The Denimbrew Blog

New Rig, Brew Day

2009-02-17T19:39:00.004+13:00

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

2008-09-22T21:23:00.003+12:00

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

2008-08-18T17:44:00.003+12:00

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

2008-08-12T21:33:00.002+12:00

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

2008-08-01T13:26:00.004+12:00

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

2008-08-01T12:58:00.003+12:00

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!

2008-05-07T18:01:00.002+12:00

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.

Experiment Started

2008-05-03T16:01:00.004+12:00

So after starting a thread on HBT forums and with the advice of some fellow brewers I kicked off the experiment today.

It took a few hours but fingers crossed it works out well.

My method was:

Heat 500mL of water to around 67C and add this water to a pre-heated thermos.

Place 30g (15 for chocolate malt and roasted barley( in a muslin bag and place in the thermos with the water.

Leave to steep for 15 minutes.

Measure out 60g of LME and add to 600mL beaker.

Add steeped grains to beaker with LME and microwave for 2 minutes to sanitise.

Cool slightly in cold water bath and transfer to 750mL bottle to cool.

Once cooled to fermenting temperature add yeast (one 11.5g packet of US05 rehydrated in 100mL of water, 2.5 mL of solution added to each bottle)

Place a sanitised balloon on the bottle.

I've included a few photos for your viewing pleasure.

Grain steeping in the thermos

60g of LME

30g of crystal malt

Bottles waiting for wort

Wort just before boiling

Party time

That's all for me today folks,

Glenim.

Experiment for Malt Taste Analysis

2008-04-28T19:34:00.003+12:00

So I've been thinking for a while now on how to do a taste comparison test between different specialty malts and what they add to a beer. I'm not a very good 'taster' as such and I reckon this would help me get my head around what I can taste (malt-wise) in a beer.

Last weekend I saw a video podcast on basicbrewing where they steeped an ounce of grain in 3 cups of water and then let it cool to taste the differences in malts. I tried it and had trouble tasting more than one sample, they all tasted like boring tea with a grainy flavour.

So my new plan is this...

I'd like to taste-test the following grains I have on hand (percentage of wort in brackets):

Munich (30%)
Caramunich (30%)
Carapils (30%)
Caramalt (approx 20L) (30%)
Crystal (approx 75L) (30%)
Dark Crystal (approx 120L) (30%)
Chocolate Malt (15%)
Roast Barley (15%)
Amber Malt (30%)
(Control of LME only wort)

I'm going to make a small beer for each to test.

Make a base wort from light LME, and bitter with around 10IBU of a tasteless hop.

Split the wort into 10 parts.

Steep a relative amount of the grain in water to add to the base wort to make around 500mL of wort at around 1.040. I plan on using a large amount (~1.5 times the max amount to really bring out the flavour of the malt).

I'll then transfer each ~500mL wort to a 750mL bottle and add US05 yeast. The bottle will be fixed with a crude airlock of some sort, possibly just a sanitised balloon.

After fermentation appears to be complete I will bottle and probably not carbonate and then age for approximately a week.

It seems like it may be a little time consuming but I'm hoping it will be worth the effort.

The biggest problem I see so far is sanitising the steeped wort but in theory I think everything should work out OK.

I'll post pics and let y'all know my progress once the great malt experiment takes off. I'd be happy to hear anyones suggestions.

Cheers and Beers,

Glen.

The first of two projects completed...

2008-03-16T22:28:00.005+13:00

Well, after hunting around for bits and pieces I've knocked out the first project.

I built an cheapo stirplate for yeast propagation from bits and pieces lying around.

The build cost was around 50NZD, 30 of which was an overpriced component box, but I wasn't in the mood to shop around that day. Twelve of that 50 was for a wall plug 12V 0.4A AC->DC transformer off TradeMe. Something most would be able to find around the home, unfortunately all of the ones I had were in use.

I ripped apart an old PC power supply box for the fan to use as a motor. I found a couple of magnets in some old computer hard drives I had. I scored a little LM317 voltage regulator kit from dse.co.nz for $2.50, great deal. With the addition of a pot into the voltage regulator circuit the fan speed can be varied. Threw in an ultra-bright LED and a cheap switch as well to make it look a little flasher.

I attached a large steel washer to the fan hub as perfectly centered as possible with double-sided tape. I then stuck the magnet to the steel washer and played around with until it was centered. I then ran a bead of super glue around the magnet to stop it moving.

The whole circuit was soldered up in about a 20 minutes, total build time would be about 2.5 hours. An easy project worth doing.

I've chucked in a few photos including the first starter I just put on it a few minutes ago.

Completed stirplate box, a little bland in looks but seems to do the job so far.

Circuitry inside.

Fan/motor. The magnets are attached to the other side with some spacers and screws and bolts to attached it to the lid.

First starter on the plate. Can't really see the vortex from this view but it almost touches the stirbar in the bottom.

NB: If you want to build a stirplate there's heaps of really helpful guides around, especially on homebrewtalk forums etc. Another thing to note is be careful with the magnets, they're strong and in the process of making mine I broke about 6 magnets from them snapping together. All of the electronics parts will be available from DickSmiths/Jaycar type places. Flasks, stirbars and other handy brew/labware is available at good prices from labwarehouse.co.nz.

Cheers,

Glenim.

I've been slack...

2008-03-06T12:43:00.002+13:00

updating my blog.

I had a hop harvest. Three seperate ones actually. About 70g dried total. They did smell kinda grassy but I picked them anyway as the were starting to brown. Will have to do a SMaSH brew with them sometime.

I've also got another project, well two, in the works.

A SS weldless keggle F/B kit, march pump arrived in the mail today for Project One. And a 2000mL conical flask and magnetic stirbar arrived for Project Two.

Hopefully I'll have something interesting to share sometime soon!

Cheers,

Glenim.

My Cascade Plant IV

2008-01-12T09:40:00.000+13:00

Things with the growing have been going pretty well, one of my cuttings has also taken off quite well.

I'll let the pictures do the talking - taken today.

The start of flowers -

Cheers,

Glen.

9th All Grain, First Outdoor Brew Session :-(

2007-12-29T14:14:00.000+13:00

My First outdoor brewing experience wasn't great. It takes too long for my gutless two ring burner to heat up strike and sparge water. After that and the circuit breaker in my multibox stopped shitting itself it was (almost) plain sailing. I'd have a few more photos to share but I was busy battling flies.

On a high note, first time using my barley crusher, a jump to almost 80% effeciency, and I finally bothered to calculate cooling volume loss and boil off loss.

Anyway here are the pictures from my (almost - couldn't get centienniel so just added a little more cascade) Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale Clone.

Barely crusher with half the grain bill loaded, started to hand crank, got tired...

Called over Mr DeWalt to help out but he got tired faster than I did, back to hand cranking...

This is the crush at the end, I'm very happy with it.

My setup outside.

Polysterenenenenene cover for mash tun, helps keep the temp sooooo much better, thanks to a member from HBT.com for posting about this, unfortunately I can't remember who posted it.

Full boiler.

Coming up to a boil.

How I aerate, probably unsanitary but it's worked (touch wood) so far.

Thats all from me,

Glen.

My Cascade Plant III

2007-12-24T11:43:00.000+13:00

After the tip snapped the laterals started going crazy so I started to train a few of them, has taken off again nicely.

Not much else has been happening lately, been so busy with work and the like.

Cheers,

Glen.

My Cascade Plant II

2007-12-01T17:09:00.000+13:00

This thing grows blood fast, doubled in height in a week.

Plant as of 1/12/07

Top broke off while I was trying to train it :-( hopefully all goes well.

Length of rope for bine, excuse the car parts.

The part that snapped off I trimmed and planted with some rooting hormone to see if they will root.

Mini-greenhouses for plants.

That's all from me today.

A couple of new additions to the brewquipment family

2007-11-22T13:10:00.000+13:00

I had a lot of dead space in my mash/lauter tun with my stainless steel braid, and the thing used to float around and be a general pain in the ass. So I built a copper manifold. The pipe was free and the fittings came to about $50 (ouch). Putting it together took roughly 1.5 hours, not too bad, just a little fiddly making things stay together and drilling a bazillion holes.

I also decided it was time to build another wort chiller, mine was a little too small and didn't really suit the immersed elements in my boiler.

That's all from me today, cheers,

Glen.

My cascade plant

2007-11-19T13:22:00.000+13:00

Just thought I'd post up a couple of flix of my hop plant, a cascade, taken today.

Cheers,

Glen.

New Toys, Logo and Kegerator

2007-10-26T17:50:00.000+13:00

Well the kegerator is up and running pretty smoothly. Still need to get the feel for my carb levels though and one of my taps is a little foamy but all up it's going well.

Here are some flix for your brewing pleasure, I put my Dystopia rasterbation poster up for shits and giggles 'cause it's so plain looking.

And I bought a new boiler. It's a 40L urn. I put in another element, 2400W and added a manifold to the tap to reduce dead space, even with the manifold it's 1800mL, would hate to think what it would be without it. It's also got a sight glass which is pretty handy. And most of all - one less thing to siphon from!

And just a few last flix.

Edwort of homebrewtalk.com's infamous Apfelwine.

The first trial brewing of what will hopefully be my house beer - Atomic Ale. Great citrusy aroma to it from mega cascade additions, but a little lacking in the malt area. Will post a recipe when I've perfected it.

That's all from me today.

Cheers,

Glenim.

Working on a logo

2007-10-19T14:02:00.001+13:00

Messing around with a logo for the brewery.

Not really all that happy with it at the moment, esp the colours, might start again from scratch.

Thumbnail

Kegerator Build - Pimp my fridge

2007-09-29T11:05:00.000+12:00

I'm part way through setting up a kegging system, I've spent about 600NZD on it so far. Including fridge and extra taps and bits and pieces.

When I first got the fridge, in all it's Fridgidaire glory. Before and after shots of the de-handleing and de-labeling.

I can fit up to four corny kegs in here or two kegs and a fermenter for lagering. Gonna get rid of the butter conditioner. Maybe build a stand for the back two kegs so they're a bit easier to get at when there's stuff in the front.

Ripped out the door thingy, gives me a bit of extra room in the fridge.

The door afterwards. I got a piece of aluminium to go aver the foam, I didn't get a flick of it though, you can see it kinds in some of the other photos.

I don't need a sparky, I'm sure I learnt enough about electricity in 6th form physics...

It was leaking in the back, moisture had got into the foam and started freezing around the gas lines. So I cut all the foam out and filled it with no-more-gaps type stuff and put an aluminium sheet over the hole. Pics are before then after.

Found a nice spot for it in the brauhaus, that other fridge will be gone once it's up and running.

What a broken thermostat probe looks like, gave me a good reason to buy the fridgemate.

Sorted the Fridgemate controller out by myself, surprisingly. With the probe taped to the keg and the thermo set at 10C the fridge's temp stays at around 6ish degrees, probably a little warm for yeast storage but I'll see how it goes. The freezer still freezes too, so good for storing hops.

Pretty much all set up and done. Still need to tidy up the wires on the photos left. And get dad to drink the Steingrenades.

Also need to sort out taps and gas lines but fingers crossed I'll get that done this weekend.

Cheers,

Glenim.

First post, third all grain batch, brown ale

2007-09-29T00:06:00.000+12:00

My third all grain batch, J. Palmers Oak Butt Brown Ale. I used a different yeast and added a little more chocolate, it may be edging more on a porter than a brown now but I'm not too familiar with these styles.

I was gonna put some more explanation into the photos and what I was up to but it was brewed a while ago and I'm just too lazy to think about it right now.

Brewed with -

Pale Ale Malt
Amber Malt
Crystal (75)
Chocolate

Single 60min at 67C infusion with decocted mash out

UK Goldings hops

Gervin Ale Yeast aka Nottingham

Time for the photos.

Malted grain premixed the night before for an early start.

Too bad you can't smell this, it's great, nice and roasty, chocolaty from the choc malt

Mash in water timer-ed to be up to temp when I wake up.

Hops also measured out the night before for easy additions during the boil, yeast also out of the fridge so it can start it's warm up before the starter.

After mash in, low on my temp as usual.

An hour later starting the decoction for the mashout.

Decoction is starting too boil, about to throw it back in the MLT.

Recirc'ing wort to clear it of fine grain particles.

Starting my runoff into the boiler.

Just added the sparge water, gonna stir it and let it site for a few mins.

Half-assed yeast starter.

Full boiler.

Pre-boil gravity, I can't remember what temp the wort was at when I took this flick so I dunno what the actual reading is, but hey, it looks all tech and shit.

Boiling started, added first hop addition.

This is why I need a bigger pot (currently accepting donations). Check out the buzzy way the flash has reflected off the steam.

Yeast started getting pumped.

Quenching my thirst with this 5% fruit juice beverage.

Started to cool wort after a 60 min boil with my home made DIY-as immersion chiller.

Slushing the thing around to speed up coiling (under HSA temp) and also to add some oxygen to the wort.

Starting to siphon into fermenter.

Pre-ferment volume.

Adding yeast starter to wort.

Post dilution volume.

OG reading at 20ishC.

Well that's it. Hope you enjoyed my awesome photography skills.

-Glenim.