EKA V

Got some new toys!!! I brewed yesterday and had a hell of a busy day so I didn't blog during the making of the beer and I'll do my best to remember what went wrong and what went well.

Ingredients:
8 lbs 2-row
0.5 lbs Crystal 15L

1oz Williamette 4.9%AA (changed this as per Jamil recipe book)

WLP001 x2 (I'm too lazy to make a starter)

Servomyces
Whilfloc

5 gallons Ridgecrest filtered water
5 gallons distilled
4 grams gypsum
4 grams calcium chloride
1 gram epsom salt

Crush, mash, sparge, and boil all went off without a hitch. Then we get to cooling. I bought a larger wort chiller from MoreBeer and while I was at it I got the Jamil style with the whirlpool feedback. Here's a pic of the setup:

 

What you are seeing here is water goes from the sink to the red bucket which has a pre-chiller. The ground water here is really warm. The bucket is filled with ice water which I continually stir to get optimum heat transfer. This water goes to the new chiller in the kettle and goes out of said chiller into the sink. The wort goes from the ball valve in the lower front of the kettle to the pump on the ground which then pumps the hot wort to a re-circulation connection on the chiller. This steers the wort right onto the chiller coils and causes the wort to whirlpool which maximizes heat transfer. The effect of this is that the wort is cooled from boiling to 70F in about 40mins instead of an hour.

The only issue I had here was that I hooked up and ran the re-circulation system about 5 minutes before flameout to sterilize the system and the pump was pissed. I couldn't understand why. It made all sorts of noise as if it was not primed. Once flameout occurred and I began cooling the wort, then it calmed down and started working great. I had taken it apart earlier in the brew day to clean it and I thought maybe I reassembled it incorrectly. I'll double check when I use it again.

Anyhow, once cooled, the wort was immediately moved to the fermenter. In hindsight I should have waited a little for the break material to settle. The whirlpool causes all that break material to just mix up in the wort. I ran out of ice in the pre-chiller and the wort was now actually warming up from 70F and I felt to need to get it transferred immediately. So the beer won't be pretty.

Ok then time to oxygenate. I put a lot of time into replacing tubing and stuff from the old O2 system I have. I've never taken the stone off and cleaned the tubing in the year or so that I've had it and figured it was time. New tubing and new air filter. It was a pain in the butt to get the stone pulled from the black tubing that MoreBeer had jammed the stone into. I actually had to get the box cutters out and cut it free. Why would they fit so tight? Well I found out. First issue, the plastic tubing is all bent to hell and I couldn't control the stone well enough to get it into the wort to oxygenate it. It would make it maybe half way down and sometimes not even that far. I was getting real frustrated trying to push it down father and farther and getting nowhere. I wasn't sure I was even oxygenating the wort at all. Then it happened. I heard a scary pop sound and the oxygen tank started making all sorts of scary noises. I stopped everything and when I pulled it out of the wort I noticed there was no O2 stone on the end of the tubing. The pressure had blown it right off the tube. This is why MoreBeer put the thing on so damn tight. Well now my O2 stone in lost in the fermenter. I'll have to get it back when I empty the beer out of it. Also, I'll need to think of a way to control the stone better once it is in the wort. This could be as simple as tie it to a steel rod of some kind and then move the rod around.

Then we get to the part I'm most proud of. I've spent the last month not making beer but engineering a way to make better beer. I really feel my ester issue is due to temp swings. So I built a super fancy temperature controller. 

So what are we looking at here? The top of the box contains three LEDs. A red for power on and two greens to indicate which solid state relay is on. You will see a nice square hole cut out of the lid and that is where a nice display modules lives that is currently being programmed. Mounted on the far side of the box is a Raspberry Pi. It has a USB WiFi device which you can see to the right. It provides a web interface that I can use to monitor the temperatures and change settings. The web page looks like this:

The green line is the beer and blue is the chest freezer temp. I wrote this code using some java script, PHP, and little CSS. C code that I wrote will then read the settings and both temperatures and make a decision about whether or not it should turn the freezer on. This code reads the temps via SPI bus that is connected to an analog to digital converter. It turns the freezer on or off using a solid state relay. I went all out on the solid state relay. Freezer compressors can draw a lot a current and I didn't want to worry too much about heat and over current issues. There is another smaller solid state relay for turning on a heating element of some kind in the future. Most of the system is powered by an AC to DC converter which is wired up to the wall power and outputs 5V. This 5V powers the Raspberry Pi and most of the supplementary components. However, it is a little too noisy for the analog to digital converter so I wired up a 9V battery to that portion of the circuit. My math says I should get 50+ days of continuous use on that 9V so it should be good enough for long lager fermentations. Below is a pic of the schematic for the electronics:

The first temp probe just sits in the chest freezer. The second is put down a thermowell. The ones at MoreBeer are too skinny and I had to get a couple from a place in LA called Brewer's Hardware. They fit perfect. I jam them into the carboy hood and it makes me smile. Here a pic of the chest freezer with a carboy full of water that I used during testing:

 

This works great and I couldn't be more pleased. The screen grab of the web interface is the one for this actual beer and you can see how well controlled the temperature is. If it comes out estery, it will not be because of temperature. I really have a pro style control of the beer temps now and I can't wait to see the fruits that come to bear from this temp control box. 

The last small issue I have here is how to mount the box itself. I tried magnets yesterday. I attached them to the box with a hot glue gun. They just are not strong enough. I need to figure that out for next time. For now though I duct taped it down to the top of the chest freezer lid.

There are improvements still to be made on the box. Right now it does not do warming temp control so come winter I'll need to write more code and the display needs to be programmed and installed. But right now it is functional and usable and I intend to use the crap out of it this fall.

I bought all the supplies needed for a Scottish 70 from the Bearded Brewer. It is a malty low alcohol beer. The trick is to get lots of body in the beer with few grains. It will require a very hot mash temp. So stay tuned for that.