Sometimes process changes aren’t for the better. This fall I made a bunch, starting with the Blichmann Hop Blocker. Then came competition brewing season and I didn’t have time to evaluate the results due to my frantic schedule (1-2 batches a week for three solid months.) The good news, though, is that I’ve now got lots of data both from the NHC feedback and my own testing and I’m going to make some changes.
The verdict? Not good. Several batches suffered from mild wild yeast infections. The judges didn’t always pick up the cause but when you taste them side by side it’s easy to pick up the problem. The other batches seemed to be lacking something that I couldn’t put my finger on. Not one batch was better than what I used to make before.
So, what did I change and what am I backing out? First, I started using the Blichmann Hop Blocker. It’s a great product that really helped prevent trub from reaching the fermenter. The problem, though, was that in the 10 gallon Blichmann Boilermaker my copper immersion chiller no longer fit. So I decided to change over to a Blichmann Therminator. Of course that meant a different setup for whirlpooling and sanitizing at the end of the boil.
Long story short, I tried several methods but ultimately about a quarter of my batches ended up infected in some way or another. The ones that weren’t infected seemed duller. I’m not 100% positive of the mechanism at work but suspect it has to do with letting the wort whirlpool and sit hot at the end of the boil. Why’d I do that? Otherwise the trub in solution at the end of the boil and hop pellet material would clog the Therminator. Ugh, what a mess.
Here were the downsides I found with my use of the Therminator:
Infections – despite back-flushing with hot PBW at the end of the brew day, circulating boiling water to sanitize before use, and attempts at autoclaving (which simply took too much effort to do regularly). I hadn’t had a problem with this before and the Therminator was the biggest change I’d made.
Added time – all the time I was spending trying to clean and sanitize the Therminator ultimately made my brew sessions longer.
Stuck Transfers – on two different hoppy batches I managed to clog up the Therminator completely meaning I couldn’t get all my wort into the fermenter.
Leaving the wort hot for longer – compared to an immersion chiller, which started dropping the temp of the whole batch right away, using the Therminator leaves wort at near boiling temp for longer. The Therminator was nice and fast but I had to do a hot whirlpool and let it settle for a total of about ten minutes before I could even start the draining.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure some folks are making great beer with this gadget but I’ve given up.
So I’m going back to an immersion chiller with a whirlpool. I’ll be brewing this weekend with this change in place and will post my results. The lesson here for me is to really take a more critical look at any changes I make to see if they’re really an improvement to the end product, the beer in the glass. And I need to do that well before competition brewing season. This year I’m going to use the summer for experimentation with process and I’m going to lock down all changes by October so I have time to let everything shake out before the winter brewing rush.
So after using An Analysis of Brewing Techniques to help answer a question that one of my homebrew club members had about fining, I decided to check Amazon to see what kind of reviews the book has received. To my shock I found a pair of low ratings from a decade ago that seem totally out of place. How could such a great book that’s cited numerous times in other homebrew texts and the BJCP study materials have a 2 1/2 star rating?
I’ve posted a review here: An Analysis of Brewing Techniques Review. If you don’t have this book see if you can track down a copy. If you do have this book I encourage you to post a review on Amazon to balance out the ones from so long ago. I’d love to see Brewer’s Publications revive this book for a new edition if possible.
Oh yeah, and sorry for not posting for a while . It’s been a busy year. Though just recently I had my Ordinary Bitter and Kölsch place in the first round of the NHC so they’ll be moving on to the big show. Both were recipes from Brewing Classic Styles: 80 Winning Recipes Anyone Can Brew with tweaks to match my process and with built water.
After doing a couple of dozen batches on my new sculpture and fighting with drifting mash temperatures most of the time I finally decided to swap back over to an insulated Gott cooler for my mash tun.
What a difference. I no longer had to pay attention to the mash temp, mess with pumps for my HERMS, run the stir motor on the hot liquor tank, or worry about grainbed compaction. Despite cool evening air temps the mash held within a degree over the course of the hour.
I really haven’t found a downside of this approach other than it means I have a surplus Blichmann Boilermaker mash tun for now. I’m going to run this way for a while and see if I can notice a difference in consistency on my beers and simplification on my brew day.
Once you’ve accumulated all the junk, err…, equipment required to brew beer, keg, and dispense, you start wondering if there’s anything else you can do with it all to justify the money you’ve spent. One easy and obvious choice is to make soda (or as some regions call it, pop.)
I started off with the decent and informative book Homemade Root Beer, Soda & Pop. It laid a good foundation and provided numerous tasty looking recipes.
Using that information as a starting point I created my own recipe for Ginger Ale. I’ll warn you in advance, this is not for soda lovers who don’t like the flavor of real ginger. This drink has a solid ginger base with an nice zing of pineapple juice and lemon. I’ve brewed it several times and have always gotten positive feedback. In fact I’ve helped some friends brew this themselves for Christmas presents just recently.
One note about safety when making a soda. Some recipes call for adding yeast and fermenting to carbonate in bottles. I strongly recommend against that because soda is filled with sugar for the yeast to consume. Even putting bottles in fridges will only slow down the carbonation. If you forget one or if you give one to a friend who leaves it out on the counter top it will explode. I always carbonate with a CO2 tank in kegs to avoid this. I sometimes will fill a carefully sanitized bottle from the keg, but only when I am sure I will drink it in the next couple of days. I did bottle one batch recently but for safety I added potassium sorbate at the correct dosing.
I’m going to assume you know how to make beer from extract and follow good sanitation practices. Without further ado, here’s the recipe:
2.5 Gallon Recipe for Dave’s Ginger Ale
Ingredients:
40 oz Desert Mesquite Honey (other honey will do but this is cheap at Trader Joe’s and has a nice flavor)
6 oz Fresh squeezed lemon juice
2.5 oz grated fresh ginger
32 fl oz Pineapple Juice
water to top up to 2.5 gallons
Directions:
Grate the fresh ginger and juice the lemons.
Put grated ginger into a straining bag and pour the pineapple juice and lemon juice through the bag. Tie the bag up so that you can easily separate the ginger from the ginger ale.
Add all ingredients to a large (at least 3 gallon) pot and top off with water to 2.5 gallons.
Stir well so that all of the honey is dissolved
Heat to 180 F, let sit for five minutes.
Transfer to a sanitized keg while hot, put in your keggerator, and carbonate like an American Pale Ale (15 psi at 40 F)
Enjoy! It is usually carbonated by the end of the first week or two but will be very strong. It mellows considerably over the following month and then the ginger fades almost completely.
I’m happy to announce that a project that BJCP Grand Master judge David Teckam has finally become available to the public. We’ve recorded some of his BJCP training sessions and are releasing them as low cost DVDs to help people prepare for the exam or just improve their judging skills. Check out he new website at www.BeerJudgeSchool.com.
So I was walking with my wife and dog tonight and I did a double take when I saw an old woman taking an empty flip top magnum of Stone Double Bastard to the curb for recycling. She was happy to give it to us and said she had a smaller one that the former college student tenant left. Turned out to be a 2 liter growler. Both are in excellent condition.
Unfortunately the Double Bastard bottle says “not refillable” so I’ll probably just look into ways to strip the paint so I can reuse it for some special future beer of mine (hmmm, maybe some of the barrel project?) Do any of you know how to clean it? If so shoot me an email at dave@slobrewer.com. I’ve heard a good soak in muriatic acid (pool acid) can do the job.
On my vacation I was faced with pile of kegs to clean up. While procrastinating and listening to the Brewing Network I remembered that Dr. Scott had come up with a homebrew scale keg washing station. Here are the full instructions (including videos of the washer in action):
My first few batches with my HERMS setup (even before I built the sculpture) had me messing around with the temperature of the hot liquor tank and swinging through a pretty wide range on my mash temps. That’s the opposite of what I’m trying to achieve so I did some hunting in the forums to see if there was an easier way to do it. Eventually I’d like to get to a digitally controlled, propane fired hot liquor tank that keeps everything on target but for now I’m willing to go a little more hands on. The pragmatic engineer side of me says to figure out what I’m want to achieve by doing it manually for a while then figure out how to automate the process.
The solution came to me in the form of some bypass valves ahead of the heat exchanger:
You can see that the two valves allow me to control how much of the continuous flow goes through the coil in the hot liquor tank and how much bypasses. The left side is a flow coming from the mash tun and the right side is wort returning to the mash tun. In this picture I’ve got the two valves half open so I’m getting some through the heat exchanger and some bypassing. The net result is that my setup is less sensitive to the exact hot liquor tank temperature and I can make gradual adjustments more quickly.
On a mostly unrelated note I’ve added a Celebrator Bock to my brew stand per Jamil tradition. Mine’s not blessed by the pope but it did help me have a nearly perfect brew session on Sunday:
Let me kick off by saying that I don’t condone people building this brew stand themselves. The fabrication involves cutting, welding, plumbing gas, and some electrical work. If you don’t know how to do those things then I’m not going to be able to teach you through this website. If, on the other hand, you’re simply curious how I made my stand then you’re in luck.
I had numerous responses to my previous post taking me up on my offer to make my cutlist and SketchUp files available. Well here they are:
Cutlist - Microsoft Excel file with two worksheets covering the metal cutting list and the other parts I used.
SketchUp Plan – Google Sketchup model of the sculpture I built. You can use this to drill in and get any measurement you are interested in.
By the way, I don’t claim this design is at all unique. I pulled from lots of freely available information on the internet and then made some adjustments for my own situation.
All the major construction on my new brew sculpture is complete. It’s based on the MoreBeer 1550 except it’s equipped for 5 gallon batches with Blichmann Boilermaker kettles. Also, since I was going for a smaller size I skipped the complexity of the tippy dump mash tun.
Here are a few pictures:
My New Sculpture. Three 10 gallon Blichmann Boilermakers, a 1×2 metal frame, plumbed propane, levelers, and hose rack
A Smoker BBQ Cover Fits Nicely
I still have a few things to complete this week:
Attaching the March pump (it’s currently in my ammo box setup but I’ve got a nice stainless mounting bracket)
Putting together the silicone hoses with quick disconnects
Installing the third burner (just waiting on it to arrive from George)
Upgrading the regulator (it’s currently a fixed pressure regulator that’s way under what I need. I’ve ordered an adjustable 0-30 PSI one.)
Mounting the Ranco temp controller
The overall height is just perfect as I planned it so I can easily see into the mash tun.
Some time in the future I plan to upgrade the following:
Add a control panel to hold my temp controllers and perhaps a float switch
Add automatic ignition for the burners
Upgrade to an ASCO valve on the HLT so I can control the burner with a temp controller
I did all the construction myself. Total cost without the pump and kettles was roughly $300 for all materials and consumables. Of course that assumes you’ve got access to a MIG welder and chopsaw, the skills or willingness to learn, and roughly 12 hours.
to help answer a question that one of my homebrew club members had about fining, I decided to check Amazon to see what kind of reviews the book has received. To my shock I found a pair of low ratings from a decade ago that seem totally out of place. How could such a great book that’s cited numerous times in other homebrew texts and the BJCP study materials have a 2 1/2 star rating?
. If you don’t have this book see if you can track down a copy. If you do have this book I encourage you to post a review on Amazon to balance out the ones from so long ago. I’d love to see Brewer’s Publications revive this book for a new edition if possible.
. It’s been a busy year. Though just recently I had my Ordinary Bitter and Kölsch place in the first round of the NHC so they’ll be moving on to the big show. Both were recipes from 
with tweaks to match my process and with built water.
. It laid a good foundation and provided numerous tasty looking recipes.
