After having a major disaster where I dumped a bunch of garden hose water into what otherwise would’ve been an awesome IPA, I made a couple changes to my equipment.  I changed the fittings on my wort chiller from a simple worm screw clamp solution on a smooth copper tube to a compression fitting mating to the copper coil, and then the plastic hose was press fit over a barbed fitting.  In addition to that, I modified the copper tubing routing so this fitting no longer would stay inside the boil pot, but instead would overhang the outside edge of the boil kettle.

The connection seemed like a super-robust solution as I checked it out when I made the change.  It wasn’t until I did my dual brew day batch where I was chilling two batches with this one wort chiller that I found a new issue.  The hot end of my wort chiller (the output side after it goes through the hot wort) had the hose sliding off just with the tug of gravity.  Luckily it was toward the end of the chilling phase so the hose was starting too cool down, shrink, and no longer slide off.

So in the future it’ll be belts & suspenders, and those barbed fittings will also get hose clamps on top of it….

About a week ago, I was preparing for my homebrew day (actually a dual homebrew day, doing 2 batches simultaneously), and I was in & out of the house gathering equipment for my brew day outside.  While re-positioning cars in the driveway to clear my brew space, something crunched in my back pocket.  I pulled out my BIC lighter and found that it was not very pocket-durable when you sit on it.

Luckily, I had bought the lighters as a 2-pack way back when, so I tossed the broken one aside and got my backup.  I briefly thought about what a disaster it would’ve been had I not had a spare.  My intricate schedule of balancing two different brews, my smack-pack yeast warming in the house, my crushed grain waiting in buckets in the basement, …  I would’ve had to scramble off to the store to buy another lighter, and screwed up my whole schedule for the day.

I was reminded that I had already taken precautions on my propane tanks, and I always keep 2 tanks
on hand for brew day.  Years ago, I ran out of propane in the midst of my boil and that really sucked.  Much worse than it would’ve been had I not had a spare BIC lighter.  It reminded me that I needed to do a bit of an equipment review and figure out which items would be a true disaster if I sat on them or something on brew day and didn’t have a spare…