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Home Photo Galleries Equipment Galleries Fred Block • Campobello, South Carolina

The vision of my home brewery was started from the vision of having a commercial end product and then building in reverse. This meant Sankey kegs, proper labeling, etc. Then basic process maps were put together, starting very high level (all obtained from online resources), then drilling down in more and more detail. Before I built my system I had never seen a beer made or seen an actual homebrew setup. I had never made any sort of beer before. Since I had an end vision, I never considered any other option than all-grain. The brewery had to be on wheels to go in and out of the garage. The brewery later became a RIMS and later a HERMS. The initial brewery had to be able to grow with me.

Fred’s brewing setup started out as a RIMS until he converted to a HERMS, using the wort chiller to also serve as a wort heater by placing the heat exchanger in the hot liquor tank.

Brewery Setup
The recirculation and sparge manifold setup allows him to either recirculate wort from the mash-tun, through the heat exchanger in the HLT, back to the mash-tun, or to drain off wort runnings into the kettle without having to swap out hose connections.

Recirculation and Sparge
<p>This manifold is critical to the ease of his system. By using standard quick disconnects, air, water, CO<sub>2</sub>, beer, can all be passed through this isolatable manifold.</p>

Manifold
In this Sankey keg cleaning stand and connection setup, Fred removes the check valve out of the connection that normally goes to the tap, and uses that as the input. He can take the valve out of the C02 input connection and use this as the exit and attach a valve to the end of the exit hose, so that this keg can be pressurized.

Connection Setup
For keg cleaning with recirculation back to the mash tun, Fred puts the kegs higher than the mash-tun.

Recirculation
The label for Fred’s home brewery is based on the traditional bottle tree, which is an ancient folk belief that has origins reaching as far back as the ninth century. Bottle trees are made by covering bare tree branches with colorful glass bottles to attract evil spirits.

Label


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