First you boil, then you chill. In our 2017 Gear Guide issue (April/May), our editors tested and reviewed a couple of burners and a chiller. Here are the results.
Anvil High Performance Burner
Efficiency fanatics will love its power-to-gas ratio.
Test lab notes
You may think that a burner is a burner and any one will do, and to some extent, there is some truth to that fact. The most important factors to us when evaluating these burners are build quality (we don’t want our boiling pot of wort to fall off), speed, noise, efficiency, and to a lesser extent aesthetic. Like everything Anvil builds, the manufacturing quality of their High Performance Burner (above, left) is great. The sturdy stand is easy to assemble and reassuring when holding our 20-gallon kettle. It also maintained a low enough auditory volume to comfortably sit around the brew and have a conversation. Where it falls a little short of its competitors is on speed, but it did make that up in efficiency. The burners we were pitting it against rated at 4x the BTUs but only brought us up to a boil at about 1.5x the speed. We also loved the burnt orange aesthetic that the Anvil burner shipped with. Unfortunately, that becomes a truly burnt orange (brown) after a couple of uses.