The Next Step!

So I have been working on a few things with my homebrew setup. A while back I had a post about the next big thing. This project was going to be based on somehting I saw on Ben's Homebrew and emailed Ben about. Well this past weekend I got quite a ways a long on that project.

I am going to put in a detailed outline of what it is that I made, but just moments ago I won this three tap beauty on eBay. She is old and pretty beat, but for $14 I feel like I made out like a bandit! This will be the crowning peice on my homebrew setup. I am pretty geeked up right now.

Anyway, more to come on this project, I just thought that I would share this little development.

Cheers!

Poo Dollar Memories

This past weekend I had a few of the guys from my fraternity over. They came in Friday night and one of the guys who is now a 5 star chef and masters grad from the CIA, cooked up steak and lobster on the grill and we washed it down with the Poo Dollar IPA. (My chef friend was all sorts of impressed with the beer so that was a small victory)

As much as this was a fun get together, it was also an emotional one. We went to Rochester to say our good byes to a close friend. Chung (pictured here to the right of me) was a good friend and we are all going to miss him. The IPA was named Poo Dollar after a game that Chung made up. It consisted of taking a dollar bill and picking up a piece of dog poo with it. After that you leave the dollar on the sidewalk (poo side down of course) and let the hilarity begin. Anyway, he used to have a sinister little giggle when he would talk about Poo Dollar.

Named appropriately, Poo Dollar IPA has Chung's evil little fingers all over it. It's what we would call back in college a "creeper." One of the guys that was over was really throwing them back and kept telling me I was lying about the ABV and that it was not that strong. In fact he went so far as to pound a full glass before he wonked out for the night. Well the next morning the joke was on him. That Poo Dollar creeped up and nailed a spike through his head in his sleep. He looked (and probably felt) like shit. It was great.

Anyway, a quick review of the Poo Dollar; It has a very pinny smell right out of the tap. The head is hit or miss because I was screwing around with the PSI on my keg more than anything, but when you get a good pour, the head retention it strong with a tint of copper. The color of the beer is on the darker side of an IPA, I would say it has the color of an DIPA. The flavor profile if not what I expected. There is a flowery, pinny almost off flavor that is coming out of the hops. I am not sure how to nail it down, but it is not the kind of tastes you would expect from an IPA. Nonetheless, it's very good on the malt side of things, though most of the malt character is really drowned out by the hops.

Drinkability is dangerously delicious. These guys slide right down and weighing in at just under 8%, they really do creep up on you, like picking up a dollar bill only to find poo on the other side.

Now since last weekend put a real dent in my brew supply, I had to push up the brewing of my next batch. Instead of doing an all-grain, because I am working on some tight time schedule stuff, I am going to brew an extract batch. This is my second shot at a flavor beer and it's a vanilla cream ale. I looked into buying vanilla beans, but they are so damn expensive I couldn't bring myself too it, so I bought some pricey extract. Here is the recipe:


5.00 lb Extra Light Dry Extract (3.0 SRM) 83.3 %
0.50 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM) 8.3 %
0.25 lb Barley, Flaked (1.7 SRM) 4.2 %
0.25 lb Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM) 4.2 %
0.50 oz Hallertauer [4.80%] (60 min) 9.6 IBU
0.50 oz Mt. Hood [6.00%] (30 min) 9.3 IBU
1 Pkgs California Lager (Wyeast Labs #2112)
1 fl oz Bourbon Vanilla Bean Extract
OG-1.043

I am brewing this tomorrow night so we will see.

Cheers!

Saturday is brew day

Today was my brew day for the doppelbock. This 21lb, 7 1/2 hour journey has whipped me out! but I am done and it was a great experience that should yield a great beer. Before I go through some of the high points on the brew day, this was my first time doing a decoction mash so I am going to go through the steps.

For those of you that have not tried a decoct mash, it's not actually that difficult, it's simply VERY time consuming. You can add an extra hour on your mashing for every decoction step in your process. A summary of a decoction is taking 1/3 of your grain out of your mash tun after you have doughed in your mash and putting it into a separate pot. The consistency should be pretty think, it reminded me of oatmeal. You get it up to 152f, give it a 20min rest at that temp and raise it up to a boil, boil it for 20 min and return the grain back to the mash tun. Mix in well and watch for hot spots. Pretty simple, right? Well it actually is. It just takes a while. Here is my time line:

Look inside the Decoc Pot

7:30am wake up, start heating 10 gallons of water for 2qt per lb of grain mix
8:30am(ish) dough in grains at 152f strike temp, 144f grain bed
8:45am take out 1/3 of the grains, add to heat get up to 152, rest 20min
9:30am get the decoc grain up to a boil, boil for 20 min
10:00 am add grains back to mash tun, grain bed temp at 152f, let rest 70min (mowed my lawn)
10:40am draw off grains for 2nd decoc, get onto heat and go straight to boil, wait 20 min
11:10am add grains back to the mash tun, get grain bed temp up above 165f for mashout
11:30am mashout, wait for sparge water to heat up
11:45am start sparge...
And so on...

The left shot is the grains in the decoc pot and the right is the non-decoc grains. It's not easy to see, but the decoc grains got a little darker.


There was a 90min boil to boot. Like I said, this was a very involved beer (did I say that?). In the end it would up being a lot more quantity than I planned, and the OG was not exactly what I wanted either. It was 1.052 before the boil and finished at 1.061. I am not good at checking quantity on my keg kettle, I could have used some more boil, but I am not sure I could have handled another minute of this brew day.


I got the idea to try a doppelbock after reading a great article on it in BYO and they indicated how difficult and time consuming this beer was if brewed in a traditional fashion. I have to agree. However, it was a great experience and I am a fan of the decoction. However, I am not sure there enough days left in my life to make a habit of it.


The other new things about the brew is that I reused my Bohemian yeast from my Oktoberfest. I basically just racked my Oktoberfest to the secondary and left the stuff at the bottom of the bucket. I added my wort and walla! The good news is that it is already bubbling, so I know it worked.



One last note- regarding my comment on the last post about being the smartest man alive; not in fact true. Come to find out my shower head sparge arm sucked ass. Back to the drawing board.

Cheers.

I am the smartest man alive!

I decided that I was going to go out and get myself up to speed with a sparge setup that made sense. I wanted to use a cooler that held between 4 and 5 gallons of water, I wanted a sparge arm that had a nice spray and I wanted something that was in expensive.


So after some thinking, I remembered that I had an odd shaped cooler in the shed that my little brother used to use for motor cross races. I planned on drilling a hole and putting a tap in it, but I found that the drain plug pulled completely out and with a few gaskets it sealed up tighter than a dolphins butt hole.

After I had my water reservoir all sealed up, I decided to move to the sparge arm. I considered some PVC contraptions to float on the grain bed and I even thought about making a copper one. However in the process of looking online to see if there were easy DIY instructions on building something like this, I found a few posts with people deciding to use shower heads.


I went to Mr. Seconds and got myself a very basic shower head (that looked chrome but wound up being half plastic, a blessing in disguise it turns out) and used some of my odds and end hose items from my other projects to come up with this.



After I noticed that the shower head as it was did not work because there was not enough water pressure, I took the shower head apart (with the water running through it) and noticed that pressure should not be a big deal. The water was forced through a tiny hole and came through the inside with pretty good force.



After some brainstorming and a 22oz of Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye (awesome!) I decided to cut the shower head in half so that the tight straight stream hit a solid spot thus creating a outward spray. Amazingly it worked.

As you can see in this picture it puts off a nice wide spray (though you cannot see it from the side view).

I am pretty pumped to try out my new device this weekend on my Doppelbock I am brewing, I just hope the plastic can handle the 170f+ temps it's going to get.

Stonch's second fermentation video

For anyone like me who uses the plastic buckets, you love to hear and smell the hoppy burps coming out when your brew is fermenting. Well I have always wanted to sit and watch it all unfold, but don't have the time or patience, so Stonch has made it easy for me and everyone else to enjoy without quitting your job.

This video is awesome on so many levels, great addition to the blog Stonch!

Brew Day- Oktoberfest

This afternoon I brewed my Oktoberfest and took some pictures of the process. The first shot is while I am heating up the sparge water and waiting for the mashtun to get done doing what it does. I Batch Sparged on this batch because I was feeling lazy. I mashed at 158f, mashed out at 160f and sparged at 170f for about 15-20min. I mashed for 60 min and mashed out for 10. This was off on some of my marks, but close enough!




The second shot here is from the boiling. I made all of my hop additions on the right time and used my grain screen for the hopps. However, there was a little bit of an issue with it this time because it seemed to hold water. This made me a little concerned because if water was not getting in, hops may not have been getting out.

My pre-boil OG was 1.042 qnd my final OG was 1.050. This is way low for my target, but I am not blaiming Beer Smith (yet) because I gave myself a 70% brewhouse effeciency (why I do not know) which would explain coming that short on my gravity reading.


I maintained a heavy boil for 90min and yeilded just shy of 5 gallons. I boiled off only .08 G though. I am not sure what that means.







This is my brewing assistant for the day Meatball. As you can see he is doing what all good homebrew helpers do, check out the neighbors.






After a long brew day, there is only one thing left to do...

Cheers!

Quick update: Poo Dollar IPA

I brewed my first extract brew in a long time and I used Beer Smith to make the recipe. Here is what I did:

3.00 lb Light Dry Extract (8.0 SRM) Dry Extract 30.0 %
6.00 lb Pale Liquid Extract (8.0 SRM) Extract 60.0 %
1.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (60.0 SRM) Grain 10.0 %
1.00 oz Chinook [13.00%] (60 min) Hops 44.1 IBU
2.00 oz Cascade [5.50%] (30 min) Hops 28.7 IBU
2.00 oz Glacier [5.60%] (Dry Hop 5 days) Hops
-
1 Pkgs
American Ale (Wyeast Labs #1056) [Starter 125 ml]
Yeast-Ale

Beer Profile
Est Original Gravity: 1.070 SG
Measured Original Gravity: 1.069 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.017 SG
Measured Final Gravity: SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 7.0 %
Actual Alcohol by Vol: %
Bitterness: 72.9 IBU
Calories: 43 cal/pint
Est Color: 14.1 SRM

I named the brew Poo Dollar IPA in memory of my friend Chung B. Hua. Poo Dollar was a game that brought him a lot of joy. I really used to love to hear him laugh.

Cheers Chung, say hello to heaven.

Two Brew weekend

This weekend I am going to be using my Beer Smith generated recipes to brew up two brews. The first will likely be tomorrow night and it's going to be an Extract IPA. I decided that I was in need of a beer to have on tab while I work on the Oktoberfest (yea I know, I am late, oh well) and the Doppelbock in a few weeks.

This brewing session is going to prove to be several big steps for me. First off I am using the Wyeast #2124 (Bohemian Lager) for both the Oktoberfest and the Doppelbock so I am going to reuse my yeast! This was something that I knew nothing about two months ago and since then I had someone from my brew club tell me about it, Ted talked about it, and by LHBS owner Ed said the same thing, it's easy! Which is good news to me.

The second first for me I will get into in greater detail next week, but in my Doppelbock I am going to try for some step infusion. In fact this is going to be like a 5 stepper! But according to BYO it's well worth the effort. Anyway, like I said, I will get into that more next week.

For now, I am brewing my extract tomorrow and my all-grain on Saturday. Should be fun!

BTW- Awesome printer friendly recipes brought to you by Beer Smith, did I mention that I want to make out with that thing?

Great Fermentation video

So one of the many blogs that I watch, Stonch had this awesome time laps video of his fermentation process:

If you look on the left hand side of the page, you can watch the final
video of last week's fermentation. That's six days of yeast orgy condensed into
three minutes of fascinating viewing.

Great stuff from Stonch at Stonch's Beer Blog! This guy always has really funny commentary and great observations from an emerging brewer.



Cheers.

Beer Smith Rules!

I have to say, I was a skeptic about this whole "paying for something", but I have to admit, I am into the first day of my 21 day free trial of Beer Smith and I have to say, they had me at hello.

After another frustrating process of concocting my next recipe on my spreadsheet, I decided I would give the software thing a shot. I downloaded a few apps (I am not going to name them because I honestly gave each one about a 2 sec perusal before I removed it) and was not at all satisfied with what I saw.

So, after listening to James from Basic Brewing Radio and his April 26th report on homebrew software, I decided that I should give Beer Smith a shot. All of the reviews from listeners and other folks gave an image of an application that was built for use, not for learning how to use.

After a few minutes I figured out how to create a recipe and had a nice printer friendly 2 page doc that had my shopping list and brew day essentials all in one place. This was REALLY easy to start using.

They use a Windows based UI that has the feeling of Outlook '98. This provides the user with an "at home" feeling in the app that lets you feel free to roam around and explore. Some of the critics felt the SRM indicator left something to be desired, but to be honest, I hadn't been looking at SRM up until I started with the software so I am totally happy with it.

Overall I was impressed. I like good software and this is a nice little app. Plus I think it's pretty reasonably priced for a lifetime license. I am giving the folks at Brew Smith my enthusiastic thumbs up and I am planning on adding them to my links list.

I will have a few more posts in the next week as I prep for next weekend's two brew weekend, an OktoberFest and an IPA, both concocted on my new buddy software.

Cheers.

I found the culprit...it was me!

As always, the explanation is usually something simple. This situation is nonetheless the same.

In the post about my brew day I noted that my OG was much higher than planned and I was not sure why. I had assumed that my tweaking of my brewing techniques had increased my efficiency 10 fold! But alas that was not the case.

It turns out my wort was on "Gravity Enhancing Substances" namely an extra 1/2 lb of Belgium candi sugar I mistakenly dumped into the brew pot.

After reading Ted's Home Brew Journal where he had had a similar freak occurrence and telling him my theory of the earths magnetic polar shifts and how it is now effecting my gravity readings (because there is no way I could f%&* up my recipe on brew day!), I revisited my recipe. In doing some math on a fancy pants brew calculator (that I am a HUGE fan of BTW) I noticed that my recipe called for 1/2 lb of candi sugar as opposed to the full pound that I added, eureka! Just the breakthrough I had been waiting for! We can all breath easy and go back to calling Al Gore the lying bastard that he is ;-)

Anyway, all kidding aside, simple answer. I think that coupled with my 1/2 assed gravity readings gave me my variation. I am not crying in my beer though, god knows there are worse things than beer that's a little stronger than you intended.

I need to get back to brewing with some patience. My brewing, like my golf game, needs to take as long as it needs to. Regardless of interruption. It's time for me to get back to allocating the time needed to make this happen.

Cheers!

Loving Californication

This is a late review of my Californication, but I have had a good chance to sample enough of it now to formulate a good opinion of this beer.

I have to say, I was a bit weary about this beer at first as I am not crazy about the "lager" taste that is the mark of lager yeast. I was not sure how that would blend with the recipe I made or if it would be overwhelming. Well I was very pleased with the flavor and the subtle nuances of this beer. Here is my assessment without any scoring:

Appearance: Pours medium copper color with a long lasting head. The head is really think and creamy and lasts quite a while. I think this is the result of the DME conditioning because I have never had a brew do this before.

Aroma: This has a very clean smell, a lot of malt without a lot of hops. There is a little hint of the Larger aroma, but it is second or third on the list of things I would say I can smell.

Taste: There is a light sweet flavor that is anything but overwhelming. It's subtle and stays on the tongue without dominating the experience. There is a touch of bittering at the end of the experience, but it passes fast and you are left with the subtle sweet carmel flavor (again, very subtle)

Mouth Feel: This is a very smooth beer. The carbonation is in line with the style being average for high drinkability.

Drinkability: This is one of the more drinkable beers I have ever brewed. It's smooth and refreshing with the ABV to make it a session beer. It has the body and character of a bigger beer, but stops shot of being overwhelming making you want more!

Conclusion: This is without a doubt one of the best beers I have brewed. It may be the style that I am growing attached to, but these days when a lot of brewers are really focused on big intense flavors, this is really refreshing. The American Lager I made was too little, the ESB, maybe a little too much, this is the baby bear, it's just right!

* For the record, I am wearing a golf glove because I took those pics on the way out to practice my short game in my back yard.

**Yes, I am anal and wear my glove when practicing in the yard, but not my shoes, I am not that anal.

Beautiful Day to Brew!

My thoughts and prayers are with everyone in the mid-west who have been effected by the tornado's. I lost my house to fire and I know how it feels to have to pick up the pieces, things will get better with time.

With that said, we were fortunate this weekend in the North East to have an albeit breezy, but sunny day in Upstate New York. Sunday I took advantage of the weather and brewed the crowd favorite Mulligan Wit.

Here some some items of note from the brew day:

• I made a starter that I cooked a little hot and it boiled over in the stove.
  It's also had some of the DME scorched the bottom of the flask (first time using
  my flask, kind of a pain in the arss).
• Started brewing at 8:30am, finish time 2:30pm, 6hr brew session.
• I heated the mash water up to 175F and it leveled out at about 154F when it was in the mash tun. One item of note was that I got two different readings from the
  thermometer, I usually stick it into a tiny hole I have in the top of the mash
  tun, and it was saying 160F, when I put the thermometer into the mash, it was
  154F. I am assuming that this is because the steam is so hot in the mash tun.
  Take note for future batches.
• The gravity of the mash was 1.060 without any adjustments to compensate for heat. I need to make sure that I start cooling these off more from now on.
• I sparged at 175F and had two rests in the sparge. By the time I was done with the sparge I had used 5.5 gallons of sparge water and 4.5 gallons of mash water.
• The beginning boil OG of the wort was 1.040, this was again without adjustment to temp.
• I used a fine grain bag as a way to keep hop loss to a minimum. I also used this for all of the other items on the list for this recipe.
• The boil went for about 1hr and 20 min., the end yield was 4.8 gallons.
• The OG was 1.059, a whole .010 over my target at 1.049 so I added water
  and stirred it a while. I got it down to 1.052 and called it good.
• I pitched at 74F and it was bubbling within 24hrs very actively!

It was a successful brew day. I doubt I will enter this one into any competitions as it's more of a brew that I enjoy than anything. I just hope that I am going to be able to get it close to what I had last year.

Cheers!

The Return of the Mulligan

So I thought that the best way to wake my senses back up was to brew...so away I go. This is an all-grain interpretation of the Blanche de Bruges (Belgium White) that we coined Mulligan Wit after a piss-poor day of golf. I considered going safe and just making another extract brew, but I am always one for a challenge so here goes.

Grain Bill:
2 Row Pale Malt (Mutton's US)- 7.43 lbs
Flaked Wheat- 5.76 lbs
Biscuit Malt- .14lbs
Flaked Oats- .27lbs
Clear Candi Sugar- .5 lbs (45min)


Other:

1.5 tsp Ground Coriander (15min)
1.5 oz Bitter Orange Peel (1/2 @ 15min 1/2 @ 3min)
1/2 tsp Crushed Cumin Seed
1.5 tsp Crushed Grains of Paradise


Hops:

1oz Saaz (3.75% AA) 60 min
1oz Styrian Golding (5.25% AA) 30 min



Yeast:

Belgium White Beer Yeast

OG: 1.052
FG: 1.009

ABV 5.6%

I made some adjustments to this recipe because I am shooting for a 7 gallon yield. I have been trying to get higher and higher yields and I am barley getting what I need to so I am going to shoot for a little more this time and see where I end up.


If you see anything here that looks out of place, now is the time to let me know because I am not brewing till this weekend!


Cheers!

Missing a friend

I always wanted to keep all personal dialog off of my blog. It really flies in the face of the objective of this blog. However, in this case, I need a place to vent and this is my medium of choice. I apologize in advance:

This past week I have not been on BA or on this blog because of the very tragic loss of a friend. His name was Travis Lee and he was a 22yr old member of my fraternity. I was one of those guys that has remained active in my house and I have taken the time to get too know the guys up there.

Travis was a member of my family tree and was a great person. Travis had a wild sense of humor and was a boisterous character. You always knew when he was around.

Tuesday morning I got a call from my little little brother Chris, he was noticeably upset. I knew something was wrong from his message, but I had assumed it was an accident of some sort. When he told me that Travis had taken his own life very early that morning it was as if I was punched in the chest. Like most everyone else the news was numbing and was met with stark disblief. How could he have done this, HE WAS 22 YEARS OLD??!!

I called some of the other guys in the house (out of a lack of knowing what else to do) and it was more and more painful the more that I said it. Suicide.

I went to the house that night with my little brother in the house to be with the guys and try and show them some support. Somewhere along the lines I found out that it was a very close friend of mine that found Travis that morning. There were no words for the pain that he was now experiencing. Not only did he loose his best friend, but now he would shoulder the burden of why he had to see what he saw.

I spent the night there, we cried, drank and tried to understand why, but left for home with a hangover and more questions in the morning. The rest of the week I spent on FaceBook and Myspace (many of the newer guys in the house are into those things), looking at pictures and posting messages. Many of them to Travis on his page. This was the last message I got from Travis on Facebook a week before:

Travis Lee (SUNY Potsdam) wrote
at 11:06pm on April 17th, 2007

Hey there T.O.T (The Original Travis)! I had a hell of a time at the wedding with you and the rest of the guys. It was really cool to see what happens to people after they leave P-Dam and become successful. I really admire you man and if you don't mind me saying, your wife is a smoking hot fox. Keep in touch, or Ill just see you Alumni Weekend. Late.

Friday was the wake, still no answers, just more pain...he was buried on Saturday and all we have left is memories. Today was the first day of the rest of everyone's lives without Travis. Questions linger as well as pain, but all we can do is wait. Someday we will all know.

Travis was a great person with great personal pain. No one saw it, or felt it because when you were with him all you felt was the love he had for all his friends. It was only a few weeks ago that we were all together for Chris' wedding. Everything was great. Now he is gone and we all miss him very much. All we can do is remember the love he had for us and the love we have for him.

I am sorry again for my deviation from homebrewing and I understand how difficult this subject is. I appreciate it if you took the time to read this, though I understand if decided to stop.

To Travis, from T.O.T; you have always had and you will always have my love and respect, see you on the other side brother.

Spring Cleaning and the Next Big Thing

So I spent this weekend going through my kegging system and replacing lines, cleaning and making the sensitive balance that it my keggerator flow. For those of you that have not checked out the post that I did on my operation, my keggerator consists of a mini-fridge that holds a cold plate and has a tap on the front. The cold plate sits inside a pan with water in it to keep the cold plate more effective (as cold water penetrates faster than cold air or something like that) and there is a liquid line that runs from the keg to the cold plate and from the cold plate to the tap.

I have had this operation intact for about a year and a half now and it's been great, I could not be happier.

So why am I thinking about upgrading?

This is the internal monster that every homebrewer (and man for that matter) grapples with at every waking moment of his/her lives. To upgrade or not to upgrade? It seems that every time I have my system dialed in and the beer is flowing like wine, I feel the need to monkey around. Don't ask me why, I just do. In this case, I am telling myself that I want to have more beers on tap.

So I have started to look at this little invention I found while looking at BeerAdvocate.com;

http://www.benshomebrew.com/Beer/kegerator.html

As you can see, Ben used a mini-fridge connected to a self insulated wood box with a hole in it to create some flow of the cold air. I found the directions helpful and I am considering making this my summer project. I emailed Ben about this, specifically the temps that he hits with the fridge and he said that it's not cold enough to lager beer. At first I thought this was a deal breaker for me because I have no other way to lager brews during the summer months until the wife game me the green light to fire up the basement fridge!

Now I am seriously considering my own variation on this design that would have one of the taps on the top and two others on the bottom. I have some old countertop that I can use for the top of the contraption and all I need to do is come up with some plywood and insulation. We will see, but with energy costs being the way that they are, this is an attractive alternative to buying a chest fridge.

More to come on this one…

PS- Ben has a store in PA that looks pretty damn nice! I might have to hit it up for my next batch of Mead.

Cheers

Keg Issues **Update**

So last night, while getting prepped to watch the Sopranos, I kicked my keg. The Schlitz is finally all gone and I am almost ready to keg my Californication so I am feeling good about the whole situation. That is until I start to go through my cleaning process.

I hosed out the keg and started to reconnect everything so that I could run some clean water through the system. However, when I went to try and hook up my outward bound hose to the out nozzle on the keg, it wouldn't budge. Now this is nothing new, it's always been a fight to get either of the connections on or both, but never like this.

After a while of working at it I figured that something was really long so I cut the line for the connector and took the outward nipple off the keg. After a long time fighting, WD40ing and every other thing I could think of, I decided to take the other nipple off the keg as well. I noticed that my outward bound connector fit like a glove on the current inward nipple and so I tried the visa verse. Sure enough the line from the CO2 tank fit perfectly over the outward nipple.

I have posted a picture above of the two nipples. There appears to be a difference with their shape. I am not sure if this is what is causing my problems or if there is any real difference between the two, but from what I can tell other than the shape differences they are the same.

Last night was the first time I was able to get the outward bound nipple off. It has been stuck on since I got it and it wasn't until last night that I was motivated enough to force it off. So this is the way I got this keg. With that said, it was off the front porch of a rival fraternity that I got this keg while in college, so there is not guarantee on the expertise from which this was setup.

Any thoughts on how this should be setup?

**Update**

Okay, so after a lot of head scratching and completely taking both my keg and all of the parts that connect into and out of it apart everything is working smoothly. The issue? What we call in software as "user error."

I must have been trying to force the liquid ball lock onto the gas nipple. That's the only logical explanation because the nipples cannot be switched. The threads for one are bigger than the other and therefore it was not possible that it was wrong on them. Also when I removed the ball locks from both the gas and the keggerator, I put them back the exact way they were before.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that I got to clean everything top to bottom.

CNYBrew.com 2.0

I figured since my last post was number 50, I should do something to shake it up so here it is...

Seriously though, I made some changes to the design to and make this a more scalable and navigable website. I loved my old design and I spent a lot of time getting it the way that I wanted it. Blogger Beta came along and I resisted the change for as long as I could because my old design wouldn't work in the new Beta format, but alas, I caved.

The reason for the change was I had tried to reference my site for one thing or another in an email or on a forum post and the person I was trying to help out could not find what they were looking for. I rarely look at my site and try to navigate around it and in doing so, I realized that I had sacrificed the purpose of this site for vanity. So I changed.

I started this site to be an "online beer log" where I would post up my recipes and experience both for my personal reference and for comment from other folks that are interested in homebrewing as well. The inability to navigate to previous posts few in the face of this plan and kept this site from being useful.

I hope you like the new site, listed below were some of the sources where I got code to customize the site the way I wanted it.

• Custom Header


• Background Image- This one I figured out myself, just look for the Body tag and look to see if there is a URL or a #6 digit number. If it's a number, just use the cole background: url("theplacewhereyourpicis.com"); and it worked.


• Fixed background image


• No Google Nav Bar

I hope everyone likes the new design and doesn't think I fixed something that wasn't broken (hence the ice beer reference).

Cheers!

Lessons in Sparging

Last night was my brew club meeting and the topic was sparging. I learned quite a bit, both from the presentation and from some conversations I had afterwards. Here is what I came away with:

• There are 5 signs to stop sparging:

1. You run out of sparge water
2. the PH turns (more or less acidic, not sure what the conclusion was on that)
3. Gravity reading
4. taste
5. color

• Sparge at 170F, this is hot enough to clean the husks, not cool enough to keep the bad stuff out of the runoff
• Avoid a stuck mash, keep the grains suspended in the water and be sure that you have as much going out as you have coming in. This way there is no binding up around the filter. All of the grains should be submerged in water at all times.
• When you are brewing and you start to see the runoff get light in color, shut off the water running in and the run off. Let the mix sit there for 15 to 10 min like that and start again. Repeat this process as a way to make sure that you are getting the most out of your mash.
• when the gravity starts to drop on the runoff, you can run the remainder into jars and use it for starter in the future.

All in all it was a great meeting for me to go to because I am still a little shaky on the sparging process. I have been completing my sparging a half hour or so and in the future, I need to allow the process to take an hour or so.

Finally, I brought in the ESB I made for some comments. Everyone agreed it was mighty hoppy for an ESB and the malt I used (chocolate at .45lbs, crystal 60L) gave the brew a very pungent malt flavor. Most people that tried it said they thought the malt was roasted barley or biscuit.

With that said, everyone seemed to like even though it was not in a style category. Some people said it was more like an IPA than an ESP, however I would keep away from that because it's a bit dark for an IPA.

Hmmm, dark, bitter...I will call it Mother's ESB after the Danzig song Mother. You don't get much more dark and bitter than that.

My Version of a Bazooka Screen

Okay, so this is something I have thought about doing for quite some time and am only now getting to it so here we go:

Not too long ago I built my first mash-tun out of a cooler and have been using it ever since. However, my first few batches had some problems because I used a filter I found in this website that was the basis for my mash-tun. You see, the filter that he used and what I was able to find had to be different. Mine was a water connection hose braid, however it was flimsy like cloth and could not hold up so it was giving me a really slow flow. His sounded like a more sturdy hose braid that could be crimped at the end.

After reading Grove's Beer Log about his new mash-tun and the Bazooka Screen he bought, I was inspired. I went out to home depot and bought some window screen and started to work...this is what I came up with.

The screen was in the window section at Home Depot and is was $6 for a lot of it. The good part about buying extra is that I can make other screens if need be. I sized up the length that I would need for it and cut the piece.

I rolled the screen around a small piece of PVC that I had, it was about 1/2" diameter. After I rolled this around the PVC a few times, I pulled the PVC out and picked the size I was going to make the screen. From there I left about 2" on both the beginning and the end of the price of screen and bent it over once to start to make a seem. I used pliers to pinch the seem down. I repeated this process of bending and crimping until I had the screen at the size I wanted. It wound up being about 3 good bends and I cut off all the excess.

From there I slid the screen onto a barbed copper fitting (something most people who have a home brew system are probably familiar with) and affixed it with a small screw-tight clamp.

*as you will note, I cut very small pieces of the PVC and slid them into the screen to reinforce them and act like ribs, I am not sure how much this really helps, but it doesn't hurt.

From here I cut the filter to length and crimped the end the same way that I crimped the edge, by folding and clamping.

In the end, the whole process was only about 1/2 hr of work and because I had some of the extra parts lying around it only cost $6 for the screen (which I still have about 90% of). If anyone were to do this, I would recommend a good pair of gloves and a place that you don't have to worry about making a mess of. Those little wires poke the hell out of your hands and get everywhere. Otherwise it's cake.

Good luck, cheers!