Brew day!

[DAPPH]

He'll have to season it , so it should be around Christmas or the new year , now't worse than 52 pints made in June being so yeasty in August that your gal disowns you and the mates you shared it with are demanding lodgings in your garage as they've been chucked out because of their exhaust smells .

 

[Brad93]

usually a few cheap bar type beer chillers available on eBay/Facebook.
Would one of those not work?

 

[Maker]

Yeah a glycol chiller would be perfect but I never found one cheap enough and close enough.

 

[Maker]

All kegged, there was a bit remaining in the fermenter above the level of the crap, but I couldn't be bothered to dirty another keg for just a few pints. I've stood it in the cold water from my cooling contraption to help with the carbonation a little.


I'm too lazy to wait for it to naturally carbonate, and I haven't built myself a Blichmann Quickcarb at a fraction of the cost yet, so I poured a pint into my ISI whipper and shook it with 6 bar of CO2 to see what it's like right now:



It's a lot clearer than I was expecting, it was supposed to be really hazy, I assume that's down to the first dry hop being too late. Good head retention. The flavour is pretty unremarkable, really doesn't have a lot of taste at all. It's "beer" but that's it, it's not nutty, it's not foamy, it's not hoppy and it doesn't have a surprisingly fruity note which lingers on the tongue. It is very clean, it doesn't have "that homebrew taste" all my other beers have had, I reckon that's down to using kveik or using a yeast starter so I'm not underpitching like I probably have been previously. I'm not sure if the lack of flavour is from it being a rubbish recipe (Only hops are at whirlpool and dry hopping, not too unusual for a NEIPA I suppose but I want some bittering hops) or because I left it on top of the yeast for too long after it was done fermenting, I've heard that can strip away flavour. I think my homemade hop socks might be too tight a weave and limit the hop utilisation too, maybe I should try just chucking loose hops in the fermenter next time, I think they'll settle out. I'm tempted to buy some more hops and dry hop in the keg to get a bit of flavour into it. Or maybe I need a hop rocket?


The next brew won't be for a while now, I start my new job in a couple of weeks and won't be here to mess with all this, I should have lots of money to chuck at it when I do come home to play though. I'm wondering if I can set up some sort of web enabled fermentation controller, brew one weekend, monitor the fermentation remotely with a Tilt and when it hits FG, drop the temperature to just barely above freezing until the following weekend when I can come home and keg it.

 

[Bullet2012]

Hmm , I can wait

 

[Maker]

Mum worked out the leccy usage for the last month, 40kWh higher than the month before, and the only thing different we can think of is that's the month I made beer, but surely that can't amount to 40kWh? It was a little under 4 hours from turning on the HLT to turning off after the boil, I've got 3kW elements so assuming they were running constantly that whole time (Which they weren't), that's 12kWh, there's no way messing around with ice packs and an ice cream machine when I was cold crashing made up 28kWh, not really sure what's going on there. It got me thinking though, if I reconfigure my controller to use the EPack instead of the SSR for temperature control, it's probably pretty simple to use it (Maybe in combination with a Pi) to monitor the energy usage, perhaps Daleyd can confirm?

I was also wondering if it's safe/acceptable to use the EPack set to 50% power to run a 6kW heating element from a 16A circuit? As long as it's in phase angle or half cycle firing mode the current x time will be well below the magnetic trip region of an MCB and the average power will still be 3kW so it shouldn't ever reach the thermal region. I can't think of any good reason why you shouldn't do it, but it still feels wrong.

 

[daleyd]

Mum worked out the leccy usage for the last month, 40kWh higher than the month before, and the only thing different we can think of is that's the month I made beer, but surely that can't amount to 40kWh? It was a little under 4 hours from turning on the HLT to turning off after the boil, I've got 3kW elements so assuming they were running constantly that whole time (Which they weren't), that's 12kWh, there's no way messing around with ice packs and an ice cream machine when I was cold crashing made up 28kWh, not really sure what's going on there. It got me thinking though, if I reconfigure my controller to use the EPack instead of the SSR for temperature control, it's probably pretty simple to use it (Maybe in combination with a Pi) to monitor the energy usage, perhaps Daleyd can confirm?

I was also wondering if it's safe/acceptable to use the EPack set to 50% power to run a 6kW heating element from a 16A circuit? As long as it's in phase angle or half cycle firing mode the current x time will be well below the magnetic trip region of an MCB and the average power will still be 3kW so it shouldn't ever reach the thermal region. I can't think of any good reason why you shouldn't do it, but it still feels wrong.

Yeah you should be able to - I think I enabled the Energy block before I sent it to you, if not let me know and I can enable it by a code - you can add this in the software wiring and wire the input from the Network "Meas.P" parameter (Measured Power). This will then totalise the energy usage, you can set the units Wh/kWh etc and read this from the Energy modbus register (4150).

For the second part, yeah that should work too - you can add a current limit (INominal) which should take care of that for you, I think you might need to adjust some alarms as well otherwise it'll complain but I'm not 100% sure. You just need to make sure the current rating of the stack is greater than the max current that the load could in theory take (32 amp stack so should be OK for 6kW/230V load = ~26 amps if my maths is correct?).

 

[Maker]

Excellent, it's such a powerful little device. I'll have a play.

 

[daleyd]

Excellent, it's such a powerful little device. I'll have a play.

give us a shout if you need anything, I've not done much with those units for a while but I've got a job on at the moment with loads of them in it so I'm getting a bit better!!

 

[knighty]

do any of you guys make cider or fruity stuff?

I really like sweet/fruity tasting stuff :-o

(please don't kill me)

 

[123hotchef]

I used to make cider and perry and many different county fruit wines stoped a while back as I drank too much!

 

[DAPPH]

do any of you guys make cider or fruity stuff?

I really like sweet/fruity tasting stuff :-o

(please don't kill me)

Making my own annual vodka rumtopf , currently have a three litre jar of it on the go.
Add about seven or more different layered fruits as they become available in a large stoppered big jar cover each layer with sugar and some vodka or brandy . invert it once every week for a month & set it back on it's base.
Let it infuse & settle for four months till Christmas ..

Not recommended for diabetics . Use the fruit on desserts or ice cream and stand by for the sugar rush .

Black green & red grapes ....... shop & home growns , strawberries, chopped apple, hand full of blackberries , 1 small chopped banana, two rings of fresh chopped pineapple, a bit of pear chopped , small peeled segmented orange each segment cut in half small stick of rhubarb etc .

I'm hoping to carefully syphon off the clearest liqueur & put it in small crimp cap bottles then store it for another year to mature more after a few samples have been had .
Next year I might do similar & also add a couple of cloves and a stick of cinnamon

Dick Strawbridge did a mean forced early sweet rhubarb and 4 ounces of sugar with about 16 cardamon seeds layer in fours as he built his litre bottle liquer , topping it up using vodka as the presrver .. again, for diabetics be careful in how much you drink as it's very high on the glycemic index .

 

[Barking Mat]

do any of you guys make cider or fruity stuff?

I really like sweet/fruity tasting stuff :-o

(please don't kill me)

Every time I buy a house over here, it's got a bloody cider press.

I've only bought two.

The first was concrete, and in the workshop, was a bugger to remove, full of rebar.

Second was wood.

One summer, just for a laugh, we collected all the apples in the garden, slung them through an old apple chopper, hand powered, erected the bed, and top bit of the cider press, and pressed them, took all day.

Ended up with 60 litres of juice, we put in big plastic containers, like antifreeze comes in.

Tasted it a few months later, we'd made rank alcoholic vinegar.

Then I know nothing about making cider, I'd say it was a laugh, but it was quite a lot of work.

Funny thing is, I don't really like cider.

Hey ho.

 

[123hotchef]

Every time I buy a house over here, it's got a bloody cider press.

I've only bought two.

The first was concrete, and in the workshop, was a bugger to remove, full of rebar.

Second was wood.

One summer, just for a laugh, we collected all the apples in the garden, slung them through an old apple chopper, hand powered, erected the bed, and top bit of the cider press, and pressed them, took all day.

Ended up with 60 litres of juice, we put in big plastic containers, like antifreeze comes in.

Tasted it a few months later, we'd made rank alcoholic vinegar.

Then I know nothing about making cider, I'd say it was a laugh, but it was quite a lot of work.

Funny thing is, I don't really like cider.

Hey ho.

hand powered nooo!
give me electric

 

[Barking Mat]

Sheer engineering genius !

hand powered nooo!
give me electric

 

[123hotchef]

Sheer engineering genius !

take is better

 

[Maker]

usually a few cheap bar type beer chillers available on eBay/Facebook.
Would one of those not work?

Good idea!



Hopefully 35 degree wort doesn't bugger my nice new chiller.

 

[Maker]

Today's brew was a slight modification on David Heath's Kolsch recipe. Came out to 1.039 so should achieve 4.1% ABV

A few problems to think about for next time:
My cheap temp probes, wired up with cheap BNC connectors, are very intermittent, occasionally read an offset, and one outright stopped working. I'll have to replace those next time.
Pre-boil gravity was supposed to be 1040, I just barely got 1035. I've noticed the sparge head doesn't distribute the water evenly, I wonder if it's leaving precious sugar behind in the area with poorer circulation.
I forgot to measure the post-boil volume, checking the pre- and post- boil gravity in a calculator suggests a boil-off of about 2.5L (I was aiming for 3L), but it never really looked like a very strong boil. I'll see if I can sort out some insulation next time. Ideally I'd install a 32A feed and upgrade the heating element.

Chiller worked very nicely, I need a bit more plumbing to use it properly though (Return pipe in the pic above was just poked into the filler hole).

 

[Maker]

Just found a 3 year old bottle of porter in the shed. Apparently 2022 is a good vintage.