Encouraging news for our Drafty Kilt
The Drafty Kilt Scotch Ale is one of our two launch beers and a beer that we’ve spent literally three years perfecting. We brewed a test production batch earlier this summer and have been attempting to replicate that recipe on our new Brew-Magic since then. Unfortunately Lemony Snicket conspired against us with a series of unfortunate events. Our fermenting chamber broke. We had some mash efficiency mishaps. And it takes the Drafty Kilt a good 6 weeks to ferment and age anyway.
On Monday, December 1, we did a side-by-side comparison of our latest Drafty Kilt with the test batch brewed this summer. The first step for us is to ensure that these two recipes taste alike, before we make tweaks. That way we can be relatively certain that anything we brew on our pilot system will scale up consistently. Great news. They were surprisingly consistent, especially considering they were brewed four months apart.
What does this mean? Now we can focus on the 1 or 2 small changes we want to make to this recipe before it’s ready to go. LEEEEROY… JEEEEENKINS.
Let’s make a deal!
We would like to welcome the newest member of the Monday Night family into the world:
No, it’s not “Don the Amazing Sales Guy,” it’s the big white box. Our new chest freezer. This means that we will finally be able to brew beer again, because we will have something to keep the fermentation temperatures where they need to be.
Thank. You. Don.
Building a beer fermentation chamber
Jonathan and several other blog readers have been asking for this post for some time now. For those of you who don’t care about fermentation temperature controls this is going to be really boring (I’ve warned you). For those that do, hopefully my experiences can provide a nice blueprint for building something similar.
The goal of this project was to create a way to provide customized and stable fermentation temperatures for our beer. There are many great examples of converted chest freezers out there but we had a few unique requirements including:
- House our 2 sweet Blichmann conical fermenters
- Provide both heating and cooling capabilities so we could leave the whole setup in Jeff’s garage year round
- Easy access so we’d be able to take samplings for gravity readings
Our starting point was a freezer we found off Craigslist about two years ago. It has served us quite well, but the main issue with using it as is was that it wasn’t tall enough to fit a conical fermenter and the lip for the motor prevented us from fitting two in there. We began researching options for extending the freezer and there are many detailed tutorials from people who’ve built great “collars” that extend the height of the freezer. The key issue in our situation was the fact that if we increased the height too much we’d risk being unable to lift the conical fermenters over the lip and into the unit (at one point I actually exported a pulley/hoist system for this but it proved impractical the more I thought about it). After a few days of research I decided our best shot was to create a collar that could collapse on both sides and a platform on the bottom that would allow the fermenters to sit level with each other and high enough that they could be easily accessed.
You can see the piece of plywood which creates a flat surface in the bottom (and the holes allow circulation)
The collapsible sides allow us to (somewhat) easily lift the fermenters into the freezer despite the high collar
Our next challenge was temperature control and humidity. Since chest freezers are built to be below freezing (duh) they typically experience a good deal of moisture and then ultimately condensation. The solution we’re currently testing for this is a plug-in humidifier. It cost about $20 from Ace Hardware and seems to be doing a decent job so long as we remember to plug it in every week or two (for it to “recharge”). For temperature control we wanted both heating and cooling. I had seen an example here of a dual stage controller but unfortunately we had a bit of a tough time locating one online. We finally ended up buying it from here and it seems to be some other more official part that someone has wired themselves (notice the very professionally looking “stage 1″ and “stage 2″ notations). For the cooling needs, obviously the freezer is what we use, but for the heating element we have been using a 150 Watt infrared heat bulb. I found this at the pet store and thus far it seems to work really well at heating up the the freezer. Granted we don’t have the most intense Georgia winters but due to the fact that it’s a closed and sealed space we didn’t have any issues with it retaining the precise temperature (except for the time that we forgot to plug it in!).
The 2 Stage Temperature controller. The freezer is plugged into the top socket and the heat lamp into the bottom one.
For the overall construction I used 2x6s and 2x10s. I glued 3/4″ foam board to the wood for an added level of sealing and insulation. As you can see from the pictures I used weather proofing foam/tape and weather stripping to give it a full, tight, leak resistant seal on the seams of the collapsible sides.
Weatherproofing tape and piping creates a nice seal on the collapsible parts of the collar
The locking clasps on the front of the fermenter. These are nice and tight to provide a solid seal.
Honestly at this point there is nothing I’d change about the design yet. I’ve contemplated added some small fans inside to help circulated the heat (or cold) when either stage is operating but I’m not sure if that would be very useful (it seems like the temperature inside stays very consistent). We do have a sweet temperature/humidity sensor and plan to install that at some point for additional testing/monitoring. Eventually I’m interested in building a 2nd fermentation chamber off of this one somewhat similar to this. The 2nd chamber could potentially be where we place beers for additional aging or for bottle/keg conditioning when we need it. We’ll see.
A serious system upgrade to Brew Magic
I haven’t been this excited about a new toy since I got one of those little cars with a motor in it for Christmas when I was 8. Last week, we placed an order for the Big Poppa of all brewing systems – SABCO’s Brew Magic.
There are so many incredible features of this system that will give us greater consistency and predictability to our brewing:
- Ability to recirculate the mash through an electronic heat exchanger.
- Pump = no lifting. Good for Joel’s arthritis.
- Sight tubes means I can calculate an accurate boil loss. Not that anyone other than me will care.
- Touchscreen electronic controls with the ability to track time and temperature, call out hop additions and transfers, and even recreate a previous session.
- All stainless steel tubing and kettles with tri-clamp fittings.
This beauty should be arriving in late July or early August. In the meantime, expect more doting, drooling and anticipation.
Monday Night recap: “Cool that wort” edition
Despite a 2.5 hour long sparging debacle (our first attempt at a mashout), we ended the night at about 10pm. Thanks to Melvin. Melvin, avid homebrewer and self-proclaimed super genius, was kind enough to let us demo his chilling system as we think about upgrading our current setup. Blah blah blah, submersion pump in ice water, blah blah blah, recirculating wort over immersion chiller, blah blah blah. Let’s skip to the good stuff. From boiling wort to 70 degrees in 12 minutes.
That. Just. Happened. In case you’re interested in the details, the setup is essentially this. Thanks again to Melvin for the link.
We brewed an original India Brown Ale recipe (not a clone like some other brewers we know and do not respect). This was a first for us, so we’re excited to see how it turns out. Heavy on the hops and medium-bodied. (Don’t tell Jeff, but even though the recipe called for .15 lbs of Chocolate Malt, I added .18 lbs).
In other, perhaps more important news, Joel revealed his true colors last night after Andrew brought him one of his favorite adult beverages, Bacardi Silver Mojito. Witness the presentation ceremony. Note: No Bacardi Silver Mojitos were harmed in the making of this blog post.
Cooling wort in the summer
Our post a few days ago brought up some thoughts on cooling wort. In the South this is especially relevant in the summer. We brew outside, so getting the temperature down can be a time-consuming process. I thought I’d go into a little more depth on how we cool our wort and open up the forum to new suggestions. In summer months it can take us up to an hour to get the temperature from boiling down to 80F for 10 gallons of beer.
First, we use an immersion wort chiller with hose water similar to the one below (but not as pretty):
This gets the temperature down to 100F fairly quickly ? usually in about 20 minutes. We used to couple this with a plate chiller.
The plate chiller was great at first. We could essentially pump the near-boiling beer straight into the carboys (this was before our fancy Blichmann fermenters). But things quickly deteriorated.
We cleaned this thing religiously (boiled it twice every Monday) and still got off flavors from our beers. It cooled like a charm, but once the beer goes through that thing it’s pretty much a black hole. We can’t see it so we aren’t completely sure that it’s 100% sanitary. Once we stopped using it our beer quality went up. Immediately. So we haven’t used it since.
Now to get the extra 20F from 100F to 80F we keep the brewpot in an ice bath. This takes a surprisingly long time. Sometimes up to 40 minutes.
We actually keep the lid on their too to prevent yeast infections, but it somehow didn’t make it into this picture. It also helps (we’ve found) to give the wort a good stir every 5-10 minutes. I’m sure there’s a great scientific explanation, but I don’t know what it is. So this is how we cool our wort, but there may be better/faster ways out there.
Chris actually pumps ice water through his wort chiller using gravity. This, I imagine, could be highly effective. Tubbs also brought up the idea of adding salt to the ice water to super-chill it. I’m inclined to try this, though I don’t know how much salt we’d have to use.
Any other ideas floating around out there? Bottom line is we want to get this part of the brew day over as quickly as possible to make more room for drinking and socializing afterwards.