I own a house with space to build the ultimate home brewery setup. It has a second garage with a roof deck added to the house for storage. I started with extract brewing on the kitchen stove long before I switched to all-grain brewing.
Back then, I built my own mash tun and stir plate, which failed instantly. Again, not handy. The good news and bad news for my wallet is I got to buy new homebrewing equipment and start from scratch. But to be honest, I always hated using propane. It made me nervous and it felt like such a waste of money and energy. So I hired an electrician to design a few outlets that could be installed and removed with no damage. A direct wire from the electrical box located around the corner of the wall with a subpanel housing two GFCI v twist-lock outlets and a v standard outlet.
Everything was mounted with the existing screws holding up the siding. And it has two Blichmann Riptide pumps and an Exchillerator counterflow wort chiller. This setup allows me to move all the wort around without lifting a thing.
One of the main reasons we bought this house was the extra garage. Once I knew we had the house, I wanted to start planning out the brewery. The garage was packed! Thankfully, my Dad is a kitchen designer and has been for over 30 years. He lives in New Jersey, so we had to collaborate via FaceTime and email. He was able to count the studs in all the pictures I sent to get a rough estimate of the size.
From that, he created the initial design draft in a program called how appropriate for the time. But it gave me a sense of the space to start making a plan. Currently, the only way into the brewery is through the first garage. Also, the door will have windows to add more natural light. Plus, an overhead 6-foot condensate hood. And next to the door is the control panel. The sink should be large enough to clean kettles and fermenters.
