As a committed alcohol enthusiast and cheapskate, I've been dabbling on-and-off in homebrewing for years. With the COVID-19 pandemic turning a simple trip to the supermarket into a terrifying live-action Mad Max roleplay experience it seemed like a good time to step up my game, so I picked up a FastFerment conical fermenter and started production!

The first job once it arrived was setting up a stand - the conical shape means you can't just stick it on a shelf like the standard buckets so I built a fairly simple tripod stand to use then filling the fermenter.

Next, I needed a slightly more robust place to keep it longer term. The kit comes with wall mounting brackets, but after burning out several drills on the near-indestructible walls of the garage I thought a mounting frame would be much simpler, and allow for moving it around when needed. As you'll see in the next installment, this turned out to be a lifesaving idea.

With construction complete on my state-of-the-art brewing facilities, it was time to make some beer! Starting with a fairly basic pale ale kit since this was deep in the heart of lockdown and supplies were very limited. My Instant Pot came in pretty handy for boiling the extract and for transporting water between tap and fermenter.

Disaster almost struck when the tripod turned out not to be strong enough to take the weight of the filled fermenter - luckily I had the other stand nearby so I was able to transfer the vessel onto that without dumping sticky hoppy liquid all over the kitchen floor!

So far, it's been working out really well - the removable collection ball makes it easy to keep settled yeast and muck out of the finished brew, and the tap at the base makes for incredibly easy bottling and kegging without needing a siphon. The current batch is an Imperial Red Ale, which should be ready for tasting in a couple of weeks. Próst!

See you around!
Jonny