Building Relativity Brewery

Here is the birth of our brewery! - by Jeremy

When we started this effort, I knew we had a few things to test out first, the biggest being brewing in the garage. Up to this point I was an extract brewer in my kitchen, so I wasn't sure what challenges we would have in the garage. I first pulled the trigger on purchasing only the boil kettle, and building the boil portion out and doing extract brews.



Here our cat Maggie was checking out the new addition.

As you can then see below the garage was in need of a lot of work.  I do have the boil kettle in here on top of a cabinet on the left. Things were pretty cluttered, and needed a gamplan to get turned into a place to brew.



After getting the boil pot built, and running a 30amp 240 volt power supply, we started doing extract brews.  We would simply plug the Boil Kettle directly into the outlet we ran for the brewery. We would lose a lot of brew through evaporation as the heating element was on the entire boil (later a temp controller would control this part), but it worked for our purposes. All-in-all we did about 4 extract brews with just this while I was ordering and building the rest of the rig.






The batches we did were:

• Banana Ale (later renamed Not-So-Banana Ale for the lack of banana flavor)
• Firecracker Ale  - Made for the 4th of July, had Red Hots candy put in during the boil for a little zip and red color.
• British Brown Ale
• Saison

Those were just a couple of pics from an extract brew day. We learned a lot from doing this. First, a sink was going to be a game changer and we needed one. Second, we spill a little from time to time, so a protective flooring will making cleaning easier. Third, it might not be a bad idea to put up some sort of backsplash to protect the wall from the steam (a vent will help as well, but that is going to come later).

Here I cleared the garage getting ready for the new floor.



Here is an after picture once the new floor was installed, which was just in time as the next day the plumber was scheduled to install the new sink.



The sink after the plumber finished his work.



Next for the garage we put up some 3'x3' Aluminum panels we got from Home Depot to make a backsplash.  This would cover everything behind the brew stand.



Finally, the new Stainless Steel tables arrived. I threw a couple of pots on for a quick pic to get a feel for the new rig.  At this stage we still had the control panel to complete, pumps to mount, counter-flow wort chiller to mount, lots of work on the kettles directly in adding valves, etc...  However it looks like a brewery here!


 
The focus then moved to building the control panel.

I bought all of the parts from Spike Innovations to put together myself. For a while I thought I would get the holes cut in the control panel via waterjet, but I had trouble getting a reasonable price from a place here in town so I decided to just cut them myself.







After the holes were complete, I did a quick dry fit to see how everything looked in place.



Next step was painting, then starting the wiring.





Finally the wiring is complete!



It's alive!



Here is the garage with everything mounted, and system working.  For our first batch we brewed a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA clone recipe I found.  More on that to come!





 

Loving the new system, you'll have to stop by for a beer sometime!