March 31st, 2009
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.
Dave.
September 22nd, 2008
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.
Dave.
August 28th, 2008
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):
https://www.slobrewer.com/howto/kegcarboy-washer/
August 19th, 2008
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:
Happy brewing everyone,
Dave.
July 29th, 2008
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.
Hoppy Brewing,
Dave.
