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Heatstick
I put together a 2000 Watt heatstick to use for doing full boils on the stove top. I am not going to get into the specifics of the build, there are plenty of articles on the Web that document how to put one together. One thing I will say, we don't have GFCI outlets in the kitchen, so I put together an outlet box with a switch and a 20 amp GFCI outlet to plug the heatstick in to. I also put a 20 amp plug on the heatstick so it can only be plugged into the outlet box, and I will only plug the outlet box into a circuit that I know can handle 20 amps. No point in burning your house down or getting electrocuted over a batch of beer.
Between the heatstick and the stove burner I have 4000 Watts. I didn't time how long it took to get six gallons to a boil, but it wasn't all that long. Once I got to a boil I turned the oven burner down to medium and I had a nice roiling boil. It worked great. And I didn't have to stand out in the cold garage. 
I did an all extract batch to try it out. I used nine pounds of Breiss Sparkling Amber, boiled to five gallons and then topped up the carboy to six and a half gallons. I didn't take a gravity reading but it should have been around 1.060, according to the info for the extract. The Breiss extract is base, Munich and C-60. bruguru's AA is MO, Munich and C-80. Pretty close. I basically followed bruguru's recipe for AA for the hops and the orange peel. Am planning on dry hopping too. I'll see how it turns out. I am sure it won't be as good as the African Amber, but it (hopefully) should still be a pretty decent beer. If it turns out maybe I will call it Gibraltar Amber, Gibraltar is pretty close to Africa. 
The bottom line is it was nice to be able to do a full boil indoors when it was snowing out and the wind was blowing. And it is a fairly cheap and simple solution.
When I came home from work this morning I had a beer volcano in the back of the basement. I ended up with some hop reside in the carboy and the airlock was one I hadn't used before and still had the plastic "x" on the bottom. It had clogged with hop residue and was on the floor about five feet from the carboy. I cleaned up the mess as best I could, cleaned and sanitized (and broke the little plastic "x" off) the airlock and added a blowoff tube. So now I have a two quart jar with a foam beer volcano. The S-04 is really chewing on this one.
you topped off to 6.5 gallons? how big is your carboy?
I think they are seven gallon acid carboys. One of these days I am going to measure them and get them marked for volume. Get some acid etch for glass and put permanent markings on them so I have a better idea of my volumes. Normally if I am careful measuring my strike and sparge water I am ending up with five gallons in the bottling bucket so I have a pretty good idea of how full it should be for a five gallon batch, but it would be good to know instead of guessing.
ruralbrew wrote:
I think they are seven gallon acid carboys. One of these days I am going to measure them and get them marked for volume. Get some acid etch for glass and put permanent markings on them so I have a better idea of my volumes. Normally if I am careful measuring my strike and sparge water I am ending up with five gallons in the bottling bucket so I have a pretty good idea of how full it should be for a five gallon batch, but it would be good to know instead of guessing.
i used White out to mark the sides of my carboys at 1 gallon intervals. works great. doesn't disappear like permanent markers eventually do.
DC
using whiteout would certainly be easier than glass etch, I have also thought about using a metal yardstick. Once it was calibrated I could use it on all three of my carboys being as they are all the same size.
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