New in Virginia Beach

[Master]

Best friend has been a homebrewer for years. Finally got into it this year, due to actually having time off from work now.

Ex Navy pilot, Oilfield Engineer, Truck Driver, Truck Mechanic, Machinist, Welder, and general jack of all trades.

To date, I have made one batch of IPA which should be ready in a couple days, a batch of cider that turned out well for the wife, and I tried to make Kvass based on a reciepe from my Latvian Aunt.. That was how shall we say less than successful. I'm letting it sit in the bottles longer and see if it gets better.

Equipment:
60 quart Aluminum brewing kettle and turkey fryer base
Homemade copper wort cooling coil
3 7.5 gallon plastic bucket fermenters
1 5 gallon glass carboy
Bottling Bucket/wand
Hygrometer, Thermometer, cleaning stuff, siphons, etc.

Currenlty set up for extract brewing, and bottling only. Waiting to move back into my house when the renters move out in 8 months to possibly get into kegging.

[drb1215]

Welcome to the forum from another Virginia based brewer!  Lots of great info can be found here with some very knowledgeable people.  Best of luck with your brewing.

-Dan

[Master]

So I've been out of the country working for most of the last year.

Bought a new house in Virginia Beach, a brewery (Pleasure House Brewing) opened up literally on the end of my street, and I'm in the process of a major equipment upgrade.

I was looking for a reloading bench on Craigslist when I came across this:


$250. Was in it's former life a four station electric cooking station in a Chinese take out place. So it's now in my garage (I did a LOT of cleaning to make it that shiny)

The idea was to set it up as a natural gas fired setup, with built in water spigots, wort pumps, plate chiller, etc.
Garage has heavy duty ventilation as seen below:


And then I got the ballpark quote to run a gas line from my house to the detached garage. 
Have to either bring in a directional driller, or saw the new concrete driveway.
Thankfully the garage has a dedicate 100 Amp panel. And a 50 Amp service right by the brew bench. (yes, it's a 30A plug, but the cable is 6ga, and it's a 50A breaker)

So I'm now building a variant www.theelectricbrewery.com's system, with a back to back capability, and some other minor changes, mostly for being code compliant here.

[Master]

Some progress on my brewery control system.

I took the basic plan from www.theelectricbrewery.com and made some modifications to it. Was going to be stupid expensive to run gas to my garage, either directional drilling or cutting a new driveway.

[Ale2u]

Looks like a great start!  I am a home brewer with an electric system I built in 2014. 
My main reason for going electric was I wanted to move inside to avoid the weather. I designed a system and when repurchasing the parts found a complete system in a kit form. The next question was should I go PID or process controlled. I went with the BCS-460 and had the case drilled. Took about three nights to put together. Kettles took longer. I had lots of questions about HERMS or RIMS, What size kettles to use and lots more. The ability to use PWM has stopped any chance of boil overs!
My main issue was how to exhaust the steam from my house.

[Master]

Some update pics. I did go on a $500 Amazon binge today.

Basically down to needing Chugger pumps and one new kettle.

Going to reuse my old Aluminum pot for now as the HLT, and a donated no-name 10g pot as the brew kettle. So it looks like I only need to buy a 20g Blichmann or similar high end pot for the MLT for now.






London/Baltic Porter hybrid about to be bottled.

Yes, I'm that guy, I have a supreme fancy electric brew system being built, but I'm still bottling. No Kegerator.