Primary Fermenter Question

[smurfe]

It looks like I am going to do my first batch of beer this weekend. Kind of apprehensive as I am going all grain with my first batch. Why all grain at first? Because a guy gave me all of his all grain brewing (home made sculpture) equipment so I said what the heck, let's give it a try.


My question. I have an extra primary fermenter here that I have made one batch of wine in. Can I use it for beer and not anymore for wine and be OK or should I use something that has never had wine in it. Seems I remember reading quite a while back that you could use one for beer that wine had been in but you didn't want to use a fermenter beer had been in for wine. I can't remember though. There is a very mild wine aroma in the plastic fermenter bucket. Suggestions?

 

[grapeman]

I am certainly not an expert in this area Smurfe, but I don't see any problem with it. I have done it before and had no ill effects. Once you have done beer in it, it has a VERY strong beer smell to it, so you wouldn't want to make wine in it. Also if you have an empty Mosti pail from an All Juice kit, they work well for beer. You could even buy a spigot and drill the pail for it. Have fun with the beer! I just bottled up a Brewer's Best Red Ale kit I made recently that I had gotten this last summer from a LHBS.

 

[masta]

I would agree that using a fermenter from wine to beer is fine but I choose not to go from beer to wine.
Take some pictures and let us know how it goes with the all grain brewing. What beer are you making?

 

[smurfe]

I'll try to remember to take some pics of our set up. We took a road trip to Houston the other day and picked up some bulk grain. We got grains to make a Belgiun Wit Biere (Hoegaarden style),a Munich Dunkel (Warsteiner Dunkel style), and a Honey Lager (J.W. Dundee's Honey Lager style).


I bought a large keg fridge a while back and the guy gave me his home made sculpture stand, burners, brew kegs, mash tun, extra CO2 tank and 5 corney kegs. We had to devise a few pieces of equiptment like a sparge arm and false bottom manifold. We did a dry run yesterday with some surplus grains that we ran through the new Monster Mill I got to clean the rollers and everything seemed to work good. If I woulsn't of been worried about metal shavings in the grist from the rollers off the new millwe could of fermented it. We hit our gravity and the wort tasted pretty darn good.

 

[grapeman]

Dang smurfe. You are going to be the brewmaster with a setup like that! I cook it on the stove with the fan on and nobody home and cool my wort in the pan in the sink full of ice. Then I put it in the bucket and later transfer to a carboy. It carbonates with priming sugar and "ages" in the 12 oz beer bottles with caps. Pretty basic. We will be waiting for the pics.