Beer Party

We had a beer party for Ellie. This was to celebrate 6 months since her last treatment and to raise money for her marathon in Ireland. I named the brown beer Balloon Knot Brown and the wheat I named Banana Hammock Wheat. I made two fliers for them:

 

I found the brown to be a little too hoppy. If I make it again I think I will dry hop it for 4-5 days instead of a week. Also, if I choose to dry hop in the keg again, I'm going to use whole leaf hops because the pellets leave too much hop particles in the keg. The wheat was really good. It had a slight banana aroma and tasted a little citrusy. Something I learned was that these wheat beers need to be carbonated high. So, you really can't have two kegs on the same regulator the way I have it setup if one of them is a Hefewiezen. You can get dual regulators for the same CO2 tank. Just costs money. What I tried to do was disconnect the CO2 line to the brown keg and then crank up the wheat beer carbonation two days before serving. I kicked it up to 18PSI. What is actually was on serving day was likely less. It seemed to turn out ok.

The party people drank all the homemade beer. I got a lot of compliments on the brown ale. Which surprised me since it was the stronger beer in both alcohol and flavor. It was also the first to be drank. Even though no one went out of their way to say that the wheat beer was good, it did get drank. I offered people some lemon slices for the wheat beer and some took it.

The party was great. We had a pinball machine and the foosball table was out. We had maybe 50 people come and I kicked out whoever was left at 1am then cleaned up and went to bed. It was a good party and I think everyone had a great time. Also, Ellie raised all the money she needed for Team in Training. All in all, success!!

German Hefe

First off let me say that the upgrades are not going so great. The stir plate is slow going but it is coming along. The closed loop chiller didn't work out. More on this later. I'm not ready to throw in the towel on either of these yet but let's just say work has been put into both.

The brown ale was kegged on Thursday. I added the dry hops to the keg. I tied floss to the steeping bag and tied it to the outside of the keg. This will help retrieve the hops the following Wednesday. The brown ale finished at 1.020 and tasted good. Can't wait on that one.

So now I wanted to make a wheat beer for Ellie. I ordered up the German Hefe kit from MoreBeer. Ingredients:

4lbs 2row
6lbs Wheat
0.5 oz Northern Brewer at 60min.

Servomyces at 50 min.
No whirlfloc.

Hefeweizen Ale Yeast WLP300 Lot number 1300IPTPORA1.

When the kit came in the mail the yeast seemed warm and I was worried they might be sick or dead. I did make a starter for them and I noticed the next morning that they flask was warm so they were in there doing something.

I invited dad over to help brew. It was HOT. I tell you what. Poor efficiency again. I added all the DME I had to the wort at the 50min and got the OG to 1.049 which was pretty close to the 1.050 I wanted. We used to glass fermenter this time so I can fit it in the chest freezer with the keg of brown. I did turn the temp down to 62F for the first few days to keep the yeast in check. Those hefe yeast can go nuts and then we have banana beer. But so far no strong banana smells so we are doing good.

The brew day was long and hot and the only thing notable was the chilling. I had this great idea to have the March pump push ice water through the coil. This was a miserable failure. The pump just didn't have enough pressure to make this happen. I'm thinking I may be able to shorten and widen the pump lines and give it another go on another weekend that is not a brew day.

This beer should be ready in a couple of weeks and then we can have the beer party. Wish us luck.

Upgrades

"Upgrayedd gonna kill me!" Great quote from a great movie. I have some ideas of projects to improve the beer.

First idea: Upgrade the stir plate. The stir plate works but has issues. First off the badass magnet is not properly on the motor. So the stir bar is not balanced. This is an easy fix. The harder fix is the issue that as the yeast grows and sugar is consumed, the viscosity of the fluid changes. This means that when I set the stir plate to spin at the rate I want, it will eventually stop spinning all together. What I need is a control loop.

This shouldn't be too hard. There is quite a bit of clearance below the fan. In it I can place an emitter/detector pair. Then I paint part of the fan white and I can use a microcontroller to count the white stripes I see and I can change the PWM to spin the fan faster or slower. This requires a solid state relay to PWM the motor. I've got one of these. I've got emitter/detectors. I've got microcontrollers, voltage regulators, etc. I've got all I need to do this right now. What I don't got is a display of some kind and an interface to change the rate of spin if I want. But I'm sure I don't need that. I may just hard code the rate in and call it good.

Second idea: Upgrade the cooling method. Right now my method of cooling is not logistically ideal. It takes two people and it sucks. I need an easier way. I need another pump to do this though and those things are like $200 but I think it will be worth it. What we will do is after the flame is out we will start the whirlpool with the current motor right on the burner. Then we get a bucket of ice water and use the second pump to pump ice water through the chiller. The water from the chiller will go back to the bucket. So, it will be a closed system. But, the water will heat up quickly so the majority of the work will be to add more ice and empty the excess water from the bucket. This will keep us from having to move the hot pot and wort to the basin. It should cool VERY quickly though. Aside from the pump I will need the tubing, connectors, coupling, and ball valves to control flow.

Third idea: Temperature control. The latest brown ale showed me an issue with my current system. I set the temp with the temp controller. However, that is not going to be the temp in the chest freezer. After the cold temp is reached the freezer is turned off but the cooling coils are still very cold and so the temp in the freezer continues to drop. All I really care about is the temp of the beer. I am lucky in that the thermal mass of beer won't allow it to fluctuate all that much. As long as the temp in the freezer is some kind of average and doesn't swing TOO much all should be well. But what temp should I set on the controller to get the beer the temp I want? Well it changes with the temp of the garage. I sort of have to play games and tweak the temp constantly. And then there is the issue that the beer itself is sometimes exothermic and sometimes not. The beer actually produces heat when aggressively fermenting the first few days. So I need to tweak the temp controller even more so and it is even more so of a guessing game and more so of a nightmare.

Well last night I read about a thermowell. This is a fermentation cap with a build it metal tube that extends well into the beer. We can put a temp sensor down the thermowell and can measure the actual temp of the beer. Then I get a computer to control the cooling cycles on the chest freezer to finely control the temp of the beer even when fermenting. I can even wire up the controller to a wireless device and have it output the temp of the chest freezer and the beer for the last days or weeks. Again, I think I can scrounge up the digital stuff.

Fourth idea: I'd like to put a nice wood collar on the current chest freezer. I will use the current temp controller for this since I don't need fine temp control. It just needs to keep the beer cool when it is served. This nice collar should allow us to add nice tap handles. I will never need to open the fridge again to serve beer. Only to replace the kegs. There are lots of examples of how to do this on youtube and it looks like a long weekend project.

Fifth idea: New chest freezer for fermenting. This would use the new cooling system and would allow us to ferment beer in one freezer and serve it from another. It should be big enough to fit two fermenters.

That's all I've got for now. Long post. My fingers are tired!