Second First Run

Tonight, was part two. The wort chiller.



Things went great. I did a brown ale, and Mr. Bergson did a wheat ale. I can still smell the wort. Great stuff. Recipe's will be posted up later. Anyway, tonight was the maiden voyage of the wort chiller.

Run one, I have a skinnier, taller pot. The wort chiller ran off about 100 degree's fahrenheit in under 20 minutes. Great work for ten feet of 1/2" copper pipe. Run two, Mr. Bergson's pot. It is a shorter, squatter pot, the chiller didn't quite fit into the whole wort. Still, ran off over 100 degree's fahrenheit in less than a half hour.



All in all, I think if you want to run a 25 foot copper line instead of something smaller, it's just maybe a 5 minute difference. I am really impressed.

I ended up squashing the copper pipe down together (view the previous pictures a few posts down for the original look.) so that it could fit into the whole wort. I didn't take into account that the wort would be around 2 gallons of water, instead of 5 or 6. =)

Anyway, success! 2 out of 2! The yeast is still really to be determined. We split it in half and pitched it a little earlier. Cross your fingers. Here's some silly pictures of us sitting on our buckets.




Alright, so right before those pictures, I accidentally stepped on the siphon plug on my bucket. Great. It was a little over 6 gallons anyway... still, i'm a little unhappy at my oversized feet.



All in all sofar we are doing great! After this it's smooth sailing provided everything goes well. If you have any suggestions or idea's feel free to let me know.

The First Yeast Starter

Alright! Sit tight, this is a long one.





So tomorrow is the next brew day with Mr. Bergson. I am somewhat excited, as I haven't been able to brew in over a month. I'd say probably almost two months now, since my red. Which is delicious by the way.





Anyway. I am starting this yeast starter now, it is currently 9:53pm. We plan to use it sometime around now tomorrow night. So hopefully it will be a 22-24 hour spin on the yeast stirrer. I don't know if there are pictures posted up on the blog for that yet, but if not I will post some up with this post. I just checked, and I do. But I will post pictures of it in action tonight.


It was a little silly, I think the Harvest Ale is making thinking a little tougher right now, I decided to try and convert 1000ml to a cup based measurement, and when i got 4.226, I said "oh man, that's going to be hard." But, then I realized that I have a 1000ml pyrex measuring cup. DUH. Alright, on with it!





I'm using an Amber DME for the extract, and 1000ml of tap water. I have purified water from k-mart, but i'd rather save that for the actual wort. From the pictures, I had a fun time getting the DME that i'd measured out into the beaker. (I am using just over a 1/2 cup of DME. that is 1oz per 200ml. or .522 cups.) I need to get back to stirring. This will take about 20 minutes to finish once it boils. Also, ignore the bottle of Red Label... Not sure why that was there.








Now I'm a little nervous about this, as it's the first time I've ever put a glass beaker on an electric range. Although I just have to look over at my coffee machine to see a glass pot sitting on an electric burner. huh. ok not so bad now.





I just popped the inner thingie in my wyeast package, I don't really think it matters if I do or don't, I just can't remember for the life of me which is the yeast, the tan stuff or the brownish clear stuff in the inner balloon. So I figure it's best just to combine the two before I chuck it in the mini-wort.


Spoon!





Finally boiling. I pussyfooted it 'til just now. Still scared of glass on a electric burner. But, it's boiling. Seems to be boiling off a lot of water, it's down to 800ml now. Once it's cooled i'll probably recompense the lost liquid. Also, apparently it doesn't like wooden spoons. And I burned my fingers. And again. Damned steam! I guess the best course is to just let it sit and bubble. 20 minute boil.





Time to let it sit for a while. after the glass has cooled to touchable temperature, gonna drop it in some ice in the sink for a few. the icebox needs to be dumped anyway.





Alright, Here it is. The temp hit 65, i yanked it from the ice, and put in the yeast. Here are the final two pictures. The first pic is the yeast mixing into the mini-wort, and the second is the yeast sittin and spinning on the stirrer. The first trial run of the yeast starter will hopefully be a success! We shall find out tomorrow. Also, to clock, it was put on the Stirrer, at about 11:45/12. so it should be about a 20 hour sit and spin.









And thus, another tale comes to pass. Stay tuned for tomorrow, for part two in this series of "The Firsts" when we try out our homemade wort chiller for the first time!

anticipation.

I'm really itching to start a new batch or two. Now that I have all day to do what I want, I can do a few batches.

Also, now that I have a yeast stirrer, I can turn one wyeast slap pack into two 5-6 gallon batches.

What say you, I start a new batch of a revised porter recipe, and a batch of brown (for Milan and Shannon) ?? That sound like a plan?

Good. I thought so too.

Here's some pics from my Wort Chiller. Basically all it is, is a 10 ft segment of 1/2" copper tubing, attached to two 5ft segments of hose. The connections are screw-clamps, and underneath are rubber washers to waterproof them. The first test, water leaked like all get out, so I added the rubber washers in to help, and they helped marvelously. Also, I bent the copper tubing by hand. I didn't have a model to wrap it around, so I just tugged and bent by hand. Anyway, it's a simple enough setup, and here's the pic's:

I fail.

Well, my other blog, International Zombie Threat Awareness Day has officially been dubbed a failure. Double FAIL goes to me, who somehow had auto-renew checked on the domain for that (iztad.net)... and it renewed for another year. oh well, i'll leave the website up as a reminder to myself of my fail.

I haven't been able to brew in the last month due to losing my job, and the resulting lack of fund's. I would love to make it my full-time job, but I just can't afford that kind of setup right now. A micro-brewery would be awesome, even if I ran it out of home for now.

However, that doesn't mean I haven't been busy. Before I lost my job I had picked up some stuff to build a few things. I built a stir-plate, and a wort-chiller. Here are some pics of the stir plate, I will post some info up on the wort-chiller later.