For the past 5 years or so I’ve mashed using my 10-gallon Gott cooler with one of Northern Brewer’s bulkhead kits.  I never was perfectly happy with the bulkhead as it would occasionally leak and it is insecure/wobbly by nature because it’s trying to sandwich two pieces of plastic separated by foam. And you if think about a leak on this bulkhead design your wort is going in between the cooler walls, gross.

So today I cut out the outer shell leaving just the inner liner, and I redid the bulkhead to only sandwich that inner liner.  It’s much sturdier now.  Photos and descriptions follow.

Here is how much shell I dremel’d away.  In retrospective I should have cut away some more to make getting my fingers around the locknut easier.

I’m using a fully-close nipple instead of the almost-closed nipple that came with the original kit.  That slight reduction in length lets me clamp down on the inner shell.

Here is a chunk of the wort-soaked foam from in between the cooler walls.  Thankfully the expanding foam they use forms a good seal along the walls so my wort leaks didn’t seep very far in.

To be able to get a better clamp on the wall I’m using a big 1/2″ silicone washer.

And the finished product.  The ball valve had enough thread to get a good seal and a leak test passed.

So I was feeling a little spendy a few months back so I sprung for MoreBeer’s $70 carbonating keg lid.  I’ve used it to carb two kegs and by golly it does work.   Each batch has been ready in about 3 days total, a big improvement over the week of shaking and waiting I’d do before.  It’s nice how this piece of kit prevents me from overcarbing my beer, something I’d usually do when attempting to force-carb.

I’ve been approximately following their instructions:

• Fill keg, and if needed put in kegerator to chill down.  Use the carbonating lid.
• Set gas very low in the 2-4 psi range.
• Increase by about 2 psi every couple of hours
• When I’ve reached my target pressure (usually around 8 or 10) I’ll leave it for another day with the carb lid still on.
  • At this point the beer will be carbonated as evidenced by the taste and seeing the fine bubbles coming out of solution.  However your pours will be very slow because the small headspace and restriction the stone puts on the incoming gas to fill that void.  So because of the slow pours you likely won’t get a nice looking head, but switching the gas over to the regular gas post will increase your pour speed and then you should start getting nice pours.
  • After another day with the gas on the regular post my pours are “normal” with the head & carbonation having the fine bubble structure that I’d normally get after maybe 2-3 weeks with a normally-carbonated keg.

Because I very rarely brew the same thing twice I wind up with a lot of leftover specialty grains.  I had been storing them in a motley crew of plastic canisters, jelly jars, and plastic bags.  After losing track of what I had on hand and buying a few redundant grains I decided that I needed to be a bit more organized about this.  Many of my grains were in bags piled up in buckets which made them hard to find and easy to forget about.

I found some inexpensive square jars from US Plastic and bought a variety of the 128oz, 64oz, and 32oz jars.  The 128oz jar holds a little under 5# of grain.  I chose the square ones because they save space.

For my odds & ends I used the small 32oz jar plus some selected jars from my old collection.  I really just wanted to make sure that I could see what I have on hand.

For grains which I have a lot of I use Gamma Seals on hardware store 5-gallon pails.  Each holds around 21 pounds of grain.  US Plastic also sells the Gamma Seal, and this plus a $2.50 bucket makes for a relatively cheap way to store bulk grain – certainly cheaper than pet food containers.