Jeremiah's brewery.. sick!

Better be sitting down, cause this one is a bit weird. Check this out.. hybrid electric propane brewery with a CRANK UP, ADJUSTABLE HEIGHT BOIL KETTLE! What the!

Here's an overview of the thing.. note how low it is to the ground. He did it like this because his ceiling height is lower than my garage is, for example.. so, he made the boil kettle sit low to the ground while boiling, and then adjustable height (it cranks up) simply to drain it with gravity! Wacky..

Here's a shot of the crazy hand made strap crank he configured. It rolls up the side bars with the vertical bars as locator's and skateboard wheels to slide it up the pipes. Bizarre!:

Here's the thing in the low, boiling position:

Then turn the crank and it's up in the air to gravity feed into a carboy..

Out of control! Then, there's the totally awesome upside down dead center drain ports, to say the least of awesome-ness. This this is definitely unique.

The false bottom is a perforated folding setup in the mash-tun. Other than the really trick bottom drained sight glass in the HLT, it's also got a 5500watt powered electric element. This thing.. I swear, you can't make this up.. if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I'd say it wasn't possible, but we put in 8.6 gallons of 76 degree water in the tun and ramped it to 100 deg in 4min 45sec.. then 130 deg in 9min 50sec, and got it up to strike water temp of 160 deg in only 15min 39seconds. Unreal! Electric is totally mind boggling. The power of these elements over propane is numbing. Check this vid of the HLT boiling water by itself on the concrete floor:

Sorta speaks for itself, but this boil was way too hardcore. We need to bring this way down to use in a boil kettle.. I'm thinking 1500 to 2000 watts to keep a mild simmer.. 5500 was raging.  All inspiring stuff, at least. There's just really something awesome about plugging in a plug and then simply flipping a switch to have enormous power in your kettle. It really made propane look like a joke.. seriously, a kids toy in comparison. I'm a believer.

In any case, he brought this stuff over and we whipped up a Belgian style Dubbel on bits and pieces of both of our systems put together. It came out great and we hit the numbers on it. Stay tuned in a couple weeks for the results of that one.