beer =[ Remgrandt's Six Months of *NOT BREWING* ]=
- Thread starter grantmichaels
- Start date
I would, but it's 9.5% and the ship date deadline is in the week of my Memorial Day BBQ Contest, so unless everyone is cool with pushing back the final ship date a few days to 6/4, I'll just do my thing and try to get back in for July's NE IPA ...
The pantry-room rarely disappoints, and this AM is no exception ...
That'll do just fine, I think ...
It's a nice heavy-bottom pot, and is actually a double boiler ...
http://amzn.com/B001AS7YSC
If I like it, I'll just send the insert piece off to be fabricated with 304 mesh as a straining basket, like my eRig ...
That'll do just fine, I think ...
It's a nice heavy-bottom pot, and is actually a double boiler ...
http://amzn.com/B001AS7YSC
If I like it, I'll just send the insert piece off to be fabricated with 304 mesh as a straining basket, like my eRig ...
Yesterday was stark proof just how fucking stupid my eRig is ...
Yesterday's batch was way more hand's off than when I use my automated system ...
The introduction of a pump, indoors, adds a real risk of flooding that's kitchen-threatening ...
My 1st pass at the Golden Stout was a perfect example - if the grain bed tightens up and divides the upper and lower areas of the kettle from one another, your pump will overflow the mash tun and flood your kitchen ... very quickly, I might add ...
The eRig has an alarm on the PID-controller ... it's loud ... so when something triggers it, you can't ignore it ...
The one advantage of the eRig/pump setup is the plate chiller ... the plate chiller is definitely more efficacious than the immersion chiller ...
Now ... let's talk about yesterday's rig and process ... and cost ...
The Sansaire makes perfect strike water, and it'll hold it at temp without you needing to be there indefinitely ... that's liberating ...
I checked it with the probe of the iGrill, 1) to see how close they would read, and 2) so that I could have monitoring on my iPad over at my desk ...
With no spigots, tubes, or pumps ... I walked away ... nothing could go wrong ... I felt free ... I was free ...
I could have let the strike water sit indefinitely until I was ready, too, which is perfect for brewing while working ... more on this in a bit ...
Since the BIAB bag is a great way to separate the powder from the milled grains after milling, and I saw first hand what happens when you don't do this last weekend, I used the BIAB for the grain bill, and popped it in the aluminum basket I bought on Amazon for next to nothing ...
That aluminum basket keeps the bag off the bottom of the pot, but like 1/4" or so, enough to keep it from scorching or ripping or whatever, and the hand of the basket makes it really easy to lift the basket up and down, kind of pumping the water around inside the mash tun, for when you are heating it up after it's started to cool off power ...
The thing is, there was no reason to have turned off the burner ...
With almost 3.5 gallons of liquid and twice that many pounds of grains in the pot, the range needs to be on like a power level of 4 or 5 just to maintain mash temp ... next time I just won't turn it off at all, and the iGrill probe gives me an idea what the temp of the mash is the whole time, and the alarms for going outside of the window notifiy me if I need to do something drastic ...
Again, walked away to my desk ... out of the kitchen ... at my desk ... worked a little while brewing, even ...
I wouldn't both with using the inner pot of my double-boiler kettle next time, and pouring through the grains into the bigger one ... that was a PITA because of the lack of height above the kettle, under the hood ...
Next time I'll heat the strike water in the boil kettle, on the stove, in position using the Sansaire, and then remove the replace the Sansaire with the grain basket and turn the burner on to 4 and walk away with the iPad to monitor the mash temp ...
After mashing out, it's business as usual, except it's better ... the 240v gets to boil faster than the 120v coil, boils harder, and the hood does a better job of removing the steam ... it's also nice that the kitchen sink across the room is free and clear, without the pump and kettle over there ...
Once the boil is started and the bittering hops are in, there's no reason to hang around until it's time to add more hops ... walked away from the eRig, walked away from the kettle on the stove ...
It boils, it's on high, and there's nothing to change until it's done ... free to work ...
I used a stainless steel ruler to measure my wort height in the pot, to have a good idea where my volumes were through the process ...
It's not hard to remember to toss the immersion chiller in the pot when you are adding the Whirfloc and the nutrient, and it's hand's off when it's in there ... again, no reason to hang out ...
When it was done, I killed the burner, transferred the pot to the sink, screwed the chillers onto the faucet and turned it on, and put the lid over the pot to limit what fell from the air into it ...
There's nothing to do ... the ground water is hot again ... walk away and let it go for a while ...
I came back, dumped a bag of ice around the base of the kettle to get a little bit more cowbell in terms of cooling, and walked away ...
When the ice melted, I poured it through a filtering funnel into a fermenter, capped it off, and threw it in a 40F freezer for a few hours to bring it lower ...
The compressor in a little chest freezer is puny, and when you put a heavy glass fermenter in there will a load of warm liquid, you aren't cooling fast in there ... again, walked away ...
Which brings me to the yeast ...
Happy with that process, too, as I really like the extended storage and reliability of dried yeast ...
Liquid yeast have been iffy for me, and dried yeast have been money ...
I thought that process was really easy ...
I StarSan'd a 600mL low form pyrex, then rinsed the StarSan with boiling water from my Zojirushi, and poured in a 400mL can of Fast Pitch ...
I aerated the shit out of the Fast Pitch with a milk frother, and then rehydrated the dried yeast in 5 seconds with the same, and covered it ...
The only improvement to that process for next time would be a drop of Fermcap S ...
Those yeasties were krausening in there by the time I pitched them after some hours ... next time I'll not get them going until I start to chill my wort, and I'll let them get happy while the fermenter is in the chamber cooling off further ...
If I didn't brew so many big beers, I'd just grab a portion of the actual wort to rehydrate them in, and skip the Fast Pitch ...
At the end of the day, it was a better experience than using the eRig ...
And the charting from the iGrill and stuff was a nice add ...
I didn't really find the electronic refractometer to be all that exciting, truth be told, but I didn't buy it for that ... I bought it for it's range, up to 85P, because I've brewed beers bigger than the manual refractometer read (Mulberara), and will again ...
I'm pretty happy with how things went, and honestly, with a few tweaks, I'll probably just do it that way inside going forward ...
Fuck the eRig ... and especially fuck pumps indoors ...
Maybe I'll sell that fucker on HBT ... the only thing I missed was the plate chiller, and not really ...
Yesterday's batch was way more hand's off than when I use my automated system ...
The introduction of a pump, indoors, adds a real risk of flooding that's kitchen-threatening ...
My 1st pass at the Golden Stout was a perfect example - if the grain bed tightens up and divides the upper and lower areas of the kettle from one another, your pump will overflow the mash tun and flood your kitchen ... very quickly, I might add ...
The eRig has an alarm on the PID-controller ... it's loud ... so when something triggers it, you can't ignore it ...
The one advantage of the eRig/pump setup is the plate chiller ... the plate chiller is definitely more efficacious than the immersion chiller ...
Now ... let's talk about yesterday's rig and process ... and cost ...
The Sansaire makes perfect strike water, and it'll hold it at temp without you needing to be there indefinitely ... that's liberating ...
I checked it with the probe of the iGrill, 1) to see how close they would read, and 2) so that I could have monitoring on my iPad over at my desk ...
With no spigots, tubes, or pumps ... I walked away ... nothing could go wrong ... I felt free ... I was free ...
I could have let the strike water sit indefinitely until I was ready, too, which is perfect for brewing while working ... more on this in a bit ...
Since the BIAB bag is a great way to separate the powder from the milled grains after milling, and I saw first hand what happens when you don't do this last weekend, I used the BIAB for the grain bill, and popped it in the aluminum basket I bought on Amazon for next to nothing ...
That aluminum basket keeps the bag off the bottom of the pot, but like 1/4" or so, enough to keep it from scorching or ripping or whatever, and the hand of the basket makes it really easy to lift the basket up and down, kind of pumping the water around inside the mash tun, for when you are heating it up after it's started to cool off power ...
The thing is, there was no reason to have turned off the burner ...
With almost 3.5 gallons of liquid and twice that many pounds of grains in the pot, the range needs to be on like a power level of 4 or 5 just to maintain mash temp ... next time I just won't turn it off at all, and the iGrill probe gives me an idea what the temp of the mash is the whole time, and the alarms for going outside of the window notifiy me if I need to do something drastic ...
Again, walked away to my desk ... out of the kitchen ... at my desk ... worked a little while brewing, even ...
I wouldn't both with using the inner pot of my double-boiler kettle next time, and pouring through the grains into the bigger one ... that was a PITA because of the lack of height above the kettle, under the hood ...
Next time I'll heat the strike water in the boil kettle, on the stove, in position using the Sansaire, and then remove the replace the Sansaire with the grain basket and turn the burner on to 4 and walk away with the iPad to monitor the mash temp ...
After mashing out, it's business as usual, except it's better ... the 240v gets to boil faster than the 120v coil, boils harder, and the hood does a better job of removing the steam ... it's also nice that the kitchen sink across the room is free and clear, without the pump and kettle over there ...
Once the boil is started and the bittering hops are in, there's no reason to hang around until it's time to add more hops ... walked away from the eRig, walked away from the kettle on the stove ...
It boils, it's on high, and there's nothing to change until it's done ... free to work ...
I used a stainless steel ruler to measure my wort height in the pot, to have a good idea where my volumes were through the process ...
It's not hard to remember to toss the immersion chiller in the pot when you are adding the Whirfloc and the nutrient, and it's hand's off when it's in there ... again, no reason to hang out ...
When it was done, I killed the burner, transferred the pot to the sink, screwed the chillers onto the faucet and turned it on, and put the lid over the pot to limit what fell from the air into it ...
There's nothing to do ... the ground water is hot again ... walk away and let it go for a while ...
I came back, dumped a bag of ice around the base of the kettle to get a little bit more cowbell in terms of cooling, and walked away ...
When the ice melted, I poured it through a filtering funnel into a fermenter, capped it off, and threw it in a 40F freezer for a few hours to bring it lower ...
The compressor in a little chest freezer is puny, and when you put a heavy glass fermenter in there will a load of warm liquid, you aren't cooling fast in there ... again, walked away ...
Which brings me to the yeast ...
Happy with that process, too, as I really like the extended storage and reliability of dried yeast ...
Liquid yeast have been iffy for me, and dried yeast have been money ...
I thought that process was really easy ...
I StarSan'd a 600mL low form pyrex, then rinsed the StarSan with boiling water from my Zojirushi, and poured in a 400mL can of Fast Pitch ...
I aerated the shit out of the Fast Pitch with a milk frother, and then rehydrated the dried yeast in 5 seconds with the same, and covered it ...
The only improvement to that process for next time would be a drop of Fermcap S ...
Those yeasties were krausening in there by the time I pitched them after some hours ... next time I'll not get them going until I start to chill my wort, and I'll let them get happy while the fermenter is in the chamber cooling off further ...
If I didn't brew so many big beers, I'd just grab a portion of the actual wort to rehydrate them in, and skip the Fast Pitch ...
At the end of the day, it was a better experience than using the eRig ...
And the charting from the iGrill and stuff was a nice add ...
I didn't really find the electronic refractometer to be all that exciting, truth be told, but I didn't buy it for that ... I bought it for it's range, up to 85P, because I've brewed beers bigger than the manual refractometer read (Mulberara), and will again ...
I'm pretty happy with how things went, and honestly, with a few tweaks, I'll probably just do it that way inside going forward ...
Fuck the eRig ... and especially fuck pumps indoors ...
Maybe I'll sell that fucker on HBT ... the only thing I missed was the plate chiller, and not really ...
GM.....you pretty much brewed how I do it. I like your comments about using the Sansaire to heat the strike water. I also have found that during the mash I move my 5 gallon pot iff of the heating element and just wrap with a heavy beach towel. It seems to hold temp constant for a 60 minute mash. I stir it abd take temp readings every 15 or 20 minutes. If I left it on the burner, I think it would get to hot. Lastly, to eliminate another step, skip the immersion chiller and just have ice on hand. For my 2-3 gallon batches the wort gets cooled down to 70-75f in about 30 minutes.
Cool recap.
Cool recap.
When I do them on the stove I just put the pot in the one side of the sink and fill it with ice and water around it. Once that melts I just run cold water every couple of minutes and let it overflow to the other side of the sink. Works pretty well. Although my groundwater is a lot cooler.
I wouldn't buy a Sansaire just to do it, but since I have it around, using it means I can walk away for an indefinite amount of time, whereas I'd have to be at the stove to dial in the strike temp ...
As for the chiller, that's probably true for you, but you probably have mid-fifties temp ground water ...
The chiller does a good job of cooling the wort rapidly enough to get a nice cold break formation, and really, since it's already here and is exceedingly simple to use - why not ...
But yeah ... neither are necessary ...
Thing is, I could have run two batches in series, side by side, with no problem ...
I have two big burners, and I have have two bowls in the sink, too ...
It would only extend my brew day by an hour, to do a pair, and it would net two different beers and obviously double the volume ...
I could easily live with brewing a pair of 1.5 gallon batches every other weekend ... 3 gallons of beer every two weeks is a nice amount of homebrew, since I also drink commercial stuff ...
I expect those torpedo kegs will be really nice, too ...
As for the chiller, that's probably true for you, but you probably have mid-fifties temp ground water ...
The chiller does a good job of cooling the wort rapidly enough to get a nice cold break formation, and really, since it's already here and is exceedingly simple to use - why not ...
But yeah ... neither are necessary ...
Thing is, I could have run two batches in series, side by side, with no problem ...
I have two big burners, and I have have two bowls in the sink, too ...
It would only extend my brew day by an hour, to do a pair, and it would net two different beers and obviously double the volume ...
I could easily live with brewing a pair of 1.5 gallon batches every other weekend ... 3 gallons of beer every two weeks is a nice amount of homebrew, since I also drink commercial stuff ...
I expect those torpedo kegs will be really nice, too ...
I was mashed into the double boiler insert pot yesterday, and boiled in the outer pot ... but next time I won't bother with the inner pot at all ...
It's a typical heavy-bottom 21qt (5 gal) pot ... it's stainless ... I bought it to make cheese in a while back ... nothing special ...
As for sparging ... I didn't ...
Next time I'll probably reserve a gallon from the mash and keep it heated with the Sansaire during the mash and sparge it through the propped up basket ...
It's a typical heavy-bottom 21qt (5 gal) pot ... it's stainless ... I bought it to make cheese in a while back ... nothing special ...
As for sparging ... I didn't ...
Next time I'll probably reserve a gallon from the mash and keep it heated with the Sansaire during the mash and sparge it through the propped up basket ...
tctenten said:
Yeah ...
I know I will use the bigger kettle outside, eventually ... but not until I have something I've already iterated upon a few times inside ...
I don't have big-batchitis ...
tctenten said:
That Winware pot is *VERY* heavy-duty ... the base is like a half-inch thick steel ... it's 21qt ... and the double-boiler aspect will be perfect for converting to a mash-basket with Arbor ...
I will probably do that very thing myself ...
I very well might buy a second one, and convert both at once ...
I wanted to participate in the BrewDown, but I'm really looking forward to the Correhuela batch ...
I might have to bang that one out Friday night, or Saturday ...
w00t ...
I might have to bang that one out Friday night, or Saturday ...
w00t ...
Sunday's reading ...
Glorious!
Organized and ready to rock out some spree-brewed batches ...
Let's see ...
Eanie Meanie Mightie Moe - these one's gonna make my golden stout baller, yo! ...
Eanie Meanie Mightie Moe - these one's gonna make my golden stout baller, yo! ...