Brainstorm time, Folks!
As I get back into brewing my goals are to make good/excellent beer while minimizing my equipment and storage space in the garage. With soaping stuff now taking up space and the wife letting me know in no uncertain terms that she is no longer willing to park outside in the winter, I need to come up with at least one free garage bay.
I've already removed my mill from its dedicated, motorized table and mounted it to the side of the brewcart for hand-cranked operation. I'll try the drill next time, too, but it was dead from all the building this weekend. The mill was mounted on a repurposed Craftsman table saw, so that saved quite a lot of space.
I've decided that I'm only going to stock one tote's worth of grain instead of two 30 gallon cans and 4-6 bags of grain. At the moment that means 2-row is in stock and I buy specialties as needed. I could probably fit another bag of wheat in the tote, but it would be crowded.
The current setup has two Cube coolers, MLT and HLT. I'm going to can starters this week (or weekend if I get busy) and I'm going to try no-sparge to see how efficient it is. If I can get into the 70's I won't need the MLT, which will free up the whole bottom shelf on the cart for storage of other gear.
Which brings me to chillers. I've got two copper IMCs currently. There's an older 3/8" one and a newer 1/2" one with provision to pump wort back into the kettle and establish a swirl. (And if chill water is too hot, the 3/8" one can go inline in front of the 1/2" one in an ice bath...) Those take up a lot of space, as you can imagine. I'm thinking of replacing both of those with a stainless counterflow chiller. I originally used a CFC years ago, but ditched it because of low flow rates and concerns about cleaning "inside" it. But the flow rates turn out to be unimportant because I'm ultimately taking 20-30 minutes to chill with the IMC's anyway. Stainless makes the cleaning aspect less vital, too. What do you think of the idea of replacing the copper IMCs with a stainless CFC?
If I do it, do you think a 20 plate chiller would be okay? Do you think it would be worthwhile to recirculate the CFC outback back into the kettle? The main goal being to leave cold break behind in the kettle. I don't know whether the increase in rate of heat exchange from higher wort flow rate would make up for the lower average rate of heat exchange caused by the lower average wort temp. I guess I could test it easily.
Any other thoughts to minimize footprint, I'd love to hear them. I'm keeping both fridges just because it's not cost effective to change them, but everything else is up for grabs.
