150L stock pot

[Barry]

Looking to increase capacity at The Far Canal Brewery.

Does anyone have an inside line on 150L stainless pots?

Need just the 1, thick bottom to be used with a rambo burner.

[Hamish Jones]

If you find some let me know as I am keen on one as well for my new rig

[Barry]

Bump. Anyone?

[Sam DT]

How did you go with this in the end? I see brewtopia/allgrain have what looks to be concord pots but think they are close to six hundy. You can grab them via eBay but still looking at around 450... Looking at grabbing one for a quad e-bia setup at the moment

[Blake Jones]

Scott B has one of the 130 or 140 litre pots from Allgrain, its awesome quality, looks the same as the good $250 Chinese ones but isnt the same, is actually much better.

[Pierre Malan]

I just looked those up.  THey look good, but crikey $630 for a 150L pot.  Hard to justify!

http://shop.brewtopia.net.nz/product_info.php?cPath=14_15&produ...

Does look decent quality though...

[Pierre Malan]

Hey,

I've been considering moving to a larger pot with gas heating.  Question for the brewers of larger batches (or anyone really): how much gas do you use for a 100L brew, say ... does it really chew through LPG?

Do you use it to heat your mash water and sparge water as well, or just for the boil?

thanks, and apologies if I hijack your thread. ... I could be in for a big pot depend on the answers!

[Peter Church]

I have a 100 litre kettle on a 19 tip mongolian burner, (removed 4 tips from the 23 model) I normally do 3 to 4 brews (60 litre) then swap the gas bottle to the BBQ or the house supply. Its amazing how much gas the cook top goes through, wife is always running out of gas when cooking. I would guess that for boil and heating sparge water for my setup it uses about 1/5 to 1/4 of a cylinder each brew. I do have a heat shield around the burner so the heat is pretty well directed.

I have a 3kw electric hlt, my process is normally to heat strike water ~55l in the HLT, have an extra 50 litres that I put in the BK and get up to 60 to 70 degrees using gas then transfer back to the hlt after dough in and let the PID hold it at sparge temp. By the time I weight out and crush the grains the water is up to temp.

[Pierre Malan]

thanks very much

Assume your cylinder is a standard 9kg?  Heat shield sounds like a bit of a no-brainer.  

[Peter Church]

yeah 9kg, heat shield is an off cut from a keg I had shortened to 10 litres, I agree with Barry, electric where you want precision and gas for power

[Barry]

We have a 100L HLT and 120L kettle currently, fired with mongolians. They chew through the gas like nobodies business.

We have no shields (yet) so lots of heat escapes, pretty inefficient.

I would say use shields, and consider electric for HLT at least. Electric is cheaper to get really precise temperature control.

[Pierre Malan]

Thanks for that.  I use electric on the HLT at the moment, but going to bigger batches the gas looks nice to get through the brew day faster.

Any feel on your typical gas usage for your bigger brew volumes?  I looked up 'chew through' as an SI unit and it told me it was somewhere between piss all and truckloads...

[David Williams]

I've got a 120l from Allgrain on order at the moment to replace a trademe chinese kettle as they're miles better and worth the money especially considering they have welded fittings. I'll keep my cheaper pots for my hlt and mash tun as they're well insulated and not direct fire heated (I wish Allgrain was around when I bought these however). I'm a big fan of an electric hlt, it's cheaper, can insulate (cheaper again), and with a thermostat (stc or whatever) can set going then bugger off and do something else while its heating.