Thanks again to Justin, who gives the impression that I know what I’m doing in these videos.
Tonight’s meeting will orient mostly around planning upcoming projects: on deck are a bio-diesel-powered go-kart (although electric is also on the table), an evening of building your own theremins, and a lesson on distilling spirits.
It will also orient around drinking beer. I may also break out that new smoker and smoke some dank meats, yo.
Please, please tell me that that carboy was filled with sanitizing solution when that happened, not wort.
Please?
whimper.
Is that a broken carboy? Oh my. You’ve got to chill the wort before pouring it in.. I highly recommend the copper chilling coils you probably saw in the brew store, or you can make your own. The cooldown time is really the critical point where bacteria settle in, and once I started using a quick-chill system the quality and finish of the beer improved dramatically, no longer tasted like “homebrew”. You can dunk your boiling pot in a bathtub full of ice water, but the coils are easier, faster, and more even. Highly recommended.
(Also you can retrieve your hops easier if you put them in a cheesecloth bag.)
Easy for me to be an absent critic, though it’s probably good I wasn’t present or I would have micromanaged what otherwise appeared to be a grand time..
Next time, I hope…
We weren’t exactly sober at that point, exactly…
Fun stuff! We just made a wort chiller yesterday out of some 5/16″ copper and plastic tubing – the whole thing was less than $20, was brain-dead easy to make and use, and it worked great. It took our chill time from ~50 min to ~25 min! (Still some room for improvement.) It helped with a clean break too, but bagging the hops and using a little Irish moss might have done something.
Also, sobriety is a terrible state to be in whilst brewing >:-)
- Eric
you should use the smoker to smoke some grains and make a smoked beer.
also yes, get some cheesecloth for those grains!
Officially going on list of projects to undertake after this year’s move to the new house: homebrewing.
Jeez, life ain’t getting any longer, I gotta get crackin’!
a few tips.
1. don’t use cheese cloth, use the fine nylon bags for your hops and specialty grains.. they are reusable, and catch far more particulate.
2. (this should be tip number 1 cause its so important) make a yeast starter. look it up, but basically you pitch yeast 12-24 hours before you brew into a small batch of wort. it gets your yeast cells up in number before you pitch lessening the chance of an infection. starters save you money and time.
3. if you have a yard, use it. get a turkey fryer and boil the full 5 gallons outdoors. no worries about boilovers, no worries about moping up messes.