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.

Before this whole thing started, I had just purchased two filter housings from Amazon to filter a problematic beer that I had recently brewed (long story!).

After filtering that beer though, I had two filter housings just sitting there doing nothing. Being that I will likely very rarely, if ever, have the need to filter another beer, I started thinking of what else I could use them for.

This led me to look into the design of the Randall 3.0.

I ended up finding the users guide that ships with it, which also included a full parts list (attached below). After researching each part and their pricing, I did find that Dogfish Head definitely does not make much money on selling them. But I knew I could do it much cheaper!

The Filter Housings:

The two housings that I had, were bought from Amazon for around $15 using my Prime account. They are Pentek Model 158117

The housings you buy do play into your cost savings here, as they have 1/4" NPT threads for the inputs and outputs. This cuts cost on having to adapt the 1/2" or 3/4" NPT threads on the filters that you'd typically find at your local hardware store, down to something you can attach a beer line to.

The housings do have pressure relief valves (PRV's), but for the Randall, they are not used, and they don't affect anything being there, either. It may be possible to find the same housings without PRV's for less money, and if you can, I would definitely go with them if they save you a couple of dollars.

The Stainless Tubes: