Building Our Keggle

Matt and I have been pretty blessed to have access to an industrial kitchen. It’s made the processing of learning and improving our homebrewing incredibly comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that I can’t believe anybody actually brews in their kitchens at home. Besides trashing your kitchen, 95% of kitchens just aren’t equipped with decent enough gas or cleaning tools to manage the process. Add to that being cramped and risking spillage and it seems like just a deal breaker to me. I suppose that’s why you meet so many people who “used to homebrew” as opposed to people who actively do it.

But just because we’re blessed doesn’t mean we’re not greedy, and restless, and curious, and thirsty. Where brewing in an industrial kitchen with 10 gallon kettles sufficed for the first six months of our investigation, we’ve now run up against the limitations of our set up. In short the limitations of our present system are:

• 10 gallon kettles can only yield 5 gallons of brewed beer on a good day, hardly enough to last two (ahem) big-boned alcoholics.
• Guessing at volumes of water is ultimately hampering us from getting the repeatability we’re shooting for.
• I just can’t get comfortable with the continued danger of having to carry and pour multiple gallons of boiling hot water across a slick floor and into a small bucket. Odds are, sooner or later, there will be an accident.

To solve this we decided to build a 3-tier keggle system.

We just built our first keggle last weekend and found the process to be fairly simple. I’ve got some experience with metal work and am modestly competant with some DIY tasks, though I am by no stretch of the imagination terribly capable. Even so I found the keggle conversion to be quite simple.

The biggest decision you need to make when doing this is whether to use welded or weldless fittings for your keggle. After some deliberation and research I chose to use weldless fittings which I purchased from the appropriately named weldlessfittings.com. The weldless fittings relieved me of the need to travel to Michigan to use my friend’s welder, it allowed me to avoid having to weld with aluminum which is a tricky task, and I was curious to see if these weldless attachments were as effective as a welded keggle. Also, with weldless fittings you have the added advantage of being able to completely disassemble and clean your keggle when ever you are compelled to do so.

There’s plenty of sites to find directions on how proceed with your keggle conversion. Here are the two that I used predominantly:

http://www.homebrewing.com/articles/keggle.php

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Keggle

We used an angle grinder to remove the top of the keg and I’m glad we did. We still went through probably 4-5 blades per keg so I can’t even imagine trying to use a dremel for this job.

The fittings from weldlessfittings.com seem to have worked great once we properly wrapped them with teflon. We’ve had some issues with the swagelok on the dip tube though I’ve contacted Dave at weldlessfittings.com and really without much questioning he’s sent me a new kit to try out. We’ll see if that solves the problem, but either way I was impressed with his responsiveness.

The one criticism I have for weldlessfittings.com is that their instructions are either pretty vague and lousy on some items and just plain on non-existent on others. However, with some digging around the internet we found the instructions we needed fairly easy (boy, I can’t find those instructions now to save my life). Other than that weldlessfittings.com is great and their prices are really hard to beat.

For our false bottom we went to the unfortunately named Climax Homebrew. They’ve got a 16 gauge stainless steel false bottom for half the price of anywhere else on these here tubes of internuttiness.

This is a fairly low-stress project that yields satisfying and helpful results. I’ll post some updates when we build our sculpture and also when we add our hot water heating elements which we’ve decided to use instead of propane for several reasons. We’ll be adding a March 809 pump eventually as well.