Setting up the pump for recirculation was a breeze, with the pump priming accomplished by gravity feed through the valve. ![]() With help from my son (who stirred with a wooden mash paddle while I poured in the grains) we mashed in without much effort. It took just over an hour for 6.2 gallons of water to be heated from 70° to 160°, which in my opinion is not at all bad. I set the control panel to the strike temperature (160°), and while it was heating up the water, I weighed out the hop additions into hop socks. I had prepped a yeast starter and milled the grains before the brewday, and of course had pre-washed the unit to remove any manufacturing oils, so the brewday started with measuring water into the vessel, adding the empty malt pipe, plugging it in and cranking it up. ![]() To my surprise, it turns out that the day I chose for brewing happened to also be National Homebrew Day, so serendipity reined supreme. But my beer fridge had run out of my most popular "house brew" - Plague of Kali Rye IPA - so it was about time I stopped messing around and did a proper full-size batch. While I have a lot of experience doing brew-in-a-bag (BiaB) style brewing, as well as more traditional three-vessel brewing, I have as of late been on a small batch kick, trying lots of different recipes with a lighter brewday time investment, using PicoBrew products: first a Zymatic, then later their PicoZ. I did my first brew session with the unit Saturday, and thought I'd share my experiences. This is their second rev of the product, with some improvements incorporated from customer feedback on the first generation.īecause of COVID-19, shipping on my unit was delayed significantly, but it eventually arrived, and there were no surprises during the unboxing. Thus the Foundry is more evolutionary in the BiaK product line, but it offers quite a few features that were well-designed, and at a very reasonable price point. Their design is a bit long in the tooth, and still very pricey, though, and several companies have come along and innovated in this space, or just copied and made cheaper units. The whole concept of the electric all-in-one BiaK unit was invented (as far as I can tell) by brewing pioneers Grainfather, a New Zealand company. The unit I purchased also comes with the optional recirculation kit, which is basically just a pump, hoses, clamps, a little metal tube for delivering the pumped wort back up to the top of the unit, and a top plate for dispersing that wort over the underlying grain in the mash. Welded-on fins on the mash pipe can be positioned to rest on a bent "basket support ring" that in turn rests on the lip of the kettle, thus allowing the mash pipe to drain into the kettle after mashing and sparging. ![]() A large metal basket with perforations at the bottom, known as the mash pipe, allows the grains to be removed from the unit after mashing, which allows this single unit to take on the functions of both a mash tun and a boil kettle, and arguably a hot liquor tun, all in one. There is a conveniently-located control panel for dialing in desired temperature and power settings. The kettle itself is double-walled for insulation. ![]() The heating element is ultra-low density - which helps prevent scorching of the contents - and supports both 120v and 240v operation. The base model is essentially similar to a coffee urn, in that it is a tall stainless steel pot, with a heating unit at the bottom. I purchased the 10.5-gallon unit, capable of doing full-size 5-gallon batches or homebrew. I recently got a new piece of brewing kit, an electric BiaK (brew in a kettle) system from Anvil Brewing Supplies and Blichmann Engineering called the Foundry.
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