Hell day continues

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scottish 80 Tasting notes

This is my 100th post. I had no idea until just now!

Anyhow, the Scottish beer turned out great. One of my favs. It is malty, sweet, and delicious. Everyone who has tried it has been pleased. I went to visit the bearded brewer today and he gave the following feedback:

- No diacetly
- A little bitter
- A little estery

I think what I need to do is pitch colder. I'll that a go on my next brew tomorrow.

Scottish 70/80

A Scottish 70 is a malty beer with low alcohol. We still get good body by setting the mash temp really high. I grabbed the ingredients from The Bearded Brewer almost three weeks ago and I can't remember the exact grain bill. For reference I've included the recipe for a Scottish 70 from the Jamil/Palmer recipe book. The hops and yeast is correct.

6.5 lbs British Pale Malt. I think I got Maris Otter.
0.5 lbs Munich.
1.0 lbs Crystal 40L
0.5 lbs Honey Malt
0.25 lbs Crystal 120L
3.0oz Pale Chocolate 200L (this is one I may have had a hard to finding and substituted)

UK Kent Goldings 0.75oz 5.8%AA

WLP002 x2 Date: 01-09-14 Lot: 1001913

Whirlfloc
Servomyces

50% RC water
50% Distilled

These brewing salts:

We are shooting for a mash of 158F.

3:38 pm- Wanted to start around 1pm. Started around 2pm. Just got the strike water to temp. The mash tun is creaky today. First time I've heard it do that.

4:03pm - Ellie here. Just mashed in. Hit 158F.

5:28pm - Runoff done. All is well. Gravity = 1.034. Should get 1.044ish. I will add all the hops. Hanging with Ellie has been fun. She made Kevin bring burgers.

8:42pm - Done the for day. Kevin brought burgers, tacos, and beer. The OG is 1.040. I thought that might be a little low for the amount of hops I added but the wort didn't taste bitter. Also, I attached the O2 stone to a racking cane with plumbers tape to better control it. It seemed to work well but there was a small leak in the tubing from the tank to the filter that I could hear. I'll need to fix that.

When it came to cooling I was able to cool the wort to 70F in 30mins. I needed to push more cool water through the big coils. I think that is why it was so slow last time. There is a lot of surface area. It makes no sense to push a small amount of water through it. There just wouldn't be enough contact. So, for a big coil, more is better.

Other than that it was a ho hum brew day. I had the gate for the dogs. They ate the barley but it was hot so the would get burned. But they wanted to eat it so bad. It was funny.

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.