New Rig, Brew Day

Finally got this thing sorted out.

Lots of new parts equals lots of hiccups I've found.

This was the third beer I've done with this system, about to brew the 5th this weekend.

This was a Robust Porter that's currently conditioning on 2kg of raspberries. There's a few pics that I missed on the Porter brew but took the photos again on the next day hence a few pics of the wort being quite light.

I'll shut up now and get on with it.

Pre-brew, ready to go.


Pump, switch and part of gas manifold


Boil kettle - all the kettles look pretty much the same on the outside.


BK Inside


MLT Inside (have gone to stainless braid now)


HLT Inside


Grist pre-crush


Grain mill motor


Grain mill post-crush


Filling MLT


The most high-tech windshield available
Heat strike water in MLT


BBQ regulator on steriods


Beersmith brew day print out


Just mashed in


Recirculating mash and end of mash out step


Recirculation attatchment


Full boil kettle


Hot break and hop bag


Recircing boiling wort through plate chiller to sanitise


Left over trub after recirculated cooling and whirlpool


Close up of above.

That's pretty much it, happy brewing!

General Update

Well as usual I've been slack keeping this blog up to date, so just a general update today.

Springs here, kind of. I dug up my main rhizome and some cuttings I made from the stem that got buried in the garden over winter. I decided to move the hops to the side of the house where I have some more area, just little less sunlight. I've planted three rhizomes of the cascade cross. I've got room for another, which I'm looking to plant a smoothcone plant.

I've bought myself a new brewing tool, an Asus Eee PC laptop. With a bit of fiddling I got wine (a windows emulator for linux) installed and with a lot more fiddling installed BeerSmith on it. Since I won't have a computer nearby when using the sculpture it will be handy to have for those brewday notes and calculations.

Not much news on the sculpture overall, have cut the manifold and kinda sorted out the burner stands, just more welding to be done.

That's all folks,


Glenim

Sanitation Test - Part II - Judgement Day

Ok so the wort has been in that fermenter since my last post.

Cracked her open today.

Infected.

Guess this is destined to be used only for grain storage from now on.

Strong CO2 burn on the nose, doesn't smell unpleasent. Tastes slightly sour. Looks like it has a krausen but I'm guessing it would be called a pellicle in this case.






I'm just gonne leave it in there and see what happens.

And I still want to bottle the weizen, so I'm going to be completely stupid, transfer the beer to a carboy, clean the fermenter out and then transfer back to use it as a bottling bucket. I have a bad feeling about this...

Brew Sculpture - Part II

Last Tuesday I had my frame for the sculpture welded up. It took about 4 hours, 4 beers and a couple of whiskeys with the neighbour but in the end it came out great.

Here are a couple of photos with and without the top before I pickled/passivated it so the welds still look a little dirty.








And to all the New Zealanders out there who are looking for stainless steel cleaner that contains oxalic acid and can't find a thing (I searched everywhere for SS Cleaner/Cleanser and couldn't find ANYTHING). You can buy oxalic acid from PlaceMakers, and porbably other hardware stores, in 500g bags. It's sold to be used as timber bleach but works great to bring up an awesome finish on your SS gear. Oxalic acid is the main ingredient in Bar Keepers Friend - unavailable AFAIK in NZ.

Cheers and Beers,

Glenim.

Sanitation Test

I've got a fermenter that I stored some grain in. It's empty now but I need it to use as a bottling bucket. Being the cheap bastard I am I don't want to buy another. I'm hoping like hell that it isn't a lacto and other random bacteria gang in there waiting for some fresh, innocent wort.

So my plan is:

Clean it to death with percarbonate.

Sanitise to death with Iodophor.

Drop in 2L of sanitised wort.

Seal it.

Leave it for a week.

And hopefully after that it will still be sanitary, infectionless and I can bottle with it without making a Berliner Weiss.

And after typing all that out I feel like I'm wasting my time, meh.

Glenim.

Brew Sculpture - Part I

I've finally acquired all the parts I need for my single tier, single pump scultpure. There are a few small bits and pieces left to go but I'll buy those when I need them.

My father is/was a machinist and we've got a lot of the tools needed to complete the job here at home. The only thing we don't have is a TIG to do all the welding, luckily my neighbour is a welding tutor at one of the local technical institutes, so all going well I'll be able to trade some beers or cash for some welding.

All the stainless for the frame work has been bought, we cut all the pieces to size a few weekends ago, that's just waiting to be welded up now. The stainless top for the frame has been folded up and is ready to go on once the frame is completed.

We've bought three Sanke kegs for kettles and cut the tops off them using a right angle air cut-off tool. Hopefully this weekend we can finish installing all the bits and pieces onto the keggles.



My old man doing my dirty work.



Three converted kegs.



And somewhere under all that shit is the frame and top waiting to be assembled.


Cheers and Beers,


Glenim.

New name!

I decided since little of the brewing I do is German having the word 'brau' in the brewery name is kinda pointless.

So this is the knew blog and I'm know Denim Brewing.

Cheers everyone!

PS New logo and all that jazz to come.