As of late I have been brewing at my friend’s house. Right now I’ve been in a state of move from going to my apartment to my house, as such, it’s kinda hard to be making mead and leaving carboys for months when you are back and forth between homes. The landscape of the house I’m brewing at presents a couple problems. First is the size of the kitchen as it’s on the smaller end. The second is the fact that the faucet on his kitchen sink doesn’t work. Now, this isn’t too much of a problem on brew day as I usually use water that I bought at the store, but for sanitizing and cleaning I have to use a different spot in the house. This spot isn’t the first you think of when crafting a home brewing setup, but I have found that it not only works great for cleaning and sanitizing, but it also works great for transferring and bottling. What’s the spot you ask? The bathroom of course.
This idea of course was born out of necessity, it’s not as if I envisioned a bathroom as a good spot to work, however I believe there are a large number of aspiring home brewers who don’t have large spaces to work with or a big open garage to play around in.
One of the reasons that a bathroom works so well is that if you have a shower head that detaches, you can set the stream to a very thin but powerful setting. This setting will allow the water from the shower head to fit right into the small circumference of the opening on a carboy. This allows you a more powerful blast when trying to clean the bottom or sides of a carboy.
The bathtub also allows a space where you can place your buckets and have them filled with sanitizer to use to dunk your tools into. The lower faucet on the bathtub also allows you to easily fill your buckets with water in a short amount of time.
Another positive of working in the bathroom is that you have multiple levels with which to place things in order to make siphoning easier. Let me show you in a professional diagram I made.
If you look at the picture up top my usual set up is having the bottles all set up in a line ready to go on the floor, the bottling bucket or carboy on the toilet, and if I need to another bucket on the sink. I have a towel set up on the right usually in case I need to set any tools down.
I know this sounds kinda funky, but it’s worked really well for me. If you are like me and lack the space in the kitchen, give your bathroom a shot. Maybe it’s not the best idea to tell anyone you are serving your home brew to that you bottled it in the bathroom. Just a thought.
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