After struggling for a while with a kettle on the stove, in which I would heat my mash water and then my sparge water, only to scoop sparge water into the mash tun with a plastic pitcher, and then have to roll the whole kettle of wort out the kitchen door on a skateboard -- yes, a skateboard -- I decided a little automation was in order.
Having recently gotten a promotion at my job, I had a little extra capital and bought myself a March magnetic-impeller food-grade pump from Northern Brewer. This became the heart and prime mover of the BMW.
Here is the BMW just after completion (click the image to make it all bigger and clearer):
I designed the whole thing around the pump, with the goal of being able to make 10-gallon batches with a minimum of slinging around 5-gallon containers of liquid (I also have a troublesome lower back). I went to a scrap yard in Sarasota, Fla., where I lived at the time, and with no trouble scored an old Anheuser-Busch 15-gallon keg for about $30 ($1 a pound). The guy at the yard cut a hole in the top end with an acetylene torch, and there was my brew kettle.
Er, not quite. There was this rim of jagged, crusty, hardened-lava type stuff all around the opening. It soon became clear that although it was black and crispy-looking, it was solid stainless steel under the black. My Dremel tool would have died before it even took off a millimeter of it. Same with an electric drill.
So I rented an angle-grinder from Home Depot, and bought a disk.
Now, if you have never taken an angle grinder to an empty, hollow body of stainless steel, it is pretty spectacular. My former Florida neighbors are probably still talking about it. The sparks fly in showers, the metal melts, and the noise ... oh the noise. Imagine a pteradactyl caught in an electrical substation.
But I got the thing smoothed all the way around, after putting on shooting earmuffs and half-filling the keg with water to deaden the screaming racket.
After that, using a metal-cutting hole saw to cut the tap hole was a cinch. Glided right through. I bought a weld-free bulkhead fitting and there it was.
The hot water tank of the BMW is simply my onetime, 9-gallon brew kettle, hooked into the plumbing of the system. The mash tun is a big, square cooler from Wal-Mart with a copper-pipe manifold in the bottom and a sort of "fountain" system coming in the top for recirculating and sparging.
The camp stove/burner is one of the more unique features; I didn't want to buy a second one, so I put it on (rollerblade) bearings as wheels and arranged the water tank and kettle so that the whole camp-stove/burner assembly can be rolled back and forth between them as needed. Works great so far, and that's about 15 batches, I would guess.
The whole thing is on heavy-duty casters, so I can either brew in the garage or out under the sky on a nice day, and the whole thing can be parked somewhere out of the way. I built a little stool-platform to go with it since the top of the tun is pretty high up.
It was built at the tail end of the recent Florida building boom, so all the lumber came from Dumpsters. Man, I love construction site Dumpsters. Is that wrong?
I moved to Roanoke about two years ago now, in Spring 2006. The BMW made the trip in good form, with all its pieces held in place with zip ties except the keg/kettle, which went separate with a glass carboy packed inside. The setup sure was a conversation piece with the movers, who seemed intent on harnessing its powers to make whiskey.
I'll talk more about the BMW and its other features later. It certainly has made my brewing easier. If it has one essential feature, though, it is, as mentioned, the March pump. If you have notions of juicing up your brewing plant, the place to start is a pump.
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