Add to My MSN

Click OK to add this content

Content Preview: rss

56 days ago

I've had mixed results recently working on HERMAN. Last week I began the process of re-plumbing the solenoid valves to tweak machine performance. This included having two water in valves (one dedicated to the mash tun and one dedicated to the HLT) after I found that reverse pressure would open them. The other change was brought about by installing the immersion chiller with agitator in the kettle. This meant I no longer needed to circulate kettle wort through a chiller until it reached pitching temperature. A side effect of this was that there was only one wort path out of the kettle (into the fermenter) compared to two previously. I had to pull apart the valve that was part of the old kettle wort chilling loop and discovered a good deal of hop debris in it. I think it was a good move to eliminate this path. Now the chilled and settled kettle wort simply gets dropped via gravity into a fermenter. The valve and fermenter fill path will be sanitised at the start of brewing with ...

So many things and so little time ...

67 days ago

It always seems like there are way too many projects to work on in the home brewery. I'd love to have built that counter-pressure bottle filler and I have the parts to do it but ... And I still haven't finished my LPG tank conversion into a stainless fermenter, nor have I sorted out the conical shell I have for another fermenter... And I've now done enough on the bar to allow myself to be distracted by other things ... There are many loose ends on the BrewTroller sculpture that need sorting out. The solenoid valves need a bit of work so that I can effectively fill both mash tun and hot liquor tun and also provide a system drain point for storage, so liquor does not stay in pipes and stale. I continue to have problems with the BrewTroller dropping out with back emf spikes from the solenoid switching. I'd really like to sort this out so that I can concentrate on brewing rather than getting back to a restore point on the BT. There are at least two things to do here - put some ...

Bar and Cellar - phase II

70 days ago

I've not had much time of late to work on brewing things but the last week I've begun to develop phase II of the bar and cellar. Phase I was an insulated box with my three tap flooded font mounted on it. It was primarily a fermenting chamber although during the summer it was needed to house the serving kegs. The cooling unit was external as was the gas bottle. The gas manifold for serving kegs was mounted inside the chamber which was less than ideal. Also the condensation from the flooded font meant the inside was always quite damp. The fermenting chamber maintains temperatures well. In effect it is a fancy 'son of fermentation' chiller. There is no need to change out ice bottles as the cooling comes from the ice bank. I pump ice water through a PC cooling radiator which then blows cold air into the chamber. I've been wanting to have two parts to this arrangement for a while. The opportunity to make a bar and have the existing chamber solely for fermenting and conditioning came ...

Hitting the target

101 days ago

I brewed a lager today that is a cross between a Helles and a Czech pils. It's a recipe that was inspired a long time ago by a lunar eclipse so I've given it the name Eclipse. The recipe tweak this time around is to use Summer Saaz hops which are a new breed coming out of my home state of Tasmania. They don't have the spiciness of Saaz and have a touch of the grapefruit flavours, but other than that they are similar to Saaz according to the description. I haven't had any time to do improvements on the machine except that I'm running build #263 on the BrewTroller and Matt has coded in some of my asked for features. This time around the HLT temp is based on the Mash target plus a differential. Also the kettle power can be controlled on the fly now to get that perfect rolling boil. Probably the most significant thing is that I had a moment of insight while looking at a graph of my last brewday. I've had troubles with mash temperatures oscillating nearly a full degree C. I've not been ...

An evolutionary step forward

114 days ago

I've been listening to Brew Strong lately and again Jamil and friends have helped improve my brewing. In particular I listened to their yeast starter program and have just pitched the healthiest yeast starter for a lager ever. The starter was for a Dortmunder lager which was batch #3 on the new HERMAN 7 powered by BrewTroller. I've blogged about a number of things on the BT site about this brew, but some observations for my own reference: To chill to lager pitching temps, I need to use ground water initially and then do the last stage (maybe below 30C) with ice water. What I actually did to chill was use the plate chiller with ground water and pumping ice water through it to pre-chill the ground water. It chilled everything a lot quicker than normal, but most of my ice water was depleted too soon. I had to wait a while for the ice bank to restore to get to lager temps and had to pump ice water directly through the immersion chiller to do it. Use a hop sack in the ...