Labor Day Weekend

Labor Day 2013 is upon us, the weekend that tends to be the swan song of summer around these parts. From here on out it is a long slog down into the depths of winter. I've also extended the normal 3 day weekend into a full blown week of vacation as my list of tasks to get done around the house has grown quite long, especially with the birthday party for the little one coming up next weekend.

Earlier this week I kegged the Pale Tranquility so that it will be available for the party next weekend. Putting it in the keg on Wenesday only allowed for 11 days to carb up, at normal serving pressure that has usually not been enough for the beer to be at its prime. As a consequence I upped the pressure to around 30 lbs to speed it up a little bit. I don't want to over carb so I pulled a sample this evening and it is doing very well. At this point I'd put it close to 90% of what I'm looking for, so I turned it back down to serving pressure and will consider it good. One more week at normal pressure and it will be at that sweet spot that I love.

Oh, and for how it tastes, pretty damn good if I do say so myself especially given that it was an American Pale recipe that I built mostly from available grains that I had on hand. The only ingredient I had to pick up was 1 oz of Simcoe for flavoring, I reused the yeast from a prior batch of Sky Blue.

One of the more enjoyable tasks that is on the list is to take up the brew club challenge of cloning Stone's Arrogant Bastard. I had planned to brew it this coming Sunday morning, but the weather forcast is not looking good so it looks like it will be pushed to Monday morning. Close enough. I've yet to settle on the recipe for the clone, a bit of research is in order to find out what I already have on hand and what I'll need to complete the brew. The next brew after that is also in the planning stages. Our club has volunteered to help out with a fundraiser the first weekend of November, all German style beers. I've volunteered to supply a Dunkleweizen. It'll be my first, but it's a style I like so will be happy to showcase to the public and enjoy the rest.

Another project I'm hoping to complete this week is the ribcage immersion chiller that I've been wanting to make for quite some time. I have all the necessary hardware already sitting around I just haven't had the time to put it all together. If I can get to it on Sunday it'll be ready to use on Monday for the clone.

Cheers

Yeast Washing

So, I put the Slam Dunkle (Dunkleweizen) into a keg last night. It should be ready in a few days.

That allowed me to utilize my new pressure cooker to sanitize jars for washing the yeast cake.

This was a dry yeast packet from one of the last beer kits I have bought. I didn't take much note of which company it was from, or yeast strain, my notes only said 'German Wheat'.

Well, now I have 4 'German Wheat' yeasts to use in the future. The process itself was simple enough, I'll be doing this again with the yeast from Ranger Danger, as well as Brown Turkey. I think I have just enough mason jars for those 3 yeast cakes. I may in the future just save two jars instead of the 4 I got out of the Dunkle.

With liquid yeasts from White Labs, or Wyeast running in the $6 - $8 range, this should be saving me a good portion of the cost of future brews.

Rib Cage IC

I was browsing HBT looking for a faster way to cool my wort. There are times in the summer where it has taken me 75 minutes to cool from boil to pitching temp, and that is just not fast enough. I have plans to make a prechiller to help combat that, but then I ran across this thread.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/diy-interwoven-rib-cage-immersion-chiller-106415/

The OP calls it a Rib Cage Immersion Chiller (RCIC). My current IC is only a 20' length, and during the spring/fall/winter it doesn't do to bad, but I'm still running times of about 40 - 45 minutes to reach 70F. Many of the people in this thread claim to have gotten down to under 15 minutes to cool 5 gallons.

With a prechiller added, other claim under 10 minutes for 5 gallons. I'm thinking I'm going to try out a similar design, and retask my current IC into the prechiller portion for the warm months.

There are several other alternate takes on the RCIC, and I think I'll attempt the following:

I like the design, it has the dual coils both being fed cool water at the top, split with a T, and then the outflow is collected with another T at the base, leading out with a single outflow tube. The in/out single tube will need to be a larger diameter than the coils themselves I would think to keep from a chokepoint slowing the flow of water. I plan to make something similar.

Here is another one:

This one is quite a bit more radical and involves quite a bit of work to make, but I bet it cools down faster than blazes given that each coil is being feed cool water. To much work though.

Let me know what ya'll think.

Multi-level stand

Today I built a 2-tier stand to place the HLT and MT above my boil kettle so I can drain one into the other, without having to stack them on makeshift boxes, tables, etc.

Materials were all 2x4's, with some left over plywood for the platforms.

4 @ 58"
6 @ 37"
9 @ 18"
2 @ 21" x 18" 3/4" plywood

And the finished product.

It isn't the prettiest thing in the world, but I made it using scrap lumber I had lying around taking up space.
It will do the trick until I need to make something better.

Brewing Goals

Over the course of the last year I've been brewing extract kits. This has been done mostly at a whim with very little planning into what I brewed. The kits were selected for taste for the most part, and the goal (besides making good beer to drink) was to learn the process involved, techniques, sanitation, fermenting, kegging/bottling, etc, etc.

One of the great things about home brewing is that you can brew exactly what you like to drink. This also can lead to stagnation, you only brew a select few beers over and over. One of my goals is to be proficient in brewing any style of beer. In order to do this, I have to make sure that I continue to branch out from brewing beer that I currently already enjoy, and try out new things. Even I don't know whether or not I'll like the new ones more, or less, than what I consider to be my current favorites.

Another aspect of branching out to cover all styles is that it will help me in another goal of becoming a certified beer judge. It is one thing to do the training for certification, learning the styles based off of examples provided, and quite another thing to know the styles inside and out because you've made your own examples.

I've put together my own little spreadsheet that has the BJCP style guidelines, and I've putting in the recipes I've already made. I plan to tackle a new style at least once a month in the coming year that I have never done in the past, while also keeping stocked up on some of my wife and my favorites.

I'm going to have to put off the lager styles for now as I don't have a freezer or fridge I can dedicate to lagering, yet. So my first foray into new territory looks like I will be making a English Brown of some sort. When I find the style and recipe, I'll post it.

Grain Mill

I hadn't planned on getting a grain mill this soon but circumstances sort of forced me into it (oh darn).

I had to wait until payday to pick up the ingredients for tomorrow's brew day. So I went down after work to the LHBS, but was informed that they couldn't crush them Friday, nor could they promise them for Saturday, maybe Sunday, they would call.

Unacceptable to say the least. (Did I mention I was the only one in the store, they had an hour until closing time, and her excuse was she couldn't do it and wait on customers at the same time, oh, and it took me all of 5 minutes to crush the grain once I finished this set-up. Nice customer service there CMC.)

So I bought a hand crank grain mill. This moved up one of the projects I was planning for 2013 to tonight. I assembled the mill, which is kinda of aggravating in it's design as the edge clamp puts the mill outlet over whatever flat surface you have it clamped onto. This is fine for small hobby type stuff, but for milling 10 lbs of grain it isn't feasible.

I fortunately have this small portable table we received for free from the furniture store when we bought our new dining room set. It had been floating around, not really finding a place in the house and ended up on the patio outside.

I took that table and cut a hole in the top in order to insert a funnel to catch the milled grain. The funnel drops it into a chute that empties into a bucket.

I removed the hand crank from the mill and inserted the proper sized tap from my tap and die set (you lose man points if you don't know what that is), put a socket in my power drill to match, and Viola! Electricly Powered Grain Mill.

Start to finish, about 1 1/2 hours.

Right now I'm just using scrap cardboard for the funnel and chute, some time in the future I'll come up with a better solution, but it works for now.

Mt Dew box forms the funnel through the table, dropping into the cardboard slide to the bucket.

The crush looks pretty good to me, I have no whole grains that are uncrushed and plenty of hulls to set the grain bed. Looking forward to tomorrow.

Shopping List

In preparation for doing an AG recipe in the hopefully not to distant future I've come across a few items that I need.

1 - Mash Paddle, needed to stir the grains as they steep
1 - General Idea of what I'm going to be making (Grain Bill, hops, yeast)
1 - Method of keeping the hot water tank above the mash tun, I'm going to have to improvise in the short term until I can build a stand for just this logistical problem.
1 - Some sort of kit for testing my water quality. PH has a huge effect on grain utilization I've heard. I have some items left over from the days of fish tanks, should suffice for PH. I can also get a water quality report from the city showing various levels of chemicals. If any are too far out of whack I'll have to find out how to balance them.

Additionally:

1 - Packet of champaign yeast to restart a stalled fermentation of the Dunkleweizen (stuck at 1.024 for 2 weeks)

DIY Projects

During this months LHBC meeting several DIY projects were discussed, and members examples were presented. These types of projects are one of the aspects of home brewing that I like the most, being able to make your own equipment to suit your particular needs.

Sure you can go out and buy the following items, but it is also great fun to make them for yourself.
Over the next year or so I will be attempting to make a few of the following items:

Counter-flow chiller and/or pre-chiller for immersion coil
Yeast starter stir plate
3-tier stand
Electric powered grain mill

I've already made my own immersion chiller which works well for the most part. However, during the summer months when the ground water is pretty warm it takes quite a while to chill 5 gallons of wort to pitching temperature. I'm either going to have to add a pre-chiller using another coil and cooler to that, or go with the counter-flow. I haven't decided quite yet which way to go.

I'll be posting each project as I tackle it, and will feature pictures from start to finish.