My Homebrewing Gear

I like homebrewing gear, but I don’t think you need a brewery full of gadgets to make good beer.

Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy something through one of them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to products and services I actually use.

Most of my setup has grown gradually since I started brewing in 2015. Some things have stayed because they solve a real problem. Others have been replaced because I found a simpler or more repeatable way to do the same job.

You can read more about how HoppyGeek started on the About HoppyGeek page.

This page is the current version of my home brewery — the homebrewing gear I actually use, not a list of things I think every homebrewer should buy.

I’ll update it as the setup changes.

My brewing system

Grainfather G30

My main brewing system is a Grainfather G30 v2, now fitted with the newer v3 malt pipe.

It handles the mash, boil and wort circulation in one system and has become the centre of most of my brew days.

I didn’t start with an all-in-one brewing machine. My first batches were BIAB, followed by a homemade mash tun built from an Igloo cooler with a DIY copper manifold.

That worked.

The Grainfather didn’t suddenly make the beer good. What it gave me was a more compact and repeatable process, with less equipment to move around on brew day.

And repeatability is something I value. The longer story is in how my homebrew setup changed over my first decade of brewing — from that first BIAB kettle, through the homemade mash tun, to the G30 I use now.

If I brew a beer twice, I’d rather change one thing deliberately than accidentally change five things because the process was different.

Counterflow chiller

I use the Grainfather counterflow chiller that came with the brewing system.

Hot wort passes one way through the chiller while cold water travels in the opposite direction, allowing the wort to be cooled on its way from the kettle to the fermenter.

It’s compact, effective and fits naturally into the Grainfather workflow, so I’ve never felt much need to replace it with something more elaborate.

18 litre sparge water heater

For sparge water I use a separate 18 litre electric heater.

It isn’t an exciting piece of equipment, but it makes the brew day easier because the sparge water can be heated independently while the mash is running.

That’s a good example of the kind of brewing equipment I tend to keep: it has one job, does it reliably and removes something I would otherwise need to think about.

Fermentation

Good wort is only half the job.

Fermentation temperature and yeast management probably have more influence on the finished beer than many of the shiny pieces of equipment we like buying for the hot side.

Speidel 30 litre fermenters

I currently use two 30 litre Speidel fermenters.

They’re simple plastic fermenters, but that’s not a criticism.

They’re easy to handle and easy to clean, although cleaning and sanitizing are two different jobs — I go through that distinction in my guide to cleaning and sanitizing homebrew equipment. And they are large enough for the batch sizes I normally brew. I don’t need every fermenter to be stainless steel, pressure rated and covered in fittings for it to make good beer.

Simple equipment that works is still good equipment.

Temperature-controlled fermentation chamber

My fermentation temperature is controlled using an Inkbird ITC-306 controller and a dedicated fermentation chamber — an old kitchen refrigerator repurposed for the job.

Cooling is only half of the setup. Since the temperature inside the fermentation fridge can also drop too far, I use a Mangrove Jack’s Heat Pad underneath the fermenter.

The heat pad is connected to the heating output on the Inkbird, while the fridge is connected to the cooling output. When the beer gets too warm, the Inkbird calls for cooling and switches on the fridge. When the temperature drops too low, cooling stops and the heat pad takes over.

It’s a very simple setup, but it means I can control fermentation temperature in both directions instead of relying on the fridge alone.

The Mangrove Jack’s pad is a low-power heater designed to sit underneath a fermenter. Mine only runs when the Inkbird calls for heat — I don’t use it as an always-on heater.

The temperature control system I built is one of the upgrades I consider genuinely important.

Being able to control fermentation temperature means I can give the yeast a much more stable environment instead of letting the beer follow whatever temperature the room happens to be that week.

It also makes batches more repeatable, which matters if I’m trying to understand whether a recipe or process change actually improved something.

Tilt hydrometers

I have two Tilt wireless hydrometers, one red and one yellow.

They float in the fermenter and give me an ongoing indication of gravity and temperature during fermentation.

The important word there is indication.

I find the Tilt extremely useful for following the shape of a fermentation: when it starts, how quickly gravity is dropping and when things appear to have stabilised.

I’m less interested in obsessing over every individual gravity reading.

For me, the value is being able to see what the fermentation is doing without repeatedly opening the fermenter and taking samples.

Kegging and serving

Most of my beer ends up in kegs rather than bottles.

Cornelius kegs

I currently have two 18 litre and one 19 litre Cornelius kegs.

Moving from bottling to kegging was one of the changes that made homebrewing significantly more convenient for me.

There’s less repetitive work at packaging time, carbonation is controllable, and being able to serve beer directly from the keg fits the way I brew and drink it.

That doesn’t mean bottling is wrong. It just means I’m very happy not cleaning and filling a pile of bottles every time I brew.

CO₂

The system is supplied from a 2 kg CO₂ cylinder.

I use CO₂ for carbonation and serving, and the same cylinder can support several kegs without taking up too much space.

Keg fridge

The Cornelius kegs live in a dedicated keg fridge.

Keeping the beer cold makes carbonation and serving much easier to control, and having everything permanently connected means the beer is ready when I want it rather than turning serving into another small project.

Software

Not everything I use for brewing is physical gear. Some of the tools I rely on most live on a screen and help me plan, track and make sense of what happens from recipe to finished beer.

Grainfather App

I use the Grainfather app together with my G30 on brew day.

I keep the recipe there with the mash steps, temperatures and timings, then sync it to the Grainfather before I start. Once the brew is running, the controller can move through the recipe steps and give me alerts along the way, which takes a lot of the manual timing out of the process. Grainfather documents this recipe-sync and step-by-step control for the G30 as well.

For me, it is less about designing the recipe and more about actually running it on the equipment.

Brewfather

I use Brewfather for recipe design, brew-day planning and keeping my batches organised.

Recipes, targets, measurements and fermentation data all live in one place, which makes it much easier to look back at a previous batch and see what I actually changed.

I don’t think software makes better beer by itself, but for the way I like to brew — keeping track of the process and comparing batches — Brewfather has become one of the tools I rely on.

You can take a look at Brewfather. (affiliate link)

The equipment changes. The process matters more.

This isn’t meant to be a list of everything you need to start homebrewing. For that, I have a separate guide to what homebrewing equipment you actually need to get started.

Quite the opposite.

My first all-grain setup was considerably simpler than this one, and it made good beer.

Over time I’ve added equipment when it solved a problem, made the process more repeatable or simply made brewing more enjoyable.

That’s still the test I try to use when looking at new brewing gear:

What does this actually improve?

Sometimes the answer comes from a brew day. Sometimes it takes an experiment to find out whether a piece of homebrewing gear or a process change actually makes a difference.

And sometimes the honest answer is that it’s just a nice gadget.

There’s nothing wrong with that either — homebrewing is a hobby — but I think it’s useful to know the difference.

I’ll keep this page updated as equipment enters and leaves the brewery.

You can see how this homebrewing gear actually gets used in my Recipes & Brew Logs and Experiments.

And if you’re more interested in the cameras than the kettles, the equipment I use to make the videos lives on How I Film HoppyGeek.