Grain mill motor for $25

My trusty old wiper motor did the trick powering my grain mill but geez it was bloody slow. So after my dad told me he used a bread machine motor with great results I decided to spend a rainy Sunday in the garage modifying my grain mill and connected it up with an old bread machine motor.

So I purchased a bread making machine from gum tree for $20 and ripped the motor and pulley out.

Had a guard made up to cover the motor as its windings are all visible and didnt want to risk dropping something down on them. Added a switch and made some modifications to my existing mounting board to allow the pulley to fit. I had to get my mill shaft machined down to match the pulley but was able to get this done at work FOC.

Final RPM is around 160 rpm geared down from 1100 rpm from the motor so I have plenty of torque.

So a cheap ebay or gumtree motor seems to work quite well as a mill motor and you get both pulleys and the belt.

Here is a video of it in action making light work of my grain bill.

Improved efficiency with better grain crush

Following on from my last post about the addition of a new mill motor (Wiper motor) to replace my "superfast rip the grain husks to shreds" drill, I did a brew on the weekend to test it out.
I brewed an English mild which had a simple grain bill of 95% Maris Otter and 5% chocolate, with a bittering addition of EKG at 60 mins and another wack of EKG at 15 mins.

The mill gap was set to 1mm and the mill took 15 mins to crush a 4.7 kg grain bill. A bit slow but whilst it was crushing I measured out my water salt additions and prepared other items needed for my brew day. Every so often I would just top the hopper up with more grain and I could hear the motor change when it had finished.

The result was a very easy and consistent wort flow through the mash bed, herms and back to the MLT with no stuck mash. And an efficiency of 82% which is fantastic, as I would have been happy to get around 70%.

As you can see in the photo the wiper motor gives the husks a nice gentle pull apart so the flour can get out but the husk is still able to act as a nice filter medium for the mash bed.

Grain mill motor

I've been using a drill to power my recently purchased grain mill but have been having mixed results. The drills speed is variable by adjusting how much you pull the trigger but only down to around 400 rpm. Because of this I've been having problems with stuck sparges due to my crush being too fine or having to mill at a larger gap of 1.2 mm but then suffering in my efficiency of only around 62%.

I couldn't afford a dedicated mill motor at the moment but I managed to score a wiper motor that a guy I know was using as a spit motor. It had a transformer to convert 240V down to 12V, a bridge rectifier to convert 12V AC to 12V DC and a switch all neatly housed in a steel box. I pulled it all out and mounted it on some board and connected it to my mill with a spider coupler. The board has rubber stoppers underneath and the whole thing sits on top of a 20 litre pail.

I haven't given it a test run yet but I'm keen to see if the constant speed of around 60 RPM will now allow me to set a smaller mill gap and hopefully improve my efficiency above 70% without risking a stuck sparge.

Don't be too stingy with home brew equipment, cheaper isn't always better.

I remember how excited I was when I first brought my 40 litre urn to use as my new brew kettle. Previously I had been using an 18 litre urn given to me by my father in law as my BIAB rig. It did the job but I was limited to around 14 litres per batch, which was fine at the time as I only bottled. 

But once I had decided to move to kegging I needed to brew batch sizes of at least 19 litres.

I used a measuring jug to mark out 2 litre increments on the side of my kettle and stuck labels onto the side so I could see at a glance what my volumes were.  However I always seemed to be out on my volumes and would blame it on miscalculations when transferring from my HLT, grain absorption rate higher than expected etc etc. But when things still didn't seem quite right I decided to double check my measurements using a different "more expensive" jug.

My measurements were out by nearly 2 litres because I had used a cheap measuring jug brought from a $2 shop. 

Green labels= cheap $2 jug. Black texta = expensive $20 jug.

The costs in this hobby can start to add up. As your quest for better beer continues you upgrade your system and add more equipment and brewery bling. So we are always after a bargain or a way to save money when we can but sometimes cheaper isn't always better.

I've brought cheap gas quick disconnects only to lose a full bottle of gas because they leaked. I've also brought cheap Chinese probes on ebay that turned out to be faulty.

So make sure you do your homework first. Ask on the forums or search for comments from others about a cheap product before buying it. 

Of course not everything cheap is dodgy. The STC1000 temp controller that you can buy on ebay is a fraction of the cost you pay for a complete unit from a home brew store. Providing you are handy with electrical wiring or know someone who is you can build a cheap temperature controller for under $30.00

My STC1000 temp controller mounted in a jiffy box. This model has both heating and cooling outputs so is good for
brewing all year round. I can plug my heat belt in during winter or my fermentation fridge in summer.

Batting for the other side.

This weekend I've changed teams. I'm batting for the other side. Im spending four days at the LaDolce Vita wine festival in the King Valley in Central Victoria.

I've headed up here with my wife and her brother and his wife and were staying in a guest house at one of the wineries. 

It's a big weekend up this way with many of the wineries putting on live bands and food and most of the wineries setup with tables and chairs out on the lawns to cater for large crowds. Unfortunately not a beer in sight but luckily for me I brought along an esky full of home brew which my brother in law and me are hooking into right now.

The guesthouse had a fully stocked fridge so we had some nibbles of cheese and biscuits, olives, pate etc washed down with my Hoegaarden clone.

Cheese, biscuits, sliced meats and a nice wheat beer clone to wash it down.

Homebrewing to save money???

Although most people start out in this hobby to save money by brewing there own beer instead of buying it, nothing could be further from the truth.

You start out buying a cheap Coopers brew kit from a garage sale, buying some tins of extract from Coles and you make your first beer.

Once it's fermented and bottled and allowed to age for a few weeks the tasting day comes around. You may or may not invite some mates over to try your awesome beer, complete with MS publisher designed labels featuring your witty brewery name and even wittier beer name, "Michelle's Pale Ale", (Usually named after your spouse or a sibling.)

You pour the beer into a glass, looks ok if a little cloudy, but a nice head to it, take a small sip and bluhh...... That's the sound your mouth makes as you open it slightly and think, this isn't the most amazing awesomest beer in the world that I'm going to start a micro brewery with to rival the likes of SAB Miller or Lion Nathan. Your mates all take a sip and give you a strange look on their face as they try to hide the fact that your beer tastes like chilled cats urine. They tell you "Umm, yeh It tastes ok" or "It gets better  as you drink more". But they never seem to want anymore, ever. 

At this stage more than half of new home brewers give up and put their kits on eBay or sell it at a garage sale and the cycle continues.

For those that are left the journey begins. Reading books and home brew forums we learn that temperature control whilst fermenting will improve our beer. Buying better yeast, steeping grains and adding hops, so we buy temp controllers, liquid yeasts, hops and grains, and old fridges to control our fermentation temps. Then we want to improve our beer even more so we start doing all grain brewing. 

The stove top brew in a bag method is what most people start out in all grain brewing. A cheap $30 BigW pot, some Swiss voile made into a bag and a temperature probe is added to our increasing brewing equipment stock, along with a stainless ball valve fitted to our pot to make wort transfer easier.

Then we decide to go 2v 3v or 4v Herms so it's more vessels, more ball valves, stainless coils, march pumps, elements, an electric brew controller with pids and a fancy brew stand to put it all somewhere. Add to that a grain mill, Bulk grains, more temperate controllers, a stir plate for making yeast starters, conical flasks, jugs, buckets, kegs, a kegerator, co2 bottle and regulator..........the list continues and is virtually endless.

Just "some" of the equipment I have added to my brewery over the years.

Not to mention that you then start buying craft beer instead of cheap mega swill as your taste for real beer improves. And we all know that a carton of decent craft beer can be upwards of $60 a carton.

I've lost track of how much money I've spent on brew gear but at a guess somewhere around $600 for my 4v Herms system. However I've been lucky and have managed to score a lot of my equipment at a good price or free of charge. It's probably worth well over $1200 if I had to pay for it all in full.

But home brewing can be as cheap or as expensive as you make it. There are plenty of beers winning awards that are still brewed on a kitchen stovetop in the BigW 20 litre pot, using the BIAB (Brew in a bag method), and having a 3v or 4v brewing system doesn't make you automatically brew better beer.

There is light at the end of the tunnel though. Once your initial investment has been recouped, brewing craft beer is a lot cheaper than buying it and you will start to save some money.

As an example a carton of Matilda Bay Fat Yak from Dan Murphy's will cost you

$58.89 per carton

$15.90 per 6 pack

$4.09 per 330 ml bottle

To brew a 25 litre batch of the same beer cost me approximately $35.00 in grain hops and yeast. Let's allow an extra $5.00 for water and electricity usage on brew day and an extra $5.00 for incidentals. 

This may or may not be a picture of a 
Fat Yak clone I recently brewed.

So that's $45 for 25 litres or $1.80 per litre. Which works out to

$14.16 per carton

$3.54 per 6 pack

$.059 cents per stubbie.

That's a huge saving on buying the same beer and in most cases my own beer tastes a lot better than what I'm buying.