Saturday, November 23, 2013

EKA V Soft Water

All out of beer. Time to make more. So I thought I'd make EKA V again but this time I will use softer water.

The ingredients are the same as EKA V.

Yeast WLP 001 Lot number 1003290. A 1L starter was made the night before. Stir plate was used. Kinda.

For the water I started with distilled and went from there. Here's what it looked like:


Started at 4pm. I just finished now at 10pm. I hit my mash temp at 152F and the OG was 1.042. Hit all the numbers.

Some of the stuff that went wrong:
- Stir plate sucks. I need to get going on the new one. My next nerd project. I want to implement a PID controller to maintain the spin rate of the magnet.

- I used my bare hands to open/close the drill bit onto the mill. It tore up my hand a little. I need wear a glove or use a towel or something next time.

- I had my headphones in and was trying to stay very busy cleaning. As a result I never heard/forgot that I was vorloufing into a gallon pitcher and it overflowed and made a mess. I used the mop to clean up. This would be avoided by another person with me.

- Still have issues with cleanly getting the wort from the re-circulation silicon tubing after cooling. It just makes a sticky mess. I've got to think of a better way.

- The pump seems to have issues moving the hot wort from pot to immersion chiller for re-circulation. I think I need to make the silicon tubing from pump to chiller shorter. It should make it easier on the pump.

- Still issues getting the wort cooled down enough. I can get it cooled very quickly to 75F ish but then I can't get cool water in the big chiller. I run out of ice in the pre-chiller so fast. I just need to remember to buy more ice at the store.

- When I turned on the temp controller I wanted to cool the wort a little before I pitched yeast. So I turned on the force on option and the temp controller seemed to just hang up. I'm not sure what happened but I will need to run this bug down later. I had to kill the process, change the force on option off, and then restart the process and it ran normally fine.

- Too much hot break in the beer after cooling. I need to find a way to settle it out faster. I don't like it just sitting there, not cooling more, becoming more infected by bugs while the break settles.

- If I'm going to keep tweaking water, I should get a scale.

I will say that the water did make a difference in taste. I tried the wort and it was...different. Not sure how it will turn out but I am sure it will turn out different.

Also, I switched the fermenting fridge to the smaller one and plan to serve out of the larger one.

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