Expanding Your Home Brewery

Are you ready for the next stage of home brewing? Expanding your home brewery takes some thought and creativity, and is, in truth, a never-ending goal. Almost every home brewer starts small, and expands from there for as long as they maintain the hobby. Starting with some bottles, a soup pot, a five-gallon carboy… expanding from this level can go quickly or slowly depending on your amount of free time and ability to build. The first thing you should decide is where you want to be with brewing.

Upgrading your home brewery can be expensive, but you save money in the long term and you can make 10 or more gallons of beer in the same time it takes to make 5 gallons.

It really doesn't take much of a set-up in order to start brewing on a large scale, but all the little steps leading up to that can really take your momentum away. Constant re-tooling and set-up changes can be disgruntling, which is why it is recommended that brewers pick out the level they want to work at and really go for it. Don't be afraid to aim high. You will save time and money by by-stepping the middlin' tiers of tooling and equipment that most home brewers are familiar with.

Extract or All Grain Brewing?
The first thing to consider is how you brew and what tools you will need for the job. Brewing with malt extract makes brewing sessions much easier, but also more costly. By learning how to facilitate starch to sugar conversion with the all grain brewing process, you are truly learning a key aspect of the brewing profession. If you plan to go big, you should research some of the three-tiered brewing set-ups that high volume home brewers have developed.

If you want to expand to the three-tiered system, you might need to expand your brewery space. This can be done in a garage with high ceilings or in the back yard. [See our article on Building an Efficient Outdoor Home Brewery] The basic system uses Sanke keg kettles and is gravity fed. These systems allow you to brew 10 or more gallons in the time it normally takes brewers to make 5 gallons! If you have the room, this is the most efficient way to produce beer at home.

You will need a way to store and serve all that beer you will be making. When looking at beer storage, you have three choices: bottle, Cornelius keg, or Sanke keg. Bottles are a very difficult choice for any but the smallest or largest of operations - the industrial tooling required to bottle beer quickly is best suited for brewers producing on a large scale. Cornelius kegs offer home brewers an easily portable option that carries five to six gallons, while the Sanke keg offers the big barrel feel of 15 gallons of beer.

One good thing can be said for bottling, which is that it is the best way to age and preserve your home-brew for future consideration. The keg is simply not designed to store and age beer over long periods of time. Bottles can hold the quality of beers over many years, providing you with a unique opportunity to test how well your home brew ages.

Cornelius kegs are also known as soda kegs, a reflection on their past lives working for the Pepsi or Coca-cola Corporations. These kegs are useful to most home brewers as a middlin' step of brewing - easy to manage, even when full, easy to chill, and easy to serve. For the hobbyist, there is little reason to go any bigger than the Cornelius keg - unless people drink a whole lot at your house!

The biggest you can go, as a home brewer, is the Sanke keg. These kegs take a little time to get to know, but once you understand how the Sanke mechanism works, you have the tool you need to mass-produce beer. Along with the three-tiered system, a home Sanke keg brewing setup is the most extensive level to which a home brewery can expand.

Related Articles:
Transforming 15 Gallon Kegs for Home Brewing - Learn how to transform a 15 gallon keg for home brewing from the home brewing experts at HomeBrewing.com.
Building a Keggle: A Keg Conversion Project - Learn how to make your own keggle for homebrewing beer.
How to Homebrew: All-Grain - Check out our diagram of the all-grain homebrew process.

Thinking about upgrading your home brewery? Browse our Professional Home Brew Systems.