I bought one of these, have used it for BIAB All Grains, making another one this weekend.
The good:
- low cost
- fast boil (20 min to strike temp, 35 to boil)
- good, rolling boil out of the box, no modification necessary
- temperature control, set to say 65 while mashing and it will kick in if temp getting low
- Urn means I can brew on the balcony rather than steaming up the kitchen with a 20 litre pot for hours
- the tap is ok, just get silicone hose from a homebrew shop and a little pit of the plastic pipe/tube they put inside so it will fit a standard fermenter tap. I use a couple of rounds of teflon thread tape on this and it fits perfectly, the silicone hose in the bottom of a cube and the boiling hot wort goes to NC. Or chill in the bathtub.
And you can brew a "full size" brew in it: I did 28 litres of 1.042 OG beer 2 weekends ago by sparging in a bucket like RdeVjun says and adding a bit of water in the fermenter. Basically put batch size to whatever you want in beersmith to find the OG you will get from a certain amount of grain in a certain amount of water, add hops to desired IBU. As long as not boiling the hops in a massively concentrated wort the IBU will be ok and then just dilute with water until the volume you wanted and the OG will be on target..
(or take a wort sample, cool it down in the fridge. Then get a hydrometer reading and use the dilute calculator in beersmith to see how much water to add to get a certain OG)
The bad:
http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum//ind...mp;#entry526512
- the quality of materials!!! Cheap, tinny feeling to the whole thing. The element got discoulored after a single use. Who would make a steel urn from materials that RUST???? My urn has tiny specks of what looks like surface rust but I have used it several times for water and beer and ended up happy about the whole thing as there is no taste/color effect from the couple of tiny spots looking like rust. (I wash it thoroughly just before use)
- the size? Everyone keeps telling me it is to small but I must admit I don't agree. Had it been a 40 litre pot, I would have preferred that. But a 30 litre pot is big enough.. Use say 15 litres of water for the mash, that is more than enough according to our favourite friend Palmer. Then sparge with say 5-6 litres (in another smaller pot/bucket in two rounds). Then add a litre or two during the hop boil to add back what you loose, then add another say 4 litres to the fermenter after cooling the wort in a cube in the bathtub with ice-water. So in my book the size is ok, but this will be a bad thing in a lot of people's opinion
- the finish is "rough". I scrubbed quite a bit to get the gruff out of the machined steel parts, maybe this scratched something I shouldn't have and that's why I get rust..
From Palmer I learned that no-sparging has an efficiency of about 60%, that is a good and easy start. Set the efficiency in beersmith to 60% rather than the default 70-75% and it only means you have to add a little extra grain. The result is no need to sparging water, buckets and temperatures. After the first time I started playing with sparging and the last beer I made ended with 67% (after changing the efficiency percent in beersmith until I hit my actual OG).
My conclusion after being really annoyd to begin with?
It's a cheap, fast-boiling urn with temperature control you can brew a full-size brew in.
That's a pretty good starting point, I would say. Low quality or not..
Anyway, enough TO and Coopers English Bitter for tonight, just wanted to say it's cheap, let's me brew outside and works like a charm compared to the hour it takes to boil a 20 litre stock pot of water on the stove top..
Thanks
Bjorn
