Homebrewing changed dramatically in November, 1978 when it was legalized. Today, you could take classes, buy equipment, read magazines, and visit cool websites (like ours) on brewing. You can even build your own homebrewery if you wish. Many of you have asked us what it would take to build a brewery in your house... Having built several over the years, we've fielded all sorts of questions. So instead of writing a long FAQ, we thought we'd go ahead and build one, then share our notes with you: If you are still at the extract or partial mash stage of brewing, you may want to consider stepping up to all-grain brewing to take full advantage of a homebrewery. We'll talk about the details of all-grain brewing in future articles. This article will concentrate on actually building the brewery. So what are the difference between the old stand-by stove top method and the all grain homebrewery method? Well, there are quite a few. While the all-grain method will add several hours to your brewing day, the results will yield and overall better beer – better clarity, advantages of specialty malts, more control over flavor and body, better hop utilization, etc... After all, this is how the mirco and macro breweries do it! Location, location, location The first and most important part of building a homebrewery is finding the right location. If you choose to have your brewery outdoors, make sure you have some sort of protection from the elements. Trust us, it's not fun brewing in the rain... Also be sure you are relatively near basic utilities such as water, gas, and electric. If you choose to build it indoors, as we did in this example, make sure it's in a properly ventilated area. An extra garage or shed would be the best. We chose the basement of a house. Although we would normally not recommend this because of the inherent ventilation issues, we felt that this particular basement met our safety requirements. What type of system? There are a variety of different ways to building a brewing system, but the most straight forward is a gravity feed system. In this system, all of your liquids (hot liquor, wort) are transferred from vessel to vessel by gravity because of their height placement in relation to each other. This will, of course, affect your decision on location. You will need enough headroom to allow for a hot liquor tank at about 9 foot off the ground. Seven Steps for Gravity Feed Brewing System: Strike Water: Hot water from the kettle is transferred (or pumped) to the Mash/Lauter tun. Sparge water is heated (during mashing) in the hot liquor tank. During the brewing process the hot liquor tank delivers water via gravity to the Mash/Lauter tun. The mash tun in turn drains wort to the kettle for boiling. The kettle...after the boil delivers wort to the heat exchanger (for example: a wort chiller), to bring the wort down to pitching temperature as quickly as possible. There are 2 types of chillers: immersion and counterflow -- more on these in our next article The cooled wort then is transferred to the fermentation vessels. Fermentation vessels are placed in a temperature controlled environment and allowed to ferment. Planning and measuring After I convinced Ale that he should help me design and build a brewery, we located the appropriate space in the basement and carfully measured off the area we would need. Click here to take a look. We decided on an 8 foot workbench with an L shaped cut on one end that would eventually become the 2nd tier to our three tier system. This particular tier would be for our mash tun. Click here to take a look. We reserved the space under the main workbench surface for our fermentors: Click here to take a look. Building the work area Once our workbench was constructed, we put it in it's final place and secured the legs and supports with carriage bolts for easy assembly and handling. If you can, it would be advisable to secure the workbench to a wall or other structural support. In our case, we were not able to do so and, instead, added additional supports within the workbench itself including a 3/4 inch piece of plywood across the back of the bench connecting the three back legs. The stability of the workbench is critically important as it may be supporting upwards of 200 lbs of hot water and grains during your brew process. So triple check every nut and bolt! Connecting the Water Now that we had a proper workbench in place, it becomes easier to work out the rest of the components of the brewery. We decided to tackle the water plumbing next. In our basement, hot and cold water lines run relatively close to the brewing space and it was quite easy to cut into them and lay down some 1/2 inch PVC piping to our sink. If you've never used PVC before, you're in for a treat. It's inexpensive, easy to handle and cut, and very versatile (in particular in odd shaped spaces such as our basement). As for the sink, we decided to go with the extra expense of a double deep sink which, in the long run, would be more practical. Click here to take a look Connecting the Gas Connecting the gas is the trickiest and possibly the most dangerous. We highly recommend you have at least one helper with you at all times while connecting to the gas lines in your house. If you have any apprehensions about this procedure, you should consult a licensed gas plumber (as a matter of fact, you should check in your county to see if this a license only project anyway). Again, the initial choice of our location gave us easy access to the house gas line. Our first task was to measure out the amount of copper piping we would require to get the gas to our two burners (one for the hot liquor tank and one to the brew kettle). Next we decided how to split the single gas line to the two burners and how to control the flow throughout our extended system. The most difficult part of this process was finding all the bits and pieces at our local our local hardware store(s). We recommend that you sketch out the gas plumbing on paper, measure everything twice, and then try and find the smartest associate at your local our local hardware store(s) to help you out. You should plan for multiple trips to the store -- Ale and I practically moved into our local hardware store. Once you have everything you need, lay it all out and triple check before you cut into any existing gas pipes. We decided that a main cutoff switch off our main gas line to our burners was a good idea. We also decided that needle valves would be appropriate for each burner. Take a look at our main connection here, and our split here. Before walking away from your gas project, you should triple check all your seals for potential leaks. Soapy water around the seals is the best method Brush soapy water along the joins and check for bubbles. If you see any, you have a leak and you need to tighten that seal. Don't get lazy with this -- it's important. Again, if you have any hesitation, check with a licensed gas plumber. Putting it all together The last bits that we added to our homebrewery were proper lighting and ventilation. Luckily our layout and space allowed us to place the hot liquor tank next to a window. For added ventilation, we mounted a small fan be the window to pull the heat out of our brewing area. Click here to take a look The entire project took about 4 weekends to put together. We did get a bit sidetracked trying to find the right materials at our local hardware store, but nevertheless, the project went along rather smoothly. Click here to take a look at the finished brewery. If you decided to take on a project as this, here are a few additional tips: 1. Preplan as much as you can. 2. Don't take on this project by yourself. 3. Safety first! And send us pictures of your homebrewery!