Electric Brewing
Dave & Desiree's Electric Brewery
Build Your Own Electric Brewing System
Over the past several years we have done a great deal of research and development of electric brewing systems for home brewing applications. We have experimented with many materials, wattage, system configurations, and power control solutions. Our objective has always been to come up with a basic package that does the job at a minimum cost, with available options to become whatever system one might need or desire.
Electric vs. Gas
This is one of the few applications where the electric version is more energy efficient than the gas version. The reason is that the liquid is heated directly from the inside out, rather than forcing the heat into the liquid from the outside in. People with no experience with electric brewing systems often assume that the heating element in direct contact with the wort results in a greater degree of caramelization or even scorching of the wort. This is not the case. The heating element is surrounded by a cloud of vaporized water, and as long as it is fully immersed the temperature will not rise above a certain point.
Our electric brewing systems are all Heat Exchange Re-circulating Mash Systems (HERMS) type systems. Since the first step in the all-grain brewing process is to heat a good-sized volume of water, nothing makes more sense to us than to place a heat exchanger in the hot liquor tank and use the heat for the mash tun too. Re-circulating the wort through the heat exchanger gently heats the wort, and minimizes temperature variations within the mash tun, and helps improve the efficiency of the mash.
Brew Indoors Anytime
An electric kettle means that you can brew indoors, anytime. It is a great way to brew.
After spending a few years looking at various ways to control the power at a reasonable cost, we decided that the only solution was to build our own power control module from scratch, the EBC II. Using the same keep-it-simple approach, we control the power smartly with a TRIAC based circuit that allows us to simply keep the power off during part of the AC cycle (both positive and negative going), and vary the time that it is on. Now we can use the best material, the lowest watt-density heating elements for a boil kettle and have extra power to achieve a boil even faster, all with fine control to adjust the intensity of the boil to whatever evaporation rate is desired.
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