With the winter coming some brewers pack the brewing equipment up for the season. I, how ever am the opposite. Winter is my favorite time to brew. Even more so now that I have been gravitating to electric.

I actually started electric brewing, just so that I could brew more often. The new set up was set up for 3 gallon batches. But now with several electric batches under my belt, plus the need to build something, I am feeling the need to go full 5 gallon electric batches.

It sounds like this means another money dump and a bunch more of things to buy. But when I think about it,, this is not the case.

I have decided to stay with the mash tun instead of the BiaB. (for no reason other than I am just used to my cooler mashing. BiaB is perfectly fine otherwise) So no extra equipment there At all.

I have finally gotten around to getting the counterflow chiller working, so again there is nothing extra to buy there.

The only place I need to spend a few bucks is on the actual boil kettle. But even here, all I need to do is build and install two more elements into my current 12.5 gallon kettle.

While using my 8 gallon kettle for the 3 gallon batches, I always felt like those two 1500 watt elements were a bit of over kill. So I upped to 4 gallon batches. This meant a boil volume of 6 gallons

 

I see almost no difference from the 5 gallon boil.

I see no reason why the two elements wont boil one more gallon just as well. But my small kettle wont handle a full 7 gallon boil. I will need to build the bigger one and hope it works. But I don’t see a problem. If there is, I think extra insulation would be enough to help it.