Proef Conijn

After brewing Down to the rabbit hole and QuaranIPA it was time to step up my game! So I decided it was time to invest. After all, when you are brewing in batches of 5 liter a time you will only have around 13 a 14 bottles of beer. And when you share that with others not much is left… So, what are the options that you have as a home brewer?

Research

There are a lot of websites that can help you but I quickly saw that the 30 Liter kettles are the sweet spot for home brewing. Big enough to have a decent output. Small enough to put in your home ;-).

I watched a lot of videos on YouTube and the channel that helped me a lot was the one from David Heath. He does a lot of reviews and always adds objective comments and disclaimers on them.

In the end the process of brewing does not change. However the type of kettle can make things easier. Since I love technology I chose the Grainfather. It comes with bluetooth connectivity and it allows you to define schemas that will be applied automatically. This helps you with making sure that the temperature is increased after a fixed amount of time automatically.

Don’t think just buy

I always lived by the motto: “Make sure you cannot blame the equipment”. And, after to much research I learned that there are a lot of tools that can help you improve the quality of your beers. So I invested in a brewing system with a matching fermenting kettle. This fermenting kettle has a Glycol chiller that can be used to cool the beer during fermenting and a heating unit to warm it up. In other words, this system is able to keep your beer at a specific temperature!

The beer itself

Now it was time to test the system out!

Again, I brewed an IPA called Proef Conijn. The end result was quite good! Looking at the color of that beer. The best part? I now had 72 bottles that I could share with friends and family.