Making a smoker

[Andy Hamilton]

Thinking of having a go at making a smoker to smoke some malt. I'm thinking using the equipment I have is the best bet; I have...

1. Cool box
2. an old disposable barbeque
3. A large cake tin
4. a piece of silicone tubing

Drill a hole in the tin and the cool box, attach the silcone tubing to join the two. put my chips into the tin and put that onto the lit barbeque. wrap the malt in cheesecloth and and place that inside the cooler, perhaps on a wire rack if I can fashion one. Resoak the malt every 15 mins and smoke for 45 around 1kg at a time.

My concerns are, lack of smoke getting into the cooler and the tubing melting. Anyone had any experience?

[boboff]

I have played with this at home and had some great results.

Can it be hot the smoke?

By playing around with the BBQ and letting the wood and chips burn then smothering them, you get good results just letting the fire smoulder away, ala making charcoal.

Also using water to cool the pipe, i.e. taking it off the pond pump one end and the filter the other, going through the pond from the fire to a container with the grain in will keep it cool.

But I reckon the easiest way is to have a fire in your shed! Or Old Tent, just let the smoke build up over time, and even have the BBQ just inside the tent/shed, no need for tubes. Having this body of smoke keeps it cool, and gives you flexibility, plus for months after every time you visit the shed you get a lovely reminder!

I used to work at a Salmon Smokery and the AFOS Kilns were very sophisticated, a small motor would slowly drip chippings on a 1kw electric fire element, then suck the smoke through a stainless steel shed with Salmon in it!

[Andy Hamilton]

Made a slight modification on your advice and used a bin intead of a cool box, kept the silicone pipe and it seems to work the bin is cool to the touch and plenty of smoke being generated. So I guess it is a cool smoker. Pumps seems a little to high tech for me on this first attempt!

Should have some juniper smoked malt in 30 mins.

[boboff]

Nice

Have you germinated the Barley first then? How do you do that?

[Andy Hamilton]

Nope, I bought a bag of malted grain and used that.

[tizzy]

Hubby made a wonderful smoker using a dead larder fridge. It was quite a tall one but that was probably because it was the only one available at the time and if you're going to smoke fish you may as well do a lot eh? He saves any nice wood shavings that he gets hold of - whisky barrels make awesome wood smoke if you can get them. The good thing about an old fridge is that it comes with racks already.