CFC Upgrade

Near the center of this picture is my latest addition to the brewery.  It is called a convoluted counterflow chiller.  It is made up of a 1/2 inch copper tube that has been slightly crimped in several places down it's entire length then slightly twisted.  It is then placed inside a 7/8 inch tube and the whole thing is bent into a coil.  The two pipes are sealed from one an other and fittings are attached to allow water to flow in one direction through the bigger pipe while wort travels the opposite direction through the center pipe.  It works in a similar way to a plate chiller but the path for the wort is much larger and has nothing for particles to hang up on making it extremely easy to keep clean.  The other great thing about this chiller is that it is EXTREMELY efficient!  At my last brew day I brought 6 gallons of wort from boiling to 65 degrees in about 9 minutes!  Most people use these for single pass chilling from the boil kettle directly into the fermenter.  I currently have it set up to recirculate the boil kettle so that a whirlpool is formed as the wort chills.  This helps separate the hot and cold break before transfer.  So far I am very happy with my purchase!

RO Water Update

Pictured above is the float valve assembly I came up with for filling my HLT with RO water.  Filling the kettle can take up to 8 hours so I wanted a way that I could leave it and not worry about it over flowing.  I have been using RO water in conjunction with Burton Water Salts for my last 4 beers and I can safely say that between this change and sparging a little less the astringency problem I was having is completely gone!  Another thing that I found is that with the proper water chemistry my mash efficiency has gone from 60-70% all the way up to 90-95%!!! 

Plastic Conical Temperature Control

Cooling - My primary goal is to simply maintain ale fermentation temps (as close to 68 degrees F. as possible) on a per vessel basis.  Because of the shape and size it is difficult to use traditional means for cooling.  It would take a VERY large fridge/freezer to house them which would eat up a LOT of space in my basement.  As an experiment I purchased 25 feet of bendable copper tube and made a coil that fits tightly around the largest part of the conical.  At this point there are small stainless bolts on either side that can be used to hang the fermenter from a wall bracket.  These bolts hold the copper coil in place about 1/2 inch below the 5.5 gallon mark.  I then connected one end of the coil to a submersible pump that I placed into a 5 gallon cylindrical drink cooler.  After routing the other end of the coil into the top of the cooler I put about 3 gallons of water in the cooler along with 3 frozen 1 liter bottles of water.  By hooking the pump power cord to my home made temperature controller I can have the pump kick on any time the temperature in the fermenter goes above a set point.   I tested this by filling the fermenter with 5.5 gallons of 80 degree water and setting the controller to 70 degrees.   Within 45 minutes the temperature in the fermenter came down about 6 degrees.  I felt this was promising so I tried the test again starting with 75 degree water and putting some bubble wrap insulation around the coils and foam around the hoses going from the cooler to the coil.  This test was even better as I was able to bring the temp down to 68 degrees in about 20 minutes.  It really helps that in my basement where the fermenters are kept the ambient temp is about 66 degrees year round.   I doubt this solution will work well for lagers but I think it will work really well for ales.  I plan to keep the unit on the fermenter for about the first week during the most active part of the fermentation.  After that it would be freed up for use on the other one.

Heating - My goal in this has two parts:  1) keep the temperature up if there is a cold snap and the basement gets below 55 degrees.  2)  allow me to do a controlled warm up to 72 or so for different fermentation profiles.  To accomplish this I ordered a Brew Belt which is simply a 110v 800 watt strap that you can wrap around the fermenter and connects to itself like a belt.  Connecting it to the heating plug on my controller should allow me to maintain a temperature above ambient up to 75 degrees or so.  I have not received it yet but will post my tests.

Plastic Conical - Update!

I liked the FastFerment conical so well that I purchased a second one!   I would recommend these to anyone with two minor warnings:  1) They do not seal well.  To get them to seal I first tried lightly sanding the top with a big flat sanding block which helped a little, then I simply added a second gasket which fixed the problem.  When I bought the second one I just automatically ordered an extra gasket.  2)  You must disassemble them to get them completely clean.  The second time I used the first one I simply wiped it out with a soft sponge, sprayed it out with 180 degree PBW, rinsed twice thoroughly and sanitized by putting a gallon of properly prepared StarSan in it and shaking it up with it sealed.   Upon tasting before it went in the keg I could detect a slight tartness that continued to get worse after it was in the keg for a few weeks.  When I did the next beer in the first conical I did the standard cleaning above then removed both the ball valve and the thermowell, cleaned them with a brush and sanitized them by soaking them for 20 minutes in StarSan before putting them back on the fermenter.  This seems to have solved the problem and I have not had bugs in either fermenter since.

Plastic Conical!

After struggling with racking my last brew to secondary and talking to the guys at St. Louis Wine and Beer Making,  I decided to risk $140 on the FastFerment conical.  It should eliminate racking to secondary and make yeast reuse a lot easier. I also have a plan to make kegging easier.  I am going to  mount a cheap boat winch and pulley to the basement support pole and beam respectively, allowing me to lift the conical out of its stand and gravity feed into the keg. It has mounting bolts on either side above the balancing point that will work great for attaching a cross chain and in turn the winch cable.  Another bonus is that FastFerment will soon be introducing an insulated wrap that you can pump cold water through to control temperature!  I would just have to add a pump and my temperature controller to get the same effect as an expensive jacked setup.

Fixing Acrid Aftertaste (RO water)

Every brew that I have done on the electric system, other than the porter, has had a very pronounced acrid after taste.  You take a drink and think, this is GREAT, then right as you swallow you get hit by this taste that I can only describe as over cooked super strong black tea.  After some research I came to the conclusion that my mash is suffering from high residual alkalinity.  I never obtained a water report but I know from seeing extreme scale build up on water faucets that our water is EXTREMELY hard.  All along I have been using PH 5.2 stabilizer but apparently it was not able to lower the PH that much.  My experiment of using Potassium chloride softened water to dilute by half also had no effect.  In fact, the American Wheat I made was even worse.  At this point I decided that I was not going to waste any more beer or time experimenting and I installed an RO water system.  Rather than trying the dilution trick again I decided to simply use all RO water and just build a balanced water from scratch.  I am planning a brew day for Sunday the 24th where I plan to brew a NB English Pale Ale.  I will be using Burton Water Salts from LC Carlson to approximate the Burton on Trent water profile.  I will also make sure to have precision PH test strips and gypsum at the ready just in case.  What I am not sure about is if I will use the PH 5.2 stabilizer.  After doing some forum research I discovered that most people recommend not buying it and if you have already bought it, through it away.....

Updates and Mash Efficiency

I have completed the 3rd 5 gallon brew on the electric brewhouse!  Here is what I have learned so far:

1)  Always make sure your hydrometer/reflectometer is calebrated!!!  Failure to do this has caused me an enormous amount of stress.  On my last two brews I relied on a borrowed reflectometer to take my gravity readings and calculate my mash efficiency.  On the second one (American wheat), there is no doubt that I had problems with the grain bed so I chalked the low numbers up to that.  On the third (vanilla porter) the numbers were also low but I had no grain bed issues.  This prompted me to double check using my trusty (mostly calibrated) hydromenter.  Turns out the reflectometer was low by .013!

2) There is not enough drop between my brew vessels and my pumps.  I am not sure why but while making the vanilla porter, I had several instances of my pumps not priming properly.   This was so frustrating that my head nearly exploded.  This situation caused me to loose more than 1 quart of very concentrated wart while tying to get the pump primed.  It also caused me to have problems with chilling down the wort.  I did not realize that the pump was not primed and I ran it dry for quite some time.  It is a wonder I didn't burn it up!  As a solution I plan to elevate my mash tun by about 2 inches, lower the pumps by 2 inches and do a flip/swap of the pump heads so that the input is once again on the bottom.  In this configuration I have never had my pumps fail to prime.

3) It is important to only use the amount of sparge water necessary to get the boil volume you need.  On my last 3 brews I figured that I had plenty of sparge water so I could just keep adding it until I get the proper boil volume.   WRONG!  The extra water is apparently diluting the run off so that there is a lot of sugar left floating in the MLT when the run off reaches volume.  I am hoping that fixing this problem will increase my mash efficiency by quite a bit...

Efficiency!

I need to brew a few more batches to be sure but it looks like my mash efficiency is coming out at about 82%!!!  Not too bad!!!   It may even turn out to be a bit higher once I figure out what my flow rate needs to be on the HERMS side.  I know it was definitely to high on the American wheat due to the fishers that formed in the grain bed and to low on the vanilla porter because the efficiency was down a bit.  As I said above I also plan to calculate my sparge water volume and stick to it!