Home Sweet Homebrewing System.
|By Marc Demeule
All the professional brewers I know have a common point. They started their brewing career at home. Homebrewing lets you create your own recipes and experiment unexpected beers with ingredients like oysters, peanut butter, Mountain Dew and sugar-beets. Those were in four different recipes, rest assured.
Basically, all the brewing systems are built in the same way. It can be simple like those described in Charlie Papazian’s book, The Complete Joy of Home Brewing, or slightly more elaborated like the projects presented in Brew Your Own magazine. Nevertheless, what is important is the beer you can get out of it and the fun you can have while in the process.
This post it dedicated to very patient guys. It took three years to build up this home brewery project. Everybody was… let’s say smiling when they were talking about this imaginary brewery. It is coming, one day, you will see. We are working on it…
They got deals and found all the components of this 100 litre (26,41 gallons) system piece by piece. Now, everything is assembled and we are quite jealous because they have easy access to water and don’t have to wear a winter coat to brew at -10°C in the garage like we did a few weeks ago.
A pale ale, an ESB and a stout have been brewed since the inauguration. We can expect a kegerator with taps for our next visit.
Cheers to the Fantastic Four Underground brewery !
I both love and hate looking at sweet home brew set ups. I love to see the ingenuity at work. But I hate the bitter, jealous feeling it stirs up inside.
So I’m not gonna tell you how much they spend for all that gear. I could wrote “Very budget breweing system” as title, but people would have probably been shocked about it.
Thanks Marc for this very good article… (I’ll give you a 6 pack for that!!!)…
As you can imagine, we are very proud of our installation and the results are at the height of our expectancies… and there’s more to come…. it’s only the start!!!
The lesson i can retreive of this “long process construction” is to keep on… like we say in french:”P’tit train va loin” … (Little train goes far…) and like my grandma said: “Si tu vaux pas une risée, tu vaux pas grand chose!” …(If you don’t worth a laught, you don’t worth nothing…) So even if your good friends tease you or laught of your project or dreams…. Don’t care about them, one day, they’ll see!!!just keep confidence, roll up your sleeves and don’t let down… Dream on!!!
To all brewers, if you want a nice installation… the best tip i can give you: take your time to search for good deals…talk about it around you.. make contacts with others persons liable to help you…( not just homebrewers), talk to your friends, parents, professionnals in other domains… (you never know what they can have in their shop or their barns… ). Everyone love beer, so when the project is operationnal, the reward shall be very apprecaited…
Cheers to all homebrewers…To all the persons who helped us to acheive our “little dream”… and still help us with precious tips and recepies…
Also, a special thanks to my 3 partners: Stéphane, Sébastien and Jean! Thanks you guys!!!
And now these Fantastic Four sons of a bitch are brewing my recipe in their system. Better give me more than a six pack!
Have fun guys!
Thanks for sharing this article, Marc. It’s always nice to see what the independent brewers are up to.