Spotlight on a Used Kettle

Used Kettle on Probrewer.com - $4,500

I just finished a class with a group of guys who are adding a brewery to their pizzeria. Naturally, as we are starting to put together a brewing system together for them, I ran across this brew kettle on Probrewer.com in their classified section. I always tell my students to make probrewer.com their home page so they remember to look at anything new everyday. Sometimes you get lucky.

The one thing I have been preaching about brewing systems that are put together piece-meal is to at least get a new kettle, like the ones at Forgeworks, Rocky Mountain Vessel, Portland Kettleworks, etc. However if you can’t afford a new kettle, sometimes you can make an OK used one work. Just for fun let’s look at this one as an exercise.

First off the negatives that I see.

• There isn’t a site glass

• I don’t see a condensate drain, but there may be one that doesn’t show up in the pictures.

• There is no bottom to the firebox or burner.

• I have no idea what all those tri-clamp openings are.

The positives.

• It doesn’t have a flat top

• There is a whirl Pool

• It has a decent manway (not pictured)

• The price

How could we make this work? The first order of business would be to fit a burner to it. I had a similar kettle once, that I used in addition to our 20BBL kettle. It was a 7 BBL and I used it for small batches for the tasting room. It has an open bottom like this one, so I bought two 99k btu ring burners (wok burners) and rigged them underneath the kettle. It worked great with a good boil and evaporation. In fact I won a couple World Beer Cup silvers with that kettle. My first kettle was also similar and I found a burner from a commercial hot water heater rated at 199k Btu’s for free at a junk yard. I mounted that under the kettle and it also worked great. Check with your building department first on this one. They can be touchy in some places.

For a site glass I would add a tri-clamp tee to the outlet and from the top of the tee run a tri-clamp to a 1/2 inch hose barb and a tube from there up to the top of the kettle and figure a way to attach it. Then I would calculate volumes and make a mark on the kettle every 10 gallons all the way up behind the site glass.

If there isn’t a condensate drain, some sort of collar on the inside of the steam stack needs to be installed with a hole for a small drain pipe, so this liquid doesn’t drop back down into the kettle during boil.

Any tri-clamp that I don’t know what to do with I would simply close them off with a tri-clamp disk and clamp. Problem solved.

But you say that is so ugly. I say use your imagination. Look at what McMenamins up in Oregon does with their ugly kettles.

Cornelius Pass Roadhouse, Hillsboro, OR

As I have quoted Paul Hawkins so many times, “Money follows imagination, imagination doesn’t follow money”. This kettle will work, and with a little imagination, save you a bundle.

From the very beginning when I made Frankenbrew (a VHS video) in 1995 I have always said this will get you started if you are short of funds. Where you go after that, the sky is the limit.

Example one. My good friend Mic Heynecamp and his wife Molley approached me about Frankenbrew back then. They were in their early 20’s and wanted to open a brewpub in Socorro, New Mexico, but were broke as most young people are. Mic was inspired by my idea of building a brewery for under $20,000 but he totally blew away my theories and built his system for half that. Mic, you should comment below and explain your genius glycol system you used back then!

That was his starting point. He went on to build the Eddyline breweries in Colorado, then moved to New Zealand and has done the same there. He no longer needs to do Frankenbrew, but that gave him his start.

And that’s the point. Sure the kettle isn’t great looking, but it can give a budding brewery owner the start they deserve and can afford. For the future? Money follows imagination.

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