The pre-built DIY brewery I bought earlier this year is now sitting in pieces on our garage floor. I realized something about DIY projects after getting it home and wired up for use — when the works of a thing are readily accessible like this, it’s difficult to impossible to resist tinkering with it. Sometimes a tweak is all that’s needed, sometimes a partial redesign is in order. The original owners’ extensive use of NPT threaded fittings allowed the brew stand to be constructed mostly of off-the-shelf pipes and hose fittings, but made parts of the system so tightly coupled, it was difficult to work on a piece of it without dismantling the whole thing.
For example, Scott and I had decided we needed to fix the leak on the RIMS, so we ordered a stainless steel tri-clamp RIMS tube, a 3-way valve, and various bits and pieces to hook it all up. I got it home and was all set to swap it in to the system, but was dismayed to realize in order remove the original RIMS, I’d first have to remove both the mash kettle and the boil kettle from the stand, because I needed to remove the platform to unbolt the RIMS. To remove the platform, I had to first remove almost all of the plumbing. The good news is that we only broke one thing, the threads on one of the pumps, when we were getting it all apart. It has two pumps mainly to avoid swapping hoses after the mash is complete. You don’t have too much else to do during the boil, so swapping a couple of hoses doesn’t bother me.
The threaded fittings are turning out to be a bigger weakness than I had originally realized – I already mentioned it’s very difficult to take apart, but it’s also touchy to put back together. You basically have to re-tape the threads on every connection each time you take it apart, otherwise it leaks. I also didn’t realize that sanitary food handling would have you disassemble and clean threaded fittings that contact the wort between every use! Oof! I’m going to look in to moving on with the tri-clover conversion; at least it’s easy to take apart and clean.