New, Bigger Wort Boiler (Brewing Copper)

My new wort boiler on the left sat next to my original that has now become my hot liquor tank to command my mash tun during the mash and subsequent sparging of the brew grist.

After realising too late my original boiler was too small to handle sufficient sweet wort for a 5 gallon brew (see my earlier post about my aluminium stock pan) and having to make a half size brew for my first all grain brew day I have got hold of a much larger pan and converted it into a wort boiler.

As you can see in the above photo I've used the same type of valve (less than a fiver from Leroy Merlin) and on the inside I've used the hop filter from the original boiler. I have fitted the valve slightly lower than on the original for a couple of reasons:

1) The rounding of the sides into the base of the larger pan is less than that of the smaller pan (part of the reason my tap was higher up and not so obvious in the piccy).

2) When filled with just water, the pan drained under syphon from the tap leaving only around 300ml of water behind. However during the brew - possibly due to the restriction of the hops around the filter - the syphon effect broke before the boiled wort was fully run off - losing me more than 300ml of the precious liquid.

The lower tap means I've had to turn my hop filter sideways due to the two, copper 90deg elbows connecting the filter pipe to the tap. I have seen other coppers with the filter to one side so I don't think this is an issue and my wort chiller still fits no problem.

Old hop filter fitted into new wort boiler. Tilted to the side to allow for a lower fitting of the tap valve.

Testing this new setup with water, I achieved a virtually total run off (less than 150-200ml left in the pan) and that was without having a length of tubing running from the down pointing outlet pipe.

Looking forward to getting a second brew on this week although I may be brave and wait until next week when I have a friend visiting us who's bringing some more grains from Blighty.