a pickup tube on the inside, and has a jarrah paddle which is calibrated to the boiler volume. After I drain the second batch sparge to the boiler, I mix up the liquid, measure the gravity (the amount of sugar) and measure the volume. This tells me how efficient the mash was, and whether I have extracted enough sugars. If my efficiency is low, (less than my standard 70%) I revise my boil schedule and hop additions to make the beer taste the way I want it to.

The boiler on its own weighs more than 10 kg. And now it has 45 l of hot liquid in it. And I need to lift it up on to the burner. Most people use a pump or a tiered system and gravity flow to avoid this problem. But I use the "hydraulic boiler liftovator".

The hydraulic boiler liftovator.

There is a tree over the barbecue and I have hung a pulley off a length of chain. Two empty 25 l jerrycans with hose connectors at the base are connected to the tap, slung on a wire cable and pulled up to the pulley. The other end of the cable connects to a chain sling on the boiler.

The hydraulic boiler liftovator controls may only be used by a qualified brewmeister, and only then if he isnt very drunk. 45 l of liquid at 70 degrees swinging around your head can be a bit of a problem. The lower valve in the picture is the "up" switch, sending water into the jerrycans. The upper valve is opened to vent water from the jerrycans and is the "down" switch.

Once the jerrycans have filled, I am able to lift the boiler with one hand, position it on the burner, then hit the down switch and fire the burner up. My original plan was to use the water venting from the liftovator in the immersion chiller, but it is too much hassle keeping the jerrycans in place during the boil, so I just water the lawn.

It takes about half an hour with all 4 rings blazing to get the wort to a boil.

I dont do a starch test to confirm that conversion of starch to malt is complete in the mash tun. But I can tell that conversion is complete when Dallas starts trying to pull the lid off to get at the sweet grain inside. Dont worry, this gets boiled so doggie germs arent an issue at this point.

You need to achieve a rolling boil to get the required reactions going in the boiler. Here the hot break is starting to happen, and the foam generated by the initial boil is disappearing. I boil for about 20 to 30 mins before adding any hops. This is to make sure the hot break has happened first, and also so I can check the evaporation rate. The 45 l of wort in the boiler is at a lower gravity (density) than I need. I expect to evaporate about 6.5 l for every hour of boiling which will raise the gravity to where I want it. I check the volume after 30 mins, then adjust my boil time and hop schedule if I need to. Some of the hops get boiled for 60 minutes to get the right amount of bitterness, other hops are added at the end to add flavour and aroma. I also add some old bread yeast and a scraping from a zinc multivitamin tablet to give nutrients to the beer yeast, and some whirlfloc to help drop floating bits out of the wort..

People laugh when they see this. It is an immersion chiller, and it was made like that deliberately. It goes into the boiler 15 mins before finishing the boil so it gets sterilised. Then after the burner is turned off, I run water through it for 25 mins to cool the wort. The wort has to be cooled to precipitate out proteins and stuff generated in the boil, and to get the temperature right for the beer yeast.

Most people make these chillers in a uniform coil shape. But it seems to me that it will cool more effectively if the pipe is better distributed through the wort. My plan was to make it in a rotating figure of eight shape (remember spirograph sets?) to occupy all of the inside of the boiler. But my bending skills werent up to it, so I went for a random coaxial design. There are also a couple of kinks in the coil, which induce turbulent, rather than laminar flow inside the copper pipe, which increases the cooling efficiency. But they were definitely accidents.

Once cooled, the wort gets drained to a fermenter. I use liquid yeasts, and so I also need to aerate the wort to add oxygen which the yeast needs in its initial growth stage. I let the wort drain from the height of the boiler to the fermenter, splashing around. Then I drain it from one fermenter to another, using a plastic tube with small holes in it (bit hard to see in this photo). The flowing wort sucks more air through the holes.

Of my original 45 l, about 10 l has evaporated during the boil. Another 3 to 4 l gets left at the bottom of the boiler, mixed up with the hops, hot break and cold break material. So I have about 30 l of wort, which I split into 2 fermenters. I usually then pitch a different yeast starter into each fermenter, so I can see what difference the yeast makes to the beer.

The hop rich stuff at the base of the boiler gets buried in a fenced off garden, as hops can be toxic to dogs.

If you think a laundry is for washing clothes, and storing dog food, you are missing out on an awful lot of potential pleasure.

My laundry is used for fermenting ales in Winter. It holds the brew between 18 and 22 degrees. If I pitch a huge starter, the heat generated by fermentation can push the temperature up too high in the first day or so. In that case I sit the fermenters in a plastic crate filled with water. I have a temperature controller to make a fermentation fridge but havent found the fridge yet.

The rest of the laundry provides storage for bottled beer. The door stays shut to minimise light, and I have changed the globe to a 20W so its always dim in there.

The conditioning fridge. Once fermentation is complete, the brew goes into a plastic jerrycan in the fridge for a few weeks. As it chills, all the sediment and dead yeast clumps together and falls to the bottom. The beer ends up better tasting and much more clear than bottling straight away. Enough live yeast stays floating around so that the bottles gas up when I prime them, although it takes a bit longer.

The door contains splits of liquid yeasts preserved for another brew, dried yeast, whirfloc for clarifying the boil. The freezer contains hop pellets, ice containers for cooling fermenters, and some food items as a concession to Fleur.

I am currently setting up a kegging system and a bar. Up to now I have bottled all my beer.

My bottle rack (left, on its side for the picture) holds 60 bottles so I can bottle 2 brews in one go. It has a wide, stable base, as Paul and I had a nasty incident with our original version while it was full of washed and sterilised bottles. Note if you are making one of these, a nail on its own doesnt hold a bottle firmly, you also need a lip for the neck to sit against, we put these in at each nail location using a drill and a spade bit.

I bulk prime instead of sugaring the bottles individually. I dissolve the dextrose in hot water and put it in the bottling bucket. Then decant the brew from the cold conditioning jerrycan into the bottling bucket, stir gently, then just bottle from the bottling bucket.

Bulk priming saves the hassle of remembering which bottles you have sugared. If you tend to taste your previous brews while making your current brew, sugaring bottles can become a surprisingly confusing process. It also saves adjusting the sugar for different sized bottles and allows you to make small changes to the amount of carbonation sugar.

The bottling bucket sits on my bottling stool so that it is above the crates of washed bottles. The stool has a tilt, so I can get all the beer out, since I have left the sediment behind. I use irrigation fittings to run two bottling wands and speed the process up.

All my beer crates were knocked up out of scrap timber stolen from street verges.