Brew beer without a fan, with no condensation!

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Do you brew indoors and struggle with how to get rid of all the steam created during the brewing process, especially during the boil part of the brew process?

Who hasn’t been there: too cold to brew outside, chased out of the kitchen. No garage? OK, down to the cellar we go. Halfway through the boil you notice water dripping from the ceiling.

It’s normal to boil off 3-6 Liters of water during a 60-90 minute batch. What should one do with all that steam?

A lot of home brewers installed electric fan exhaust hoods above their brew kettles and evacuated the steam to the outdoors. If you’ve faced the same problem, you’ve probably already looked at other solutions such as a domed kettle cover with exhaust vent to the outside, or installing a really big exhaust hood over your kettle. 

The problem with exhaust hoods is that all your conditioned air (heated or air conditioned) inside your home or brewery, is evacuated the outside while you are brewing. This means that your furnace/air conditioner has to work overtime to heat/cool the indoor air you air to keep up with what you are exhausting the outside! Over a 2 hour brew session, that represents a real cost as well as unnecessary wear and tear on your heating/cooling system.

There’s a genius and simple solution to this problem- just use a condensator attached to the lid on your brewing kettle with two 90 degree elbows, just hook up and turn on the water to the condensator, and all your steaming problems are gone!

This system works perfectly on both Grainfather and RoboBrew, just get the stainless steel lid, and tri- clamp adapter for the hole in the lid, mound the condenser, and you are all set!

Basically, the condenser uses cool water to drop the vapor back into a liquid by cooling down all the inner tubes that the steam passes through.  The cold water absorbs heat from the steam and the steam undergoes a phase change back to liquid water.

 This cold water supply can be tap water or it could be water that you recirculate through a chiller or a big bucket, cooler or a tank, using a pump that delivers at least 20psi. Install a flow control valve on the water tubes, and you can regulate the flow to the lowest flow you can that eliminates any steam from exiting the device. You can regulate the heat on the re-circled water by adding a couple of large frozen soda bottles, and put in some new bottles when the water inside of them has melted. Easy, effective, and most of all, fun.

When the steam condenses inside the condenser, the steam contracts and actually creates a vacuum inside the kettle, sucking the steam into the device. This assures that all the steam is evacuated and DMS is expelled. The result is a steady stream of warm water discharging at the bottom of the condenser. You can discharge this via a hose to a drain, let it drain into sink, or create a closed loop where you cool the water and pump it back into the cold water inlet.

In simple word, the steam condenser work just as well as an open kettle under a large exhaust hood, it just makes the whole thing easier, cleaner and saves you a lot of money and work, as most of us have to install a new exhaust  hood, which will cost hundreds of dollars as well.

There’s more. After using this device for several brews, we’ve found that there was one huge, unexpected advantage, beyond eliminating the exhaust of our conditioned indoor air to the outside that we did not consider!

You will greatly reduce your electrical power used for your brew sessions!

Because the boil occurs with the cover on the kettle, the power requirement to maintain the boil is actually reduced to less than half! You typically will have to  reduce the effect on your heating element by 50%, due to the use of a lid and the condenser.

Just remember to adjust your grain bill to the new boil off values. The new, reduced boil-off rates remain above the generally accepted industry standard of a minimum 4-5% as the boil off rate. Now, you have to try it out for yourself, but adjusting the boil off rates to 1,5-2,0% might be a good start.

So make sure to do a test run with water the first time, in order to decide how much you must adjust your grainbill and sparge water before you start using this vapor condenser system on your Grainfather or RoboBrew.

Finally, the beer brewers also have something to learn from us distillers!

You can get a condensers, elbows and tri-clamps at brewshops that also sells stills, but you can easily find it on Amazon, Ebay and AliExpress, just to name a few.

The best part is that this system is multi- functional, and cheap!