My name is Rich Bingham and I live in the small St. Louis suburb of St. John, Missouri, hence the name of my brewery. The main purpose of this site is to promote the craft of home brewing as well as to show you some of my equipment.


Brewing can be as simple or as complex as you wish to make it. My brother-in-law got me started by brewing with extract, some sixteen years ago. Those beers turned out pretty good, but after quite some time, I decided to take my brewing to another level. Mind you, I have known of several people that consistently brew quality beers from extract, but I wanted more control of the process, which meant converting to all-grain. Besides, you need more gadgets when brewing with grains and I love to build gadgets.

My wife loves it, due to the equipment that I decided to make, the kitchen was no longer big enough, so she got it back and I moved downstairs to the basement.

I am a member of the "St. Louis Brews" home-brew club, as well as "Skotrats Brew Rats" cyber brewing club. The reason for joining these clubs was to hone my brewing skills and to make beers more true to form of the imports that I enjoy. Reading books can give you a good understanding of the craft, but nothing beats practical experience, shared by others. The best mistakes to learn from, are the ones made by other people.

Inside you will see the system that I make these beers with. I preferred to build my own, versus using an out of the box system and am really glad that I did. After a lot of research, I decided to build a H.E.R.M.S., which is a Heat Exchanger Re-circulating Mashing System. This will be explained inside in better detail. My first system was rather simple, which consisted of 2 modified half barrels, for the Boil Kettle and Liquor pot and a bucket-in-a-bucket Mash Tun. The Liquor pot was elevated and used gravity to dough in and sparge. A triple diaphragm "Sure-Flow" pump was used for recirculating through the HERMS loop and transferring sweet wort to the Boil Kettle. It all worked fine, but the pump was working at it's upper limit of 170 degrees f and since the bucket system was only 7 1/2 gallons, I was limited to five gallon batches and that just wasn't going to cut it any longer. I took what I had learned about likes and dislikes and designed my present system, "Oscar." He has gone through a few changes but is fairly similar to the way he was first designed. I am in the process of making some major changes in him now and hope to have all that information on this site too. This system allowed me the opportunity to make several gadgets to make it even more functional.


Did I say I like gadgets?


I would like to say "Thank You" to Doug Evans from Vinbrew Home Brewing Supplies, for always letting me play with his new brew toys. Several of my equipment ideas came from him. Also, thanks Maury for putting up with my dumb questions when I converted to all-grain. While giving thanks, I have to include the members of The Brewrats cyber homebrewing club as well as the members of my local brew club, The St Louis Brews.