The best money I ever spent on home brew equipment

Home brewers are attracted to all kinds of shiny stainless steel toys. We're like magpies or something. For all that shiny bling, the reality is that the best money I've spent is not on stainless steel but on things that make yeast happy. Good yeast management has been the key to improving my beer. If I lost everything else but still had this stuff, I could be up and brewing great beer again for less than the cost of a carton.


1. Temp controller for my fermentation fridge - $20

These babies are brilliant. They're such a cheap and easy way to keep the fermentation humming along at the temperature you want rather than being at the mercy of ambient temperatures. It takes a little wiring to get it set up but it's not too difficult. I scored the fridge I use for free so this is the winner of the biggest and cheapest improvement I've made to my beer.


2. Erlenmeyer flasks & stir plate - $80-100

I made the stir plate and bought 4 x 250ml flasks and 2 x 2000ml flasks along with several stir bars. That's enough to grow up yeast to keep up with my regular brewing schedule and keep several samples ready to be stepped up. It's a little bit of mucking around but with the help of a good yeast calculator it improved the consistency of my beer.


3. Oxygenation - $95

For some reason I found this one the most difficult to justify. It took me roughly a year of dithering about it before I finally pulled the trigger. Now I wish I'd done it immediately. I've used it for 12 batches so far and the slight off flavour I had with at least 1/2 my brews has disappeared. The rough routine I've worked out is to oxygenate for 60 seconds for gravities up to 1.060, 90 seconds for gravities between 1.060 and 1.075 and 120 seconds for lagers and beers over 1.075. In some ways this is the most satisfying improvement I've made to my beer. That niggling off flavour was annoying me and it seems to have been the final piece of the puzzle in terms of refining my brewing process.

DIY stir plate

My friend Jon says that the essence of hardcore punk is 'DIY'. I love that as a definition of punk and I like the idea of being a bit handy but I don't have a great DIY track record myself. This is my attempt to build a stir plate, something that will help my yeast starters to grow big and healthy.

It took:

• A PC fan
• A 12v adaptor
• A couple of crazy rare earth magnets
• A LED dimmer (for speed control)
• A plastic container
• Bolts, nuts, washers, blu-tac

I drilled holes in the lid to mount the fan. 4 bolts, each with 3 nuts between the lid and fan to provide a bit of space for the magnets to sit on top of the fan. A couple more holes in the container, one on the end for the speed controller and one on the side for the power chord.

Magnets nicely balanced and spaced for my stir bar

After stripping the wires for the power supply and the fan, they were hooked up to the speed controller.

I attached the magnets to the top of the fan as in the picture. I'd read that some people had difficulty getting them balanced and others had difficulty with spacing the magnets. I wasn't confident to just glue them down and blu-tac made it easy to get it right. It also means that I can easily move the magnets if I get a longer stir bar.

DIY stir plate in action

Pretty simple and totally effective. The bar spins well and stays spinning properly even at full speed. 

Normally, I'll be putting an erlenmeyer flask of wort and a bit of yeast on the stir plate. The idea is that as the magnetic stir bar in the flask spins, it keeps the wort moving and doesn't allow the yeast to fall out of suspension. It helps the yeast to be active and also introduces oxygen into the wort. These are perfect conditions for the yeast to flourish and quickly build up numbers before pitching into a brew.