Ruby Street Brewery Review – This All-grain Home Brewery Kicks Ass!

As a follow-up to our last blog post, we wanted to give a more behind the scenes look at what you will get with the 15 Gallon Ruby Street Brewing System, and what it looks like in action!  You have already seen what this brewery looks like on the pallet when delivered.  We will now take you through un-packaging and assembling the brewery.

As mentioned in the last article, the brewery was very well packaged. The frame had 3 large boxes plastic wrapped to it.  In each of these boxes were 3 brew kettles, along with all of the other parts; pump, hoses, tri-clamp valves, clamps, false bottoms, etc.  All of the propane lines and burners come installed which is very nice!  So all you really need to do is assemble the false bottoms and valves on all your brew kettles and make sure everything is scrubbed out really well.  That part is very important because these are brand new kettles which have a lot of residual grease, dirt, metal flakes on them still from the factory.  Ruby Street includes a packet of P.B.W. to scrub all your equipment with which is a nice little bonus and is definitely needed before brewing your first batch of beer

If you have already looked at the photos/watched the video from the unpack and brew day, you may have already noticed that the 15.5 Gallon Brew Kettles that are included with the Ruby Street Brewing Systems are all Bayou Classic.  In-fact all of the burners are from Bayou Classic as well.  But I have no complaints about that, the equipment is very solid and the Bayou Classic Propane Burners that come installed on the brewery get you up to a boil very quickly!

Things We Would Change:

Overall we were very happy with the Ruby Street Brewery, and there is not much we would change after first use.  But if we are going to be picky, a couple things would be the false bottom, and the sparge system.

False Bottom:  The false bottom is composed of 3 pieces;

1. A triangular riser.
2. The main large false bottom with a v-shape cut into it.
3. A smaller v-shaped false bottom piece that has a small hole cut into it for the down-tube from the vale to go through which sits on top of the main false bottom plate.

In all the setup worked well, but is juts a little bit of a pain dealing with multiple parts down there.  Most false bottoms have the riser bars welded onto the bottom of the false bottom, which would have been a nice touch here.

Sparge System:  The spage system is just a rubber hose with a cork on the end which allows the hose to stay afloat on top of the liquid and grains while sparging.  This seemed to work ok, but as you can imagine it does not disperse the hot liquor evenly over the full diameter of the grain bed like a rotating fly sparge arm would.  We will most likely look into some alternative methods of sparging in the future.

All-in-all we are very happy with the Ruby Street Brewery and look forward to brewing the next batch on it again!  Below is a slideshow/video of arrival of the brewery, through set-up and first use.  Enjoy!