DIY Randall

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ryanmetcalf
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DIY Randall

#1 Post by ryanmetcalf » Wed Jan 29, 2020 4:49 pm

Has anyone tried making a DIY Randall? How did it turn out? Any advice?

https://www.maltosefalcons.com/tech/bui ... randall-30
What is a Randall you may ask? Back around 2002, Dogfish Head Brewing figured out how to turn a filter housing into a device that could infuse beers with various ingredients as they were being poured. They named this genius device "Randall the Enamel Animal", and the when they actually started building them for the beer industry the name stuck. The original Randall stirred up the beer world quite a bit, but it did have a pretty serious flaw; that being that it foamed, a lot!
So, in 2010 they set out to re-design the Randall to address the foaming issue. What ended up working was to add a second "de-foaming" chamber, which can be surrounded by ice, and a flow control faucet to balance the beer flow on the way out.

Now, you can buy these pre-built, directly from Dogfish Head for (at the time of writing) $298.00. While this is great for commercial breweries and some heavy pocketed home brewers, we have to face that fact that most of us home brewers are cheap and always looking for ways to save as much money as possible.

That's where my motivation to build this myself came in.
https://homebrewacademy.com/how-to-build-a-randall/
Invented by the brilliant minds at Dogfish Head back in 2002, Randall the Enamel Animal is an “organoleptic hop transducer module.” In other words, it’s a device (not a guy) that infuses flavors and aromas from various ingredients into a finished beer as it travels from the keg to your cup.

What sets the Randall design apart from other infusion methods such as late additions, whirlpooling, and dry hopping or fruiting is you’re not affecting the entire batch of beer (unless you want to). You’re affecting however much of the batch you want to affect.
I've thought about doing a primary chamber with the filter housing, then if I was to do the 2nd chamber, do it with a regular soda/drink bottle and you could adjust the size of your defoaming chamber to suit/change out for fresh/clean ones (or even use brown plastic Mr Beer or rootbeer bottles to avoid light exposure)

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