Lessons Learned

I learned many lessons during the design and operation of the HERMIT. I think these are particularly useful. As someone once said,

"Fools you are who say you like to learn from your mistakes,

I prefer to learn from the mistakes of others and avoid the cost of my own".

System Design

1. Make your system SIMPLE. I know electronic doohickies are sexy, but the more complicated you make your brewery, the more it will cost and the more you will end up working on it and not brewing beer. Gadgets are cool, but don't forget why we do what we do -- to MAKE BEER, not work on equipment.

2. Spend 75 - 80% of your time in the design/planning phase before you spend any money. Make drawings, sketches, and lists. When you think you've got it right, go back and make another drawing and another list just to make sure. There is nothing more frustrating than having to buy something twice. Plan, plan, and plan again. Your efforts will be rewarded.

3. Try to simplify your plumbing to minimize or eliminate connecting and disconnecting hoses during the brew day. It's a pain and you run the risk of burning your hands with hot wort which is not fun. With the HERMIT, I make a single hose change from dough-in to recirculation, the rest of the process is done with valves.

4. Avoid hard plumbing. Hoses are replaceable, hard plumbing isn't, which means you have to clean it in place. Hoses can be removed, flushed and hung to dry, hard plumbing can't. Give this some serious thought.

5. Barb fittings suck! Enough said.

6. Remember that you may have to move someday, think modular. A modular system like the HERMIT can be moved easily. A 3-tier behemoth with a rigid frame requires a lot more planning and can't be readily taken apart or moved from place to place.

7. Brass is OK. As discussed in the plumbing section, this is a great place to save money. Stainless steel is expensive and in my opinion, doesn't buy much for the homebrewer, except it's cool to tell your friends. If you can afford it, go for it, but if your looking for places to save, buy brass. See the Plumbing section for how to remove surface lead from the brass.

8. Don't get overly hung up on the cost of stuff to build your brewery. Three years from now you won't care and neither will anyone else. Buy what you can afford and certainly use your ingenuity to scrounge for things, but when the time comes, pay the money for the right equipment and forget about it. You will hear lots of stories about how cheap another homebrewer got this or that, but I have news for you - homebrewers lie like fishermen when it comes to the cost of equipment.

9. Start your brewery design with a specification. Nothing elaborate, just a list of important things to help guide you in your design. This will be a constantly changing list, but if you're ever in doubt about something, just refer to the list. If it's not on the list, it's probably not worth spending money on. One thing that kept coming out during the design of the HERMIT was "time". I wanted to save time on brew day. This lead to the use of high pressure propane burners and the Counter Flow Wort Chiller. Both of these are time saving devices, but certainly not necessary if time is not a priority. Decide what your priorities are and write them down.

10. Spend the time and money on the aspects of your brewery that will have the biggest impact on the flavor of the beer. For instance, spending hundreds of $$ on kegging equipment is stupid if you're dispensing pond water. Take care of the essentials first. See Note 3 below.

11. Don't put your equipment away wet. You'll be sorry. Use a towel to wipe everything out after you clean up.

12. If you use a pump, put a tee on the outlet and install a valve to be used for priming. The pumps used for homebrewing are not generally self priming, and priming the pumps without a valve is tricky at best. Refer the pump page for further explanation.

13. Make use of gravity where possible. Pumps are nice, but expensive and require plumbing and electricity.

Brewing

1. Join a homebrew club. This is the best way to learn and meet other people who are interested in the hobby. If it weren't for the people at the Tennessee Valley Homebrewers, I never would have started all-grain brewing.

2. Invest in a piece of brewing software such as ProMash. These are great for formulating recipes and keeping track of your ingredients inventory. I bought ProMash and can vouch for it's incredible accuracy from target gravities to strike water temperature. Check out the Recipes page for downloadable Promash files.

3. Brewing is all about temperature management. Mash temperature, sparge temperature, pitching temperature, and fermentation temperature (this is the process order, not the order of importance). These things affect the flavor of the beer far more than whether or not you use brass vs. stainless, or your manifold design, or whether or not your grain mill is motorized. Spend your time and money on temperature management FIRST, then worry about other details. I would list these in the following order: Mash, Fermentation, Pitching, and lastly Sparge. Pay close attention to these aspects and formulate the best and most economical way to control each one.

4. Use a Fermometer (a stick on thermometer) on your carboy to monitor your fermentation temperature. I personally think that probes to monitor fermenting wort temperature are unnecessary, plus, why introduce one more source for contamination?

5. Don't trust thermocouple readouts to tell you what your mash temperature is. There's only one way to be absolutely sure of what your mash temperature is - stick a thermometer in the mash and look at it often.

6. Buy an accurate calibration thermometer to check your other thermometers before every brew session. If you buy the bi-metal type thermometers, they have a screw on the back so you can calibrate them. I recommend these.

7. Don't leave your "automated" system unattended for long. Just because it's automated doesn't mean you can go take a nap. You always have a brewing partner, and his name is Murphy.

8. Sanitation. It's good to put sanitation into perspective. Fresh wort out of the kettle is an infection waiting to happen. Be very anal at this stage. After primary fermentation, the risk of infection is much lower, after secondary fermentation it is even lower, and kegged and carbonated beer is basically adult beer with pretty good resistance to infection. Prioritize your sanitation worries.

9. Have your recipe ready BEFORE you start brewing. Don't "wing it". Brew day can be hectic, make a plan and work the plan.