I am the smartest man alive!

I decided that I was going to go out and get myself up to speed with a sparge setup that made sense. I wanted to use a cooler that held between 4 and 5 gallons of water, I wanted a sparge arm that had a nice spray and I wanted something that was in expensive.


So after some thinking, I remembered that I had an odd shaped cooler in the shed that my little brother used to use for motor cross races. I planned on drilling a hole and putting a tap in it, but I found that the drain plug pulled completely out and with a few gaskets it sealed up tighter than a dolphins butt hole.

After I had my water reservoir all sealed up, I decided to move to the sparge arm. I considered some PVC contraptions to float on the grain bed and I even thought about making a copper one. However in the process of looking online to see if there were easy DIY instructions on building something like this, I found a few posts with people deciding to use shower heads.


I went to Mr. Seconds and got myself a very basic shower head (that looked chrome but wound up being half plastic, a blessing in disguise it turns out) and used some of my odds and end hose items from my other projects to come up with this.



After I noticed that the shower head as it was did not work because there was not enough water pressure, I took the shower head apart (with the water running through it) and noticed that pressure should not be a big deal. The water was forced through a tiny hole and came through the inside with pretty good force.



After some brainstorming and a 22oz of Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye (awesome!) I decided to cut the shower head in half so that the tight straight stream hit a solid spot thus creating a outward spray. Amazingly it worked.

As you can see in this picture it puts off a nice wide spray (though you cannot see it from the side view).

I am pretty pumped to try out my new device this weekend on my Doppelbock I am brewing, I just hope the plastic can handle the 170f+ temps it's going to get.