The Midnight Hour Brewery Goes Next-level

I purchased a used 3-tier stand yesterday from a local homebrewer. In brief, it is professionally welded 2" box iron. The vessels are all converted kegs with weldless quick-disconnect fittings. Propane is hard plumbed up the center support.

Before plunking down money Clint invited me to make a batch of beer with it. This is that beer's story.

Clint and I started heating strike water around 9:15 Saturday morning.

Fermentables:

• 10 lbs Pale Malt

Doughed in with 1.3 qts/lb of RO and tap water to rest at 145° F for 30 minutes. Direct-fire heat to bring the temperature up to 160° F for another 30 minutes. Sparged with 170° water to collect about 6 gallons sweet wort. Boiled 60 minutes.

Hops:

• 1 oz 7.9% AA whole Perle Hops first-wort hop
  
• 1.5 oz 5.3% AA whole E.K. Goldings 30 mins

SafAle S-05 California Ale yeast

We were done and cleaned up by about noon-thirty, making a relatively quick brewday. OG was 14.6 °Brix with an estimated 51 IBUs. I call it Bitter Blonde.

I love the recirculating mash and all the direct-fire vessels. The mash tun and hot liquor tank have temperature probes for use with common digital oven thermometers. That gives me fine control over the mash, meaning when I find a recipe I like I can accurately record and recreate it. The kettle doesn't have a sight glass which is critical to me. Kettle volume combined with the gravity of the sweet wort is a guide to hitting target OG. My current 20 gallon aluminum kettle has a sight glass and fits on the bottom burner, so I will continue to use it (and I already have a prospective buyer for the keggle).

I also get a March pump with the deal, doubling the number of pumps I have. Now I have a spare mash tun and HLT which will go up for sale. It is a little sad to see my mash tun go because it is the second piece of homebrewing equipment I made - the first being an immersion chiller which was sold long ago.

Bitter Blonde is bubbling away in my 6.5 gallon carboy. Looking forward to tasting it and brewing again on my new brewstand.

Grain Mill Hopper Construction

In my pile of brewing equipment is a grain mill which I purchased from More Beer. I am a little embarrassed to say that the purchase was made at least eighteen months ago and I have yet to make use of it. Some weeks ago the Austin Zealots made a bulk grain buy and I bought fifty pound bags of 2-row and pale malts. Having all that unmilled grain around motivated me to start using my equipment.

The mill came with a small plastic hopper and a flimsy bucket-top mount. I wanted to build something more suited for my ten gallon grainbills. So I enlisted the help of my friend Ry and we got to work.

Here is the undercarriage that holds the mill and sits over the bucket.


Now a plywood top with slit for the grain.


Here we are, ready for the hopper.


Diagonals are difficult to cut for an amateur.


The grains for Alt One in the finished hopper.

Duck-in Cooler Update

Hello loyal readers (and others),

I started the duck-in fermentation cooler project with the goal of keeping my homebrew at a temperature appropriate for fermenting. It is mostly finished now and stands in the brew-room of my new house undergoing light testing.

On the left is my 15-gallon fermenter with about 12 gallons of tap water and a thermometer probe. To see how long this contraption takes to get to temperature I started running the AC at about ten in the morning yesterday. Here is what the thermometer said:

Top is ambient temperature and bottom is the water. Yep, it comes out of the tap that warm, which makes for problematic wort chilling. After 8 hours the water temperature dropped to the low seventies. At the 12 hour mark it was in the mid sixties where it stayed mostly constant. Most ales are happy in this range, so I am happy. The ambient temperature was in the high seventies. Initial tests showed that it could hold 65-ish° without a full fermenter even in 90° F weather, giving me a 25° drop under ambient. I am using the AC's built-in thermostat, which probably doesn't go much lower than 65. I measured 40° air coming out of the unit, so with the right controller I could get down lower.

I do not know how efficient it is. When the cooler is in full swing I felt around all the likely places where cold might escape and only found one. I would like to purchase a watt-hour meter to see how much electricity this thing needs. The total cost of the cooler comes in at around $380 for materials; my time is more precious, but who's counting?

The cooler appears to be ready for a maiden fermentation, but I have not decided what to make. There is space for two 15-gallon fermenters and four corny kegs, so I have the capacity to make a respectable amount of beer.

Here is Proof My Wife Loves Me and Wants Me To Be Happy

With apologies to Ben Franklin.

My last beer fermented a little too warm and turned out full of esters. What I am calling The Fruity Brit is still drinkable as demonstrated last night when Adie and I had eight friends over for pizza and beer. The first keg is at least three gallons light. A good time was had by all, even without chairs.

The Fruity Brit is light on hops and body. I can pretend there is a clean malt profile, but the fermentation flaws overpower that. However, I hit the alcohol content right on the button: non-offensive. The Brit's gravity bottomed out at 4° brix falling from 6°, putting it at about 2.3% ABV. Next time I will start and end higher, and throw in more hops for good measure. My objective is to zero in on a medium-bodied, lightly hopped British session beer.

While gatherings of friends will continue, I do not anticipate unaided fermentations to turn out any better. As summer approaches, Texas ain't getting cooler. In Redwood City I had a chest freezer with good control over bubbling carboys, but now I have fifteen gallon conicals towering four feet tall on PVC stands. Such things just do not fit in this sort of chest freezer. A proper stand-up freezer runs around $500 and Craig's List here is pretty pathetic. Those stand-up freezers only fit one of my fermenters, but I expect to be brewing with increasing frequency.

Three weeks ago I started working on a walk-in cooler that could accommodate both my fifteen gallon conicals. Many entwined brewers might meet steep resistance from their significant others, but my beautiful wife simply smiled and told me what a great idea it was. My initial estimate for materials was two hundred dollars easy, but I will probably go over by around fifty percent. While I may get a grimace from Sweetie, I know she will support me. It makes me all warm and fuzzy thinking of how much she must love me.

To drive the cooler I have a window air conditioner (which I wanted to leave in Cali, but Adrienne insisted we keep it; how smart). Here is how my cooler starts; left to right, the frame for the bottom and top.

Basic dimensions are 4x2 and 5 feet high. The skeleton is mostly finished 2x2 furring strips with a few 2x4 studs in key places. Here it stands loose fit together.

For insulation I am using reflective bubble wrap insulation stapled to the exterior plywood:

Followed by loose-fill insulation.

Then a semi-rigid plastic interior layer glued and stapled to the frame (see below). The floor gets a layer of plywood under the plastic to support the weight of the fermenting beer. Here is a shot of the bottom corner, the frame nailed to the floor.

Today a friend, Clay, and I made a lot of progress on the cooler. He is an electrician and offered to wire up an outlet, switch and light fixture. With these features, the project goes to way-cool.

Here is the back. The large opening is the AC mount. Clay is putting the light switch in center-top in our make-shift wiring box. All of the standard-type electrical bits and bobs are made for 2x4 studs while my walls are one and three-quarters thick, so we have to be creative.

Here is Clay again working on the light fixture. It is slightly too deep for the ceiling so we shimmed it out, taking advantage of the flexible plastic to hide the protrusion. We filled this with insulation and covered in plywood.

I will get some pictures of the interior up soon. When it is done I will break down the cost of materials. Expect a second follow-up when the thing is working.

In parting, I would like to thank Adrienne for allowing this project to take up my time, our money and her "pretty living room" for three weeks, going on six. I love you sweetie.

--Dean

First Brew-In

Weeks in advance the word went out through Craigslist, Facebook and TexAgs, trickling through emails from friend to friends. When brewday about 20 people showed to share beer, make beer, talk beer and have a good time. Three people brought their gear and we made 21 gallons of beer. I made an ordinary bitter, Ian made some hefeweizen, and a trio of brewers crafted chocolate raspberry stout.
I would say it was a great success. There was plenty of home and commercial brew going around and there was some great tri-tip off the bar-b-que. As is typical of many homebrew clubs, there was just a little bit of club business to discuss and a next meeting to decide on. Josh and Leslie volunteered their place for the next meeting and we quickly decided on May 3rd. I am pretty excited at the ease with which everyone got along and the eagerness of the group to continue gathering.

For 11 gallons of Ordinary Bitter:
Actual OG 1.034
Estimated IBU 26

Fermentables

• 12 Lbs Crisp Maris Otter
• 1.5 Lbs CaraMalt

Mash at 150° F with 1.7 quarts water per pound of grain for 90 minutes.

Hops

• 1.0 oz 5.3% AA E.K. Goldings 90 minutes
• 0.5 oz 9.0% AA Target (pellet) 90 minutes
• 1.0 oz 5.3% AA E.K. Goldings 15 minutes
• 1.0 oz 5.3% AA E.K. Goldings 1 minute

Starter of WYeast 1098, British Ale yeast.

My brew-day went smoothly until the end. My kettle screen let some hop leaves by and they got clogged somewhere leaving me with half-chilled wort. What I should have done was stop the chill, disassemble my apparatus and back-flush the system into the kettle. What I did instead was to dump the hot wort into the fermenter to air cool. I had to walk the fine line between pitching yeast into scalding wort and giving infection too much time to take hold. I think I pitched too hot because it took about 24 hours to see activity from a decent starter. I would really like to get my system hard-plumbed and on a stand.
I had two new gadgets to play with yesterday. The filter worked well once I realized it would be fine if I glued the casing together instead of worrying about replacing the filter after 10,000 gallons. I also bought a "Squirrel" brand paint mixer to aerate wort. That thing whipped up a six-inch head of foam in no time, making it a great purchase.

Cheap, Simple Water Filtering

The water here in Bryan, TX is soft, but stinks of chlorine. I finally decided to put together a water filter for my growing brewery. I got the specs from the January 2007 issue of Brew magazine. They have yet to put that article online, so here it is. I built it for about $40, but you can probably do better.

The Culligan WHR-140 filter is intended to be used in a shower head, so you get much better throughput than a faucet filter. The manufacturer says it is good for 10,000 gallons, or about 770 ten-gallon batches. It is good at removing chlorine, sulfur and heavy metals. I got mine from Amazon for about $20 delivered. You can get that down to $14 if you find it locally.

The five other parts are:

• 2" PVC slip-fit coupling
• 2" x 3/4'" MPT PVC slip-fit bushing X 2
  
• 3/4" MPT x female garden hose adapter
• 3/4" MPT hose bib adapter

If you want to cut costs, switch out the hose-bib adapter (a $7 part) for a the corresponding MPT x male garden hose adapter.

Here the filter fits snugly inside the bushing adapter:
It makes a compact filter and the full-port ball-valve is a nice way to save running around to the spigot. When I water-tested the assembly, the backpressure was enough to blow the thing apart, so I plan on checking out threaded bushings. Failing that, I will glue one bushing in and strap the whole thing together.