Up-ending the boiler into the fermenter or No-Chill Cube is no good. I want to keep as much of the trub out of the fermenter as possible and also avoid the dreaded Hot Side Aeration. The former is a taste and clarity issue and the latter is claimed to reduce the beer's longevity as a drinkable thing.
I thought I had found the solution with Fermtech's 'Easy Syphon' (or perhaps Auto Syphon - they seem to have a naming/branding issue), but near-boiling wort is a natural enemy of plastic and this too soon proved to be less than perfect.
Eventually, I got sick of the whole caper and decided to bore a hole in the side of my 75 litre FBBoiler. I settled on a hole of about 20 mm diameter, which was too big for my biggest drill bit but too small for my smallest hole-saw. This, dear reader, is why we have Dremels. A short half-hour or so of noisy Dremelling and I had a somewhat messy, but perfectly functional hole in the side of my boiler.
Having done this, something had to be done to bring the boiler back to usefulness. Two trips to Bunnings, one to the local Mitre-10 and one to Grain and Grape later, I settled on a nickel-plated brass ball valve and some ancillary plumbing bits.
It looks like this:
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| From Beer Equipments |
Unless you're on the inside of the boiler, in which case it looks like this:
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| From Beer Equipments |
The yellow washer is actually a silicon O-ring I compressed the bejesus out of when I tightened the whole thing up.
Now I just have to test it all out with a brew...
