Making the leap to all-grain brewing gives you finer control of your recipes and can also save you some money on ingredients, but it does require special equipment. You need a container to hold all the grain while the starches convert, and you need a way to rinse the sugars from the malt. It’s a simple problem with a multitude of solutions. Some people use a brew-in-a-bag setup, which is fairly simple, but it does require some muscle. The more traditional path is to use a mash tun with either a false bottom or some kind of manifold. Here, I’ll show you how to build a mash tun from a 10 gal (38 l) drink cooler (pictured above).
Parts List
- 10 gal (38 l) cylindrical drink cooler (Igloo or RubberMaid, for example)
- Tapping hardware
- Adapter: ½ in (13 mm) copper pipe to ¾ in (19 mm) FPT
- Bottling spigot
- Manifold parts
- Three ½ in (13 mm) copper tees
- Four ½ in (13 mm) copper end caps
- About 6 in (15 cm) of straight ½ in (13 mm) copper pipe
- About 6 ft (1.8 m) of ½ in (13 mm) copper tubing
Like any good DIY project, there are many paths to get to the completed project. This project in particular makes several design trade-offs. You could just use a stainless steel kettle as the vessel, but a cooler has built-in insulation, which will help to better maintain the mash temperature. Also notable is that a cylindrical drink cooler works better than a rectangular one because the geometry provides a good grain bed and efficient draining.
I’ve chosen to make the manifold from copper tubing. Other alternatives would be to make or buy a screened false bottom that fits the cooler (12 in/30 cm round for a 10 gal/38 l cooler) or to use a stainless steel braid as a filter.
Tools
- Pliers
- Plumbing torch
- Lead-free plumbing solder
- Flux
- Dremel tool with a cutting blade
- Pipe/tubing cutter