The beer gods do not smile upon me today. After the whole black lager disaster I forged onward. I bought new serving lines for the beer as mentioned in the previous post. After trying out the first line I went back into the house to attempt to make a second, longer line. I must have had some type of beer leak in the keg and in the time it took to make a new line and get back to the fridge the entire keg had emptied into the chest freezer.
It was a surreal experience. I didn't even notice as first. I put the new line on and plunged the tap down and all I got was air. As first I thought that the new line had a leak because all I heard was air. But that didn't make sense. Even if I had a leak it would leak beer not air. I looked at the bottom and it was all white with beer head which didn't really register at first since the chest freezer is white anyway. Once I figured it out I was sad.
I told Ellie and she seemed to really be sad for me. Like the good trooper and wife that she is she snapped into action and began scooping the beer with a ladel from the bottom of the fridge into pitchers. I was so disheartened that I wanted to just dump it all but I glad she didn't let that happen.
Afterward we poured some into a growler for a crazy lazy who liked my shirt and Ellie drove off to deliver it while I poured some into a growler for a party tonight. We drank the rest. I then proceeded to clean up.
Lessons learned. Be sure there are no leaks when installing new beer lines.
Silver linings. Now I have a temp controlled fridge that has been freed up to lager the black lager.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Black Beer Tragedy
To start, the current EKA is the best. The soft water is the way to do this in the future. The lower temp and the starter helped generate fewer esters. I'd bet next week it will clean up more and taste even better. I think the next time I brew, I will brew even colder, with more yeast, and a starter. That should make it as clean as possible. Then we can add in some crystal malt and a little amarillo and then I think I've got my beer.
Some things I learned recently.
- You can make beer fizzy by shaking it up but you will also put all the yeast in suspension and the blonde beer will be yeasty for a week or more until it settles out.
- Beer lines need to be small in ID, large in OD, and long. I saw a way on the internets to use that really tiny fridge water lines. I'm going to try that. http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/1te7c8/how_to_14_icemaker_tubing_beerlines_great_pour/
Ok now for the reason of this post. The temp control box has died. I believe it happened during a brown out a couple of days ago. It appears that the brown out caused the file system to become corrupted. The pi is unable to be booted at this point. It makes me sad. I have backed up the code so that's good. But not the temp data or the logs. I may be able to mount the drive on a linux box and extract some of those pieces of data. I'll try that later. They are not a huge loss. The worst part is configuring the box to execute the code I wrote. Permissions needed to be set up. Configurations to make the serial port behave a certain way at power up and so on. Those will take a while to remember. What I think I need to do is figure out a way to clone the drive so that I will be able to quickly recover from this issue in the future.
Worse yet is the potential status of the beer. It is a lager and I wanted it to be kept at 52F for a few weeks. It has warmed to the garage temp for the past few days. I sampled it and it is finished fermenting. The FG is 1.010 and it tastes good. So I think I will leave it at the current temp until I keg it.
Some things I learned recently.
- You can make beer fizzy by shaking it up but you will also put all the yeast in suspension and the blonde beer will be yeasty for a week or more until it settles out.
- Beer lines need to be small in ID, large in OD, and long. I saw a way on the internets to use that really tiny fridge water lines. I'm going to try that. http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/comments/1te7c8/how_to_14_icemaker_tubing_beerlines_great_pour/
Ok now for the reason of this post. The temp control box has died. I believe it happened during a brown out a couple of days ago. It appears that the brown out caused the file system to become corrupted. The pi is unable to be booted at this point. It makes me sad. I have backed up the code so that's good. But not the temp data or the logs. I may be able to mount the drive on a linux box and extract some of those pieces of data. I'll try that later. They are not a huge loss. The worst part is configuring the box to execute the code I wrote. Permissions needed to be set up. Configurations to make the serial port behave a certain way at power up and so on. Those will take a while to remember. What I think I need to do is figure out a way to clone the drive so that I will be able to quickly recover from this issue in the future.
Worse yet is the potential status of the beer. It is a lager and I wanted it to be kept at 52F for a few weeks. It has warmed to the garage temp for the past few days. I sampled it and it is finished fermenting. The FG is 1.010 and it tastes good. So I think I will leave it at the current temp until I keg it.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Schwarzbier
I wanted to make a Schwarzbier. But I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I bought the ingredients. I wanted to go simple and just use pilsner as a base malt. Also, I wanted some kind of de-bittered specialty grain so I went with Carafa II. Ok. There are other specialty malts and I didn't get them. Soooo, it will be a black pilsner beer. Not sure if anyone who drinks it will think it is a Schwarzbier or if it will even be good. But here we are, so let's do it.
8.5 lbs Pilsner
12oz Carafa II
1.65 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 60mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 20mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 0mins
WLP830 x2 with 1 liter starter (stir plate) Lot num: 1002989, Date 3/4/14
Here's the water:
3:00pm - Got everything measured out. Boiled O2 stone. Going to start heating up strike water. I'm considering this the start of the brew day. If done by 9pm. Then we all good. Also, I bought some tubing and connectors and stuff to improve the cooling process. More on that later.
3:31pm - Got the water done and am heating up the strike water. Got the grain milled. Pulled the mash tun off the shelf and stuck my nose in it when I opened it, just like everytime. And it smelled foul. Almost like a mild vomit smell. I narrowed it down to the ball valve. I put the steel braid, washer, and ball valve real quick into a PBW solution with super hot water. I'll leave it for 15 mins or so. Since it's on the hot side, any infection will be killed in the boil so I'm not too worried but I plan to clean that valve more thoroughly and today. And if the beer tastes like shit, we'll know one possible reason why. I may just replace that ball valve. Maybe completely disassemble it and see if I can clean it.
3:54pm - Mash temp was a little high, 158F. I added some room temp water to get it to 151F. After the PBW wash the ball valve smelled a little better. I will re-access after the run off and give it another smell. Also, I will be sure to order up a new ball valve. Maybe it's time to replace the old mash tun. Also, pH came out a little high 5.5ish instead of 5.2. Probably won't be real bad but I think it goes to show that it won't be as dark a beer as I think it will be. Haven't had a bad brew day in a while. This day is going badly. It's my fucking birthday. Doesn't this brew day know. There's only one thing left to do I think. Time to start drinking. I bought some Gordon Biersch.
4:06pm - A bird flew in. I yelled at it. It flew out.
4:25pm - Sat down for a sec. Wanted to note that my temp controller box is having an issue. I made it such that the two key executables fire up upon boot up. But the tempcontroller program doesn't work. If I kill it, then restart it, it works. I think the issue is that the Pi I/O requires permissions that I had to setup to get pi user access to the I/O ports. I don't sudo the tempcontroller executable in the startup script so I don't know which user starts this up. It works when I log in and kill the process and restart because when I log in as the pi user, I now have permissions. Ergo, I think I have a permission issue. I just thought of this just now after having had beaten my head on the issue last night. Late last night. Working on my first Winter Bock. It's good.
5:50pm - Took a 30min break for Chinese food. Mongolian Beef. Pre-boil gravity is 1.042. Higher than I thought it would be. Kevin is on his way over.
6:14pm - Things looking up a little. I tried the wort. No vomit. Ellie feels the same. The wort tastes good. So maybe the malt bill is not so bad. Also, I fly my new plane tomorrow. So that's good. The vomit odor in the ball valve is completely gone. I made sure to clean the crap out of it. I'm gonna pour me another beer.
9:03pm - Done. OG was 1.050. A little higher than what I thought but that's ok. It tasted good. Looked a little more dark brown than black. I should google translate dark brown beer into German and use that to name this beer. Kevin came. We had good talks. The new cooling system worked like a champ. Basically we use the basin as a sump and re-circulate ice water through the coils. We got the wort down to 50F in 25 or so mins. Really fast. Everything else went without a hitch so I guess we'll see what happens.
8.5 lbs Pilsner
12oz Carafa II
1.65 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 60mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 20mins
0.5 Hallertauer 4.1%AA @ 0mins
WLP830 x2 with 1 liter starter (stir plate) Lot num: 1002989, Date 3/4/14
Here's the water:
3:00pm - Got everything measured out. Boiled O2 stone. Going to start heating up strike water. I'm considering this the start of the brew day. If done by 9pm. Then we all good. Also, I bought some tubing and connectors and stuff to improve the cooling process. More on that later.
3:31pm - Got the water done and am heating up the strike water. Got the grain milled. Pulled the mash tun off the shelf and stuck my nose in it when I opened it, just like everytime. And it smelled foul. Almost like a mild vomit smell. I narrowed it down to the ball valve. I put the steel braid, washer, and ball valve real quick into a PBW solution with super hot water. I'll leave it for 15 mins or so. Since it's on the hot side, any infection will be killed in the boil so I'm not too worried but I plan to clean that valve more thoroughly and today. And if the beer tastes like shit, we'll know one possible reason why. I may just replace that ball valve. Maybe completely disassemble it and see if I can clean it.
3:54pm - Mash temp was a little high, 158F. I added some room temp water to get it to 151F. After the PBW wash the ball valve smelled a little better. I will re-access after the run off and give it another smell. Also, I will be sure to order up a new ball valve. Maybe it's time to replace the old mash tun. Also, pH came out a little high 5.5ish instead of 5.2. Probably won't be real bad but I think it goes to show that it won't be as dark a beer as I think it will be. Haven't had a bad brew day in a while. This day is going badly. It's my fucking birthday. Doesn't this brew day know. There's only one thing left to do I think. Time to start drinking. I bought some Gordon Biersch.
4:06pm - A bird flew in. I yelled at it. It flew out.
4:25pm - Sat down for a sec. Wanted to note that my temp controller box is having an issue. I made it such that the two key executables fire up upon boot up. But the tempcontroller program doesn't work. If I kill it, then restart it, it works. I think the issue is that the Pi I/O requires permissions that I had to setup to get pi user access to the I/O ports. I don't sudo the tempcontroller executable in the startup script so I don't know which user starts this up. It works when I log in and kill the process and restart because when I log in as the pi user, I now have permissions. Ergo, I think I have a permission issue. I just thought of this just now after having had beaten my head on the issue last night. Late last night. Working on my first Winter Bock. It's good.
5:50pm - Took a 30min break for Chinese food. Mongolian Beef. Pre-boil gravity is 1.042. Higher than I thought it would be. Kevin is on his way over.
6:14pm - Things looking up a little. I tried the wort. No vomit. Ellie feels the same. The wort tastes good. So maybe the malt bill is not so bad. Also, I fly my new plane tomorrow. So that's good. The vomit odor in the ball valve is completely gone. I made sure to clean the crap out of it. I'm gonna pour me another beer.
9:03pm - Done. OG was 1.050. A little higher than what I thought but that's ok. It tasted good. Looked a little more dark brown than black. I should google translate dark brown beer into German and use that to name this beer. Kevin came. We had good talks. The new cooling system worked like a champ. Basically we use the basin as a sump and re-circulate ice water through the coils. We got the wort down to 50F in 25 or so mins. Really fast. Everything else went without a hitch so I guess we'll see what happens.
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