Brew Sculpture Design

If I'm able to follow through on my plans to spend more time in Mexico teaching brewing, I'm going to need to start collecting equipment. After comparing the prices for shipping from the States compared to having a brew system fabricated here it's a no-brainer, I'll make it here.

Brewing in Santa Cruz

I normally use a three tiered, gravity fed system for my personal brewing and also when I teach the all-grain method so I decided that a duplicate of that system would work equally as well here in San Miguel. I contracted a local herrero (iron worker/welder) Alfredo Moreno to fabricate the brew sculpture. It's identical to the one that Scott A. made for me while I was living in Washington. Alfredo quoted me a price of 1,850 pesos which is the equivalent of $130 usd. That seemed like a pretty good deal, in fact a great deal compared to what I'd pay in S.C. so I told him to start building. Oh yeah, that cost includes delivery!

Brew sculpture diagram

I thought you might be interested in the details that I gave Alfredo to build this sculpture. It was originally designed so that the gas piping could run down inside the center column, allowing for the burners and gas tank to connect through holes located six inches below the platforms that will support the brewing kettles.


During the process of building the sculpture, Alfredo had a few questions and I had my concerns but between his limited English and my bad Spanish we managed to get our thoughts expressed and after a couple weeks the end results were perfect.

This system is made to support keggles (kettles made out of beer kegs) for the brewing process but when I have a future one made I will have the platform size changed to accommodate kettles that I'll also have fabricated here. Or, have the kettles made to fit the platform. I'll spend some of the time I have left here to locate someone that can make the kettles and get some pricing on those.

Another thought I'm having while writing this is the fact that a larger system for brewing could be manufactured for relatively little more cost than this one. Fabricating a system that I could use to brew, let's say a full barrel (bbl) or larger, may be ideal for a possible future nano-brewery. I'm excited by the possibilities here because of how in-expensive it is compared to California.



Alfredo the welder



In the mean time, I'll leave this one here in the good hands of friend and fellow homebrewer Francisco to use and I'll probably have another made when I return.

* For all Beer Diary... members only-

As a way of saying Thanks! I'll send you a free PDF copy of the above design if you want. Just send me an email message of your interest.