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Who Dat posted:So...southern brewer tips. I'm sure this has been touched on but I follow this thread so sporadically I miss a lot.
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Apr 12, 2014 17:38
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Who Dat posted:So...southern brewer tips. I'm sure this has been touched on but I follow this thread so sporadically I miss a lot. Does your house have floor vents for the AC? I put my fermentor right next to the vent and put a large box over so it traps the cool air. You might have to cut a few holes depending on how cold your AC is. It's not perfect because it will fluctuate a bit but it's better than nothing.
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Apr 12, 2014 18:01
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fullroundaction posted:Put your kettle in the woods uncovered for a couple weeks. Stop paying these corporate fatcats fat $tacks. I know this was a few pages ago, but I just made two beers with that yeast. One batch fermented and cleared very quickly, but the other one fermented more slowly and looked like sandy river water until it sat in a secondary for a couple of weeks. Now they're both quite clear with tight sediment at the bottom, so I'm not getting a bunch of crap in every glass(or having to leave a bunch of beer in the bottle). I think it is one that I will be using again.
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Apr 12, 2014 18:56
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fullroundaction posted:Make saisons and other Belgian session ales all summer long and give a big middle finger to the weather. Basically this. I'm almost tempted to dry a 90+ ferment this summer with a really basic malt bill and light light hops, then maybe secondary in the house at 75F with a dry-hop and see how peppery I can get that fucker with the Dupont strain. I have a big out-building that is unfinished, but sealed and it would be like a perfect farmhouse type thing if its not 110F in there.
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Apr 13, 2014 01:41
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Thanks a lot folks - great advice. Will have a look around local shops - but I work for most of the day so may just buy online. Closest big town is Hamilton (city of the future) so I'm sure there'll be a brewing shop there. Will try not to get ripped off!
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Apr 13, 2014 05:56
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more falafel please posted:Speaking of which, I've got an Airgas location and a local welding/industrial gas supply place close by. I've gathered that I probably want to just buy a used CO2 tank so that I don't waste money and can do swaps instead of fills -- can I just walk in and say "one 5lb CO2 tank please" and pay for it, or is there a process? It's pretty much "5 pounds of CO2, please." Actually, at the Airgas I use, the guy knows what I need by eyeballing the tank and just checks with me - "10 pounds of CO2? Need anything else today?" and then I pay for it and head out. Nice guy, I should invite him by for a beer one of these days.
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Apr 13, 2014 15:20
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Bobsledboy posted:Does anyone here use a thermowell in their fermenter to control fermentation temp? How much difference do you see between the thermowell and your fermentation fridge ambient temperature? I just made up a pseudo-thermowell for yesterday's batch. Since it's a lager, I wanted the wort at about 50 degrees for pitching, so when I loaded the fermenters into the fridge, I put the probe from the STC-1000 underneath one of them, in the dead space formed by the slightly domed bottom of the Better Bottle. This morning, it's perfect. The controller and the stick-on thermometers agree that it's time to go pitch yeast.
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Apr 13, 2014 15:25
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Jo3sh posted:I just made up a pseudo-thermowell for yesterday's batch. Since it's a lager, I wanted the wort at about 50 degrees for pitching, so when I loaded the fermenters into the fridge, I put the probe from the STC-1000 underneath one of them, in the dead space formed by the slightly domed bottom of the Better Bottle. This morning, it's perfect. The controller and the stick-on thermometers agree that it's time to go pitch yeast. I just simultaneously discovered this method yesterday for a beer I had just brewed and it seems so obvious now. Works great.
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Apr 13, 2014 18:05
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Just got done transferring my first batch of the day to the fermentor and found a giant carpenter bee at the bottom of my pot. Hopefully it flew in there before or during the boil...
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Apr 13, 2014 18:39
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Since we're doing CO2 tank talk: get a luggage scale like this so you can measure how much CO2 you have left. It turns out that the pressure gauges they usually put on your regulator don't actually tell you anything useful due to  , so this is the only reliable way to measure what's in a tank.
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Apr 13, 2014 18:58
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On Friday we had to bottle 3 beers and after about 2 minutes of thinking I realized I could cut the time down it takes me to clean 100+ bottles by ... a lot. I'm sure this has been mentioned in this thread before but I'm an idiot. * Method I started out using: submerge as many bottles as I can in my bucket of StarSan, wait a couple minutes, pour out, repeat. Takes forever and is messy. * Upgraded to one of those spray pump wine cleaners. Faster and more streamlined but still takes a long time. * NEW AND IMPROVED METHOD: Grab 3-4 bottles at a time, submerge them in my StarSan bucket, pull them out filled and set them aside. Do this for half the bottle tree (you'll be low on StarSan anyway). Start pouring the ones back in that you pulled out first, repeat. Took less than 15 minutes to do each bottle tree. Wish I could get all those hours of my life back that I was wasting.
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Apr 13, 2014 19:14
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wattershed posted:Thank you, everyone, for those replies. Sorry for such a late reply but basically I went through the same poo poo you did with my stir plate build. My stoner rear end thought I lost my stir plate and decided that I could build my own. I had my own soldering iron and pretty much all the other components. I first built it with a fan controller as the rheostat but it just wasn't sensitive enough and would spin way too fast. I had high hopes for this one because it looked so cool.  Next I got a project box and a real rheostat and re-read all the internet guides and re-watched all videos. I still couldn't get this poo poo to work! It would just go way too fast even with the real rheostat and for some reason it felt like the voltage control was just not sensitive enough. So I searched the internet and finally figured out what the hell was going on. You need to solder in three other components for it to work properly. I have no idea why in those videos their stir plates would work just fine but I have a feeling they'll burn out pretty quick. But here's the website that explains it better. http://www.stirstarters.com/instructions.html Basically you need to also solder in a M317 voltage regulator, resistor at 330 ohms and a capacitor at 0.1 mfd. The picture in that website didn't really show how to solder it in all together but lo and behold I found the misplaced stir plate! Busted it open and just copied how it was soldered. Now my stir plate works great. Here's a pic of what it looks like.  Hopefully you don't stumble into the same pitfalls that I did and it works perfectly but if not, this post might give you some insight. I think you live in San Diego? gently caress it, if you do and want to drive down to Hess brewery in North Park and buy me a few drinks I'll just give you the stir plate.
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Apr 13, 2014 19:17
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Kelley Geuscaulk posted:Sorry for such a late reply but basically I went through the same poo poo you did with my stir plate build. My stoner rear end thought I lost my stir plate and decided that I could build my own. I had my own soldering iron and pretty much all the other components. I first built it with a fan controller as the rheostat but it just wasn't sensitive enough and would spin way too fast. I had high hopes for this one because it looked so cool. Thanks for this! I'll be building my own as well, once I get a little free time. Speaking of free time... fullroundaction posted:
I'm going to have to try this out next time, because spending two hours just sanitizing bottles is ridiculous.
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Apr 13, 2014 19:41
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Josh Wow posted:Just got done transferring my first batch of the day to the fermentor and found a giant carpenter bee at the bottom of my pot. Hopefully it flew in there before or during the boil... Beer 
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Apr 13, 2014 20:35
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fullroundaction posted:On Friday we had to bottle 3 beers and after about 2 minutes of thinking I realized I could cut the time down it takes me to clean 100+ bottles by ... a lot. I'm sure this has been mentioned in this thread before but I'm an idiot. You can dunk and empty straight away, you're leaving a film of starsan on the inside of your bottles that's doing the sanitising for you, leaving the solution in there is just wasting time.
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Apr 13, 2014 21:40
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I just use a squirt bottle of Star San. Tilt them on the side, spray them and swish them around. I sanitize as I go on bottling days. As far as cleaning, I take the Charlie P approach, I dump all my bottles in to either a rubbermaid tote or my bathtub, depending on how many I have to do, fill it with water and PBW/Oxiclean, and let them sit for a few hours or over night. By that point, any junk in the bottles should come out with no scrubbing and labels should peel off with no problems. After I rinse them out, I put a piece of foil over the tops, and put them in the garage so they are ready to go next time I need to bottle. If they don't come clean, or the labels are a bitch I recycle them. Last time, it took me a little over an hour total to do 6 cases of bottles, and that was only because a lot of them had labels.
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Apr 13, 2014 21:59
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Is it possible to reuse starsan a couple times?
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Apr 13, 2014 22:17
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fullroundaction posted:On Friday we had to bottle 3 beers and after about 2 minutes of thinking I realized I could cut the time down it takes me to clean 100+ bottles by ... a lot. I'm sure this has been mentioned in this thread before but I'm an idiot. What my wife and I have been doing is: - Make fresh batch of starsan, about 2.5 gallons or so - Spray bottle tree with starsan - Dunk each bottle for a short time (maybe 5 seconds?), pour out, place bottle on tree - Dry outside of bottle - Fill - Cap Placing the bottles on the tree gives me a nice queue of bottles to work with and helps get out the excess sanitizer, and as mentioned, there will be at least a small starsan film left in the bottle.
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Apr 13, 2014 22:34
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ShadowCatboy posted:Is it possible to reuse starsan a couple times? Yes
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Apr 13, 2014 22:41
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Kelley Geuscaulk posted:Hopefully you don't stumble into the same pitfalls that I did and it works perfectly but if not, this post might give you some insight. I think you live in San Diego? gently caress it, if you do and want to drive down to Hess brewery in North Park and buy me a few drinks I'll just give you the stir plate. Haha, Hess DID just win a WBC gold for something... I'll take your steps into consideration; the website you linked to is where I bought my first one at and was kind of my fallback plan if just slapping the rheostat on there doesn't work. I'll also tinker with lower voltage power sources if I can't control the stir bar with the 9v as the source.
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Apr 13, 2014 22:43
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Well, I seem to have solved my efficiency issues. The red IPA I brewed yesterday is now going to be a ~10% American barleywine, not that I'm complaining. I was planning on 1.078 and got 1.094 in the end. Thankfully I made an extra large starter, though I was planning to hang on to the extra yeast for my next beer. I did a couple things differently. Double batch sparging, running off super slow, and adding calcium to the mash and sparge water seemed to do the trick. Also ignoring the SG scale on my refractometer and going by the brix measurement gave me a giant boost.
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Apr 13, 2014 22:51
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ShadowCatboy posted:Is it possible to reuse starsan a couple times? Yes. I mix it with distilled water, so it doesn't degrade. I keep a spray bottle of starsan for months on end. I spray the inside of the bottles three times, rotate and dump. It takes about 45min to sanitize for a bottling day, if I'm not also delabeling and whatnot.
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Apr 13, 2014 23:02
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LeeMajors posted:Yes. I use both spray and buckets (depending on the thing), isn't it if it goes cloudly you can only use it that day right? Got hard water etc which makes it cloudy and such and everyone in my area who homebrew say just use it for the day then make fresh. If I used the mash PH buffer to get the water down to 5.2ph is it safe to use starsan in that water?
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Apr 13, 2014 23:12
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I just squirt the next bottle with a vinator 3 times or so while I'm filling one.
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Apr 13, 2014 23:15
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Fluo posted:I use both spray and buckets (depending on the thing), isn't it if it goes cloudly you can only use it that day right? Got hard water etc which makes it cloudy and such and everyone in my area who homebrew say just use it for the day then make fresh. If I used the mash PH buffer to get the water down to 5.2ph is it safe to use starsan in that water? Yeah, cloudiness is a bad thing and you should make a fresh batch. I just keep a jug of distilled water in my cabinet and mix it up when I run out. It stays good for months. Since it's a contact sanitizer, I felt like I was wasting tons of it by mixing up gallons.
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Apr 13, 2014 23:15
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LeeMajors posted:Yeah, cloudiness is a bad thing and you should make a fresh batch. Is there any option apart from distilled water, just its quite a nightmare to get hold of for me (I've tried in the past). Just change PH of the water or? Fluo fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 00:55
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Fluo posted:Is there any option apart from distilled water, just its quite a nightmare to get hold of for me (I've tried in the past). Just change PH of the water or? No access to grocery stores? The big thing that makes it so effective is the lack of minerals. You could distill your own water??
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Apr 14, 2014 02:16
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Random update: If you ever find yourself with lovely beer or still beer you forgot to prime, making a hot scotchy (normally 1-2 shots scotch or whiskey for a glass of wort) is a great solution.
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Apr 14, 2014 02:36
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BrianBoitano posted:Random update: Brewing TV taught me this, and it is glorious.
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Apr 14, 2014 02:39
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Fluo posted:Is there any option apart from distilled water, just its quite a nightmare to get hold of for me (I've tried in the past). Just change PH of the water or? To check whether old Starsan solution is still effective you just need to get some pH strips. Or a pH pen if you want to go all  on the problem.
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Apr 14, 2014 02:46
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Fluo posted:Is there any option apart from distilled water, just its quite a nightmare to get hold of for me (I've tried in the past). Just change PH of the water or? You don't have jugs of distilled or RO or DI at the supermarket? The DIY solution is to get a RO or DI rig from an aquarium shop/mailorder. e. Which is all pretty overkill for keeping starsan around for a bit of extra time. Personal experience and anecdotes but the dilution is such that a lot of homebrewers tend to overconcentrate the stuff since its made for a larger scale setting so there's a cost saving opportunity for a lot of people right there before fiddling with longevity through water chemistry. zedprime fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 03:09
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LeeMajors posted:No access to grocery stores? Distilled water isn't really sold in supermarkets here and I've only ever seen it once in a pharmacy.  Looking around online I can't find anywhere in UK either apart from amazon which is £19 ($31).  Edit: Found a place that sells it but its still extremely silly priced. Specially if filling a 5gallon bucket for the brewday. Guess the best bet is to just use carbon filter or something if not just to carry on using starstan and replacing it everytime. As it works out cheaper to replace it every time I need it then to buy distilled water. D: zedprime posted:The sciencey reason is the pH buffering capacity of the chemicals causing hard water. The solution... is to remove the hardness of the water. Yeah looking at the prices and stuff I won't be buying distilled water or any De Ionized etc, its more expensive to buy then a 16oz starsan bottle. Fluo fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Apr 14, 2014 |
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Apr 14, 2014 03:28
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I was in the process of cold crashing an IPA and when I opened my kegerator this morning I noticed that the temp had dipped below freezing. The beer was all fine but there was a jar of Conan yeast culture in water which froze  . What are the chances that this yeast is still salvageable by building a light starter?
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Apr 14, 2014 03:57
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Mikey Purp posted:I was in the process of cold crashing an IPA and when I opened my kegerator this morning I noticed that the temp had dipped below freezing. It'll be fine. Defrost and revive via starter, you may need to build it as to not overwhelm (.5L/1L/2L+)
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Apr 14, 2014 04:03
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Fluo posted:Distilled water isn't really sold in supermarkets here and I've only ever seen it once in a pharmacy.
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Apr 14, 2014 04:22
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Bobsledboy posted:What do you guys fill up the water in your iron/the wiper water in your car with? King piss.
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Apr 14, 2014 04:28
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Makes sense
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Apr 14, 2014 04:46
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Bobsledboy posted:What do you guys fill up the water in your iron/the wiper water in your car with? We use this weird blue stuff for cars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_washer_fluid  For irons just tap water. :x
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Apr 14, 2014 04:57
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more falafel please posted:I just squirt the next bottle with a vinator 3 times or so while I'm filling one.  Where has this been all my life?! I guess this is what I get for stubbornly refusing to buy brewing stuff online when I have three brew shops in the area 
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Apr 14, 2014 07:22
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Softened water works great for Star San, I've kept it for years without it getting too high or pH or becoming cloudy. RO or DI work just as well but are a bit of an overkill. You just need to remove the pH buffering elements which ionic exchange softening does just fine.
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Apr 14, 2014 13:13
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