As we built our inventory of brewing equipment, we discovered not everything had to be shiny, spendy new toys from More Beer. There are a few items that we picked up on the cheap that are in the regular rotation.

Towels

We protect the kitchen floors and counters from spills or from getting banged up with kettles and other equipment by covering surfaces with towels. Sometimes we’ll wrap a fermentation vessel in towels for insulation. It’s useful to have half a dozen or so large towels dedicated to the brewing process.

Hand towels and kitchen towels are useful, but the sheer volume of potential spills when you’re dealing with 5-8 gallons of liquid at a time means that you’ll want bath towels, bath sheets or beach towels on hand. Check the back of the linen closet, or shop thrift shops and garage sales for your towel supply.

Tubs

We have found any number of uses for these tubs we bought at our local Daiso. At first we were fermenting our brews in the bathtub since it was out of the way and relatively climate controlled. These tubs were large enough to accommodate the fermenting vessel and still fit neatly in the bathtub. If we needed to bring down the temperature of the wort we could put some water and one liter bottles of ice into the tub.

We also use the tubs to clean and sanitize bottles, tubes and other bits of equipment.

Ice Trays

Once the boil is finished, the wort needs to be cooled down to a temperature that won’t kill the yeast. At first, we accomplished this by putting our kettle into a sink full of ice water. This takes a lot of ice. Later we added a wort chiller to our equipment, but even now the wort chiller is more efficient when we ice down the circulating liquid.

Of course, we can buy ice in bags at the grocery store. But we also have a perfectly good freezer. We picked up mismatched trays at thrift shops and the dollar store until we had 15 or so trays. We empty the trays and bag up the ice in advance of brew day. We also freeze water in one liter bottles.

We’d love to hear about any household items that you have repurposed to be part of your brewing equipment! Leave us a note in the comments.

JMN