Looking for the right Outdoor LP Burner

This should (and probably will) get moved over to the homebrewing sub-forum pretty quickly...
What burner do you currently have? That might help in a recommendation. Do you know what BTUs you have on it?
I have a burner I got at Home Depot for $40 on sale after Thanksgiving. IIRC it has around 55,000 BTU, and gets my batches up pretty easily. Plenty of the homebrew retailers have higher power burners available, it all depends on how much you can invest. I think the highest I've seen runs something like 200,000 BTUs. I would think that would get stuff boiling pretty quick.
Also, it is more the volume being boiled that makes the difference, not the kettle itself. 6.5(ish) gallons coming to boil doesn't really care if it's in a 40-gallon pot or a 7 gallon one.
You may also think about looking into an electric heat stick element. That could give you the boost to get up to the boil, then rely on a burner to keep it there.

 

This is what I have. It'll do ya just fine! (God, I love this video and, no, it's not mine)



Mine uses Natural Gas, as does the one in the video. A propane version is available, which I assume delivers similar performance. No BTU rating on this, but it'll get 12.5 gals boiling in under 20 mins. As I recall, I paid something like $25 a few years ago. It's selling in the high $30's today, though I suspect you can probably find it cheaper if you look hard enough. You'll need to build a suitable stand for it and add a bit of stock plumbing, though you might be able to use what you have. If NG is an option, I would strongly recommend it over propane. Both the cost and convenience benefits are huge! The only thing you sacrifice is portability - a non-issue for me (YMMV).

 

I have a Blichmann, which is probably the most common, quality brewing burner. It's a bit pricey, about $150. The Anvil burners look like they could be decent (and cheaper $99), but I have never used one so can't comment on the quality.

You can usually find used burners pretty easily if price is an issue.

 

I was gifted an edelmetal burner from northern brewer that gets shit done. Bayou classic has the same burner out for a quarter of the price.

 

I would personally advise on the blichmann burner. Very solid performance and extremely efficient delivery of heat. Feel like it pays for itself within a year or two over the cheaper burners since you waste tons of propane with those burners. Also blichmann came with nice components such as a high quality needle valve which you don't find with cheaper burners. You could probably source the components cheaper on your own, but getting the whole package from blichmann is nice...imho. I chucked my bayou burner years ago...didn't actually, but was on the verge of going Office Space fax machine on it (crap components & inefficient). I still use my hurricane burner and is decent, and use one of those jet burners like Mike posted, but that burner loud and super inefficient. I should post a photo, but the jet burner melted the silicone right off of the ball valve handle of one of our brewpots.

Nothing else i've used compares to the blichmann. Speed to boil is similar to the jet burner, very quiet and sips propane.

PS...never tried the edelmetal or anvil

 

Since you're using propane, your opinions on efficiency are irrelevant! My burner paid for itself in the first batch, efficiency be damned!

No argument there. Ball valves are really not ideal in this application. You really need the finer control that only a needle valve can give you.

I hate to be dwell on the point, but NG is about 80-90% cheaper than propane on any given day in my neck of the woods. Unless you're a certified tree-hugger, efficiency is irrelevant in this context, IMO .

 

My edelmetal is similar to my friend's blichman. I would like to do a side by side with the two and see how they compare.

 

Not everyone lives in the NG world...farthest north NG goes is Pittsfield, Mass in western New England, about 60 miles south of here. But I definitely should be tying into my 57 gallons LP tank at my house. Would save money if I ran my gas grill & brew system off it....
But when you're paying $22 a 15 lb tank exchange...like prices around here for most tank exchanges, efficiency matters (I get 40 lb fills for $22)

 

I would love to hear results...propane consumption (via weight) vs. time to say 160F...although you are giving your money to ABInbev buying edelmetal now....just throwing that out there

 

Agreed. I got mine as a gift a couple years ago. I also found out inbev is in bed with picobrew too.

 

I tend to take NG for granted. In your case, efficiency, indeed, matters. I'm assuming the 57 gal tank is waaaaay cheaper per lb than even your 40 lb tank. I don't know the logistics of your setup, but what's stopping you from using the big tank?

 

I have a Bayou Classic KAB4 and its been great so far! I have a 10g Megapot and I can bring 8+ gallons up to strike in about 10-15 minutes and maintain a nice boil on a fairly low (for propane) setting. Its super-quiet too! Previously I had used my dad's turkey fryer that he got in a set and its was loud and not very efficient.

There are only two issues: one is that the black coating burns off pretty badly at first and gotten some marks onto the underside of my kettle, which to me is not a big deal at all. There is also a stainless steel version that I wish I had gotten in retrospect, just because it looks cooler. Also, I wish there were a little more wind protection, but I haven't had nearly the wind issues that I had on my dad's fryer burner.

 

That requires converting between cost per gallon vs. cost per lb...way above my paygrade

Just require an investment tying it all together....grill is on my deck which is on the north side of my house, my garage where my brewing system is found is detached on the south side of my house and my tank which is on the east side of my house. Planning on getting one of those Insta-hot water heater systems run off the propane tank, so basically hoping to do all three of those in one fell swoop.

 

Cost per BTU is the comparison. I believe LP has a higher energy density. If you can get the BTU's of LP and compare it to the delivered price for a BTU of NG, there you go.

But this requires research and then math. So I refuse.

Studying your energy usage and cost is a sure way to to know you are being screwed. Just like we should never never know exactly how much each each pint of homebrew really costs. The ingredients, kettles, hydrometer blah blah blah. Don't do it!

 

Many people lament this fact without realizing that the purpose of the black coating is simply to allow the otherwise rust-prone product to survive shipping without developing an ugly orange 'patina'. It wasn't meant to survive the heat of the burner and high temp paints are just too expensive to preserve maybe a buck's worth of Chinese steel.

 

LP contains a bit under 22,000 BTUs/lb, which is about $1 in my neck of the woods (20 lb fill). NG contains 100,000 BTU/therm, which varies monthly, but has been hovering between 25 and 45 cents for me in recent years. For grins, I'll add another 20 cents for delivery (I don't know what my gas company charges). Doing the Math, it takes about 4.5 lbs of LP to deliver the same BTUs as 1 therm of NG. That's $4.50 versus 65 cents for 100,000 BTUs. Thus, I'm saving about 86% by using NG. Obviously, YMMV, plus I'm doing lots of rounding here. As I said, I assume a bigger tank is substantially cheaper per lb than the 20 lb suburbanite staple.

Amen to that!

 

Yeah, I knew that it would, and it didn't bother me personally (I used a wire brush and was able to get just about all of it off), but I just wrote that in case anyone was interested and didn't want there to be any surprises.

 

Brulosopher uses 2 kab4 burners and switched it to natural gas. I believe he even has the instructions to do so on his website.

I bought the kab4 and the thing really does a nice job. I regularly do ten gallon batches (80 percent of the time)and have no problem boiling quick. It's basically overkill on 5 gallon batches.

 

I use the anvil burner. I like it my problem is that it doesn't really have much wind protection to it. So in my garage in can get the water for a 5 gallon batch to temp in about 20 minutes. Down in my backyard where I have to be to get water for my chiller takes about an hour. Gas usage isn't terrible if I'm in the garage I probably use a third of a tank per batch in the backyard it's closer to a half tank or more