Our first brew highlighted some challenges inherent in our kitchen/equipment set-up. The first challenge we chose to address was the heat source.

For our first brew, we purchased this 8.5 gallon kettle at More Beer. It’s a fine kettle and remains an important part of the equipment inventory.

It is, however, LARGE. It barely fit between the stove burners and the range hood in our kitchen. And it took a long time to get up to temperature. Imagine you’re hungry and boiling up a big pot of water for pasta. Now multiply that by 10. Even spanning two burners on the stove, getting to a boil was one of the most time-consuming parts of the process. The hot break was so wimpy we weren’t even sure it had happened.

One way some home brewers get around this problem is to do a partial boil. For a partial boil, the malt boils with a smaller volume of water, and then cold, purified water is added to reach the volume needed for the 5-gallon batch.

But we bought the Brewmaster kettle so that we wouldn’t have to do a partial boil. That meant that the solution to our problem was to upgrade our heat source.

We purchased a little propane burner like this one.

The first one we bought was faulty and burned dirty, coating the bottom of our beautiful Brewmaster kettle with black gunk. We had to return and replace it. But this upgrade definitely solved the problem of inadequate heating and produced robust and beautiful hot breaks for subsequent brews.

It meant that we had to move the boil portion of the process outdoors, which could be chilly but was not a huge problem because California.

There are other, more expensive, equipment solutions to the heat source problem. We chose to add incrementally to our equipment inventory rather than buying all the shiny, costly new toys before discovering if the hobby was going to stick.

Spoiler alert – it stuck!