#electricbeerkettle — Public Fediverse posts

An overdue return to homebrewing–with an Instant Pot vibe

I had not meant to let almost two years lapse between my last batch of homebrewed beer and this Saturday night’s–but in my defense, 2024 had a lot going on. By which I mean, it included a new kitchen featuring an induction cooktop incompatible with the five-gallon pot I’d been using to brew beer since 2012.

If I’d just bought an induction-compatible pot of that size, I probably would have gotten around to homebrewing sometime last winter, but instead last spring, a friend offered to loan me the electric brewing kettle he’d had sitting around his house.

This Gigawort kettle from Minnesota-based Northern Brewer is a much more complicated beast than the metal container I’d put on a burner of the old gas cooktop. It has a digital display, a temperature sensor, computerized controls and setup instructions sufficiently complex to warrant reading the wiki in Reddit’s r/homebrewing.

Instead of doing that, I spent the next 20 months procuring beer the usual, no-kitchen-time-required way. But the imminent onset of the holiday season finally persuaded me to buy an ingredient kit and drag this contraption out of the basement.

After spending more time than I would have imagined fussing with the valve that screws into the side of the kettle, I set this to heat up 2.5 gallons of water–and realized that I was dealing with the homebrewing equivalent of the Instant Pot that’s been a mainstay of my cooking since 2018.

Much as that computerized pressure cooker does one thing and does it well, the Gigawort seems optimized for one job. After bringing the water to a steeping temperature in about 25 minutes–much faster than the old gas stove handled that task–this kettle held itself to roughly 160 degrees instead of leaving me to chase a gas burner up and down for 20 minutes.

But an Instant Pot can also have its fussy moments, and the Gigawort did too at the start of the boiling phase when it shut off with an E4 error–a result, going by some quick searching, of malt extract getting stuck or scorched to the bottom. Unplugging the device and pressing a reset button inconveniently located on its underside fixed that… after a second try.

This kettle was also more complicated to clean up, since I couldn’t dump the entire thing into the sink and instead had to wash it upside-down to keep soap and water away from the electronics in the base.

Are the results of this venture into computer-assisted homebrewing any good? The brew finished inside the recipe’s documented range of original-gravity figures, but I can’t offer a review until after a few more weeks–during which I’ll have to trust yeast to do the most important work.

#beer #brewery #brewing #electricBeerKettle #gigawort #homebrew #homebrewing #instantPot #northernBrewer #wort