More of the Nov. 10 Session

At right is a photo that shows more of the brewery at my last session.

Below is another shot from its construction in 2005 (click it for maxi-view). It's a photo from before the copper plumbing was built on, with the pipes drawn on in Photoshop. I had previously sketched it out legal pads, newspaper proofs at work, etc., and this was the final scheme before I went out and bought the pipes and valves and tubing. The blue lines are plastic tubing, the brown are copper and the brass ball valves are green. Pump's that orange thing at the bottom. Note that the mash tun is my backup one. It's nice (and I got it free!) but the blue one is bigger and that's what I've been using:


Also note the changes that happened during construction. The vertical pipe up to the mash tun has a more elegant, diagonal rise to it, and the orientation of the pump was changed when I realized that the planned position would create an air bubble around the impeller with no way to bleed it off (why the heck isn't this &*%#! thing working?).

I also added foam insulation around the pipes, although I think more of that will be needed for winter brewing in Virginia. I'm losing heat through that plastic tube going into the tun in particular.

You'll see the diagram also has a "heating coil," like in a heat-exchanged recirculating mash system (HERMS). This is not very effective as a way to drastically change the temperature of the mash, but it definitely has benefits. It doesn't make step-mashing a breeze (I don't really do this anyway), but it does allow some temperature control of the wort while it recirculates, and recirculation is really the beauty of this system.

When you recirculate, you are constantly running the wort through the grainbed as long as the pump is on. This turns the grainbed into a very solidly bedded filter, which results in incredibly clear wort as well as a very good mash yield. You never have to stir anything, either. In fact you shouldn't.

After an hour of mashing, or close to it, I turn on the pump and begin moving wort out of the bottom of the tun, through the pump and back up to the top of the tun where it can pass through the grain again. To keep the flow into the tun from disrupting the grainbed (that pump can push pretty hard), there is a "fountain" system at the top of the tun to slow down the flow and kind of lay it gently on top of the grain. Here's a picture of the open tun lid during a mash, and you can sort of see how the fountain works:



During recirculation, if I want, I can turn two valves and shunt the wort through the heating coil, a length of 3/8 copper pipe that's immersed in the hot water tank. If the tank is full of hot water, this of course heats the wort. On warm days, this is a good way to boost the temp of the mash and stop the conversion process, also called "mashing out." On cold days it's not so effective for that.



I run the pump until the wort is clear enough for me to clearly see my finger through the clear plastic tubing coming out of the tun. You can see this tube above. Magical! You know that tan rubbery stuff that's left in the bottom of your kettle after you boil? Well, this makes it a thing of the past. Recirculating leaves almost all of that crud in the mash tun. (The iodine is for testing the wort for conversion, which I rarely do anymore.)

This next picture is a better illustration of how clear your wort can get, although this is in fact wort that has been boiled and is headed for the chiller:



To finish for today, here is a shot of what happens to the spent grain when the wort has been drawn off into the kettle and is boiling. My son and I detached the tun and lugged it down to the compost pile, and dumped a nice, warm layer of goodness on the heap. It will be great for next year's vegetables:



If you're disposing of spent grain for the first time, especially in warm weather, dump it AWAY from the house. After about 48 hours it is squirming with worms and STINKS like few other things you have experienced. This is also a good reason to thoroughly clean your tun as soon as it's empty, and not put it off:



Until next time ...

Brew Session - Nov. 10

Without futzing around with a lot more background (there's ample time for that), here's a recent brew session, on Saturday, Nov. 10.

I made 10 gallons of "1-hop" IPA from a recipe provided by another Star City member; I had tried it at his house and was impressed with the clean simplicity of it. His one hop was Amarillo, and I am doing mine with German Perle.

As you can see, it was a beautiful day to be outside brewing. The children were also outside, pulling frost-zapped flowers and cleaning up the remains of the summer flowers and tomatoes.


The recipe for 10 gallons has 21 pounds of Maris Otter pale malt, a pound of Crystal 40, a half-pound of Crystal 60 and a handful of chocolate malt. All this fit neatly in my tun with some room to spare. I could almost make 10 gallons of double IPA with this tun, it is so big.

I had a little trouble with the strike temperature this time, I think because I ran a little too much hot water into the tun before mashing in. But after adding about a quart of cool water the temp was at 153 and things settled in for an hour.

The rest of the session went like clockwork, although as a Florida-originating brewer I am still not used to how long it takes to boil 12 gallons of liquid when it's 50 degrees outside. I'm more used to brewing when it's 85. I need to get a lid for my kettle, I think, to contain some of that heat. Goodwill store here I come.

Also as a Florida brewer, I am not used to having such good water. My well there yielded very hard, mineral-rich water that imparted a definite flavor to the beer. Not so much with extract brews, but definitely when I used it to mash grain.

Here, however, my well water is acidic (pH of 6) and tastes delicious. We recently had a powdered-limestone neutralizer installed for the house, to keep the acid water from eroding our copper pipes in a few years, but when the guy did it I had him leave one of the outdoor faucets directly fed by the well, i.e. bypassing the neutralizer. So when I brew, I just guestimate and use half acidic water and half neutralized. The results have been excellent.

Anyway. Here are some close-ups of the operation. In this picture taken from low down, you can see the pump with its splash guard of aluminum flashing. The chiller is visible behind it, and I'll talk more about the fabrication of that later (it was the first piece of brewing equipment I made).


Note the camp stove with its little precision-bearing wheels, on its track. It is rolled into position under the kettle in this view.

The gizmo to the right is another result of Florida brewing. It's a water uptake hose. In 2004 and 2005 Florida had no shortage of tropical rain, and as an alternative to my stalactite-forming well water I started putting a carboy under the eaves of the house and collecting rainwater to brew with.

The beer flavor improved amazingly, but try lifting six or seven gallons of water and pouring it -- glug glug glug -- into your hot water tank.

So I built a special valve into my system, just before the pump, which could suck collected water up out of a carboy or bucket and into the system. The big problem was with all the water running back out of the uptake hose the moment the pump was shut off (or before it could be started), so I fashioned a check valve to put on the end of the dangling uptake hose. I cut the bottom off a White Labs yeast tube, cut a wide hole in the black plastic cap, stuck the soft rubber gasket from a swing-top beer bottle inside the perforated cap and dropped in a marble, generously donated by my son.

The result is a check valve that worked quite well, once I figured out the physics of how to prime it and get it started. When the pump came on, the hose would suck up water from a bucket and the marble would rattle around merrily. When the pump was cut off, the weight of the water in the hose would slam the marble down and seat it against the soft swing-top gasket, sealing off the hose and holding the solid column of water inside. The diameter of the White Labs tube just happened to be perfect to push onto the plastic hose I use on the BMW.

Sorry to take so long on that, but I was pretty proud of that little invention. You can sort of see it in the above photo. Now that I am using my garden hoses, though, it's pretty much superfluous.

I need to go. More about this brew session in the next post.

The BMW

BMW is short for Biermaschinenwagen, which you don't have to know German to figure out.

After struggling for a while with a kettle on the stove, in which I would heat my mash water and then my sparge water, only to scoop sparge water into the mash tun with a plastic pitcher, and then have to roll the whole kettle of wort out the kitchen door on a skateboard -- yes, a skateboard -- I decided a little automation was in order.

Having recently gotten a promotion at my job, I had a little extra capital and bought myself a March magnetic-impeller food-grade pump from Northern Brewer. This became the heart and prime mover of the BMW.

Here is the BMW just after completion (click the image to make it all bigger and clearer):



I designed the whole thing around the pump, with the goal of being able to make 10-gallon batches with a minimum of slinging around 5-gallon containers of liquid (I also have a troublesome lower back). I went to a scrap yard in Sarasota, Fla., where I lived at the time, and with no trouble scored an old Anheuser-Busch 15-gallon keg for about $30 ($1 a pound). The guy at the yard cut a hole in the top end with an acetylene torch, and there was my brew kettle.

Er, not quite. There was this rim of jagged, crusty, hardened-lava type stuff all around the opening. It soon became clear that although it was black and crispy-looking, it was solid stainless steel under the black. My Dremel tool would have died before it even took off a millimeter of it. Same with an electric drill.

So I rented an angle-grinder from Home Depot, and bought a disk.

Now, if you have never taken an angle grinder to an empty, hollow body of stainless steel, it is pretty spectacular. My former Florida neighbors are probably still talking about it. The sparks fly in showers, the metal melts, and the noise ... oh the noise. Imagine a pteradactyl caught in an electrical substation.

But I got the thing smoothed all the way around, after putting on shooting earmuffs and half-filling the keg with water to deaden the screaming racket.

After that, using a metal-cutting hole saw to cut the tap hole was a cinch. Glided right through. I bought a weld-free bulkhead fitting and there it was.

The hot water tank of the BMW is simply my onetime, 9-gallon brew kettle, hooked into the plumbing of the system. The mash tun is a big, square cooler from Wal-Mart with a copper-pipe manifold in the bottom and a sort of "fountain" system coming in the top for recirculating and sparging.

The camp stove/burner is one of the more unique features; I didn't want to buy a second one, so I put it on (rollerblade) bearings as wheels and arranged the water tank and kettle so that the whole camp-stove/burner assembly can be rolled back and forth between them as needed. Works great so far, and that's about 15 batches, I would guess.

The whole thing is on heavy-duty casters, so I can either brew in the garage or out under the sky on a nice day, and the whole thing can be parked somewhere out of the way. I built a little stool-platform to go with it since the top of the tun is pretty high up.

It was built at the tail end of the recent Florida building boom, so all the lumber came from Dumpsters. Man, I love construction site Dumpsters. Is that wrong?

I moved to Roanoke about two years ago now, in Spring 2006. The BMW made the trip in good form, with all its pieces held in place with zip ties except the keg/kettle, which went separate with a glass carboy packed inside. The setup sure was a conversation piece with the movers, who seemed intent on harnessing its powers to make whiskey.

I'll talk more about the BMW and its other features later. It certainly has made my brewing easier. If it has one essential feature, though, it is, as mentioned, the March pump. If you have notions of juicing up your brewing plant, the place to start is a pump.

Doughing In

Well, I have a recently created a model railroad blog, so why not one now about my other main hobby, brewing beer?

I guess next will be birding ... Hey, we're getting pine siskins at the feeder here in Roanoke, Va., and the cedar waxwings are migrating through this week!

Anyway. Beer. I've made it. Lots of it. Almost exclusively ales, since lagers don't turn me on all that much. Not to say that they won't someday. But for now ales are exciting, easy and ready pretty quickly, with the exception of those high-alcohol ones.

There are just tons of homebrewing resources on the Web, among the best of which is John Palmer's How to Brew site, so I won't reinvent the wheel by explaining how to mash, sparge, make manifolds, save yeast, etc. I'll just post pictures of my brew sessions and any random thoughts I want to pass around.

Palmer's site is, in fact, a gold mine. Take some time to read that, and perhaps a copy of Charlie Papazian's "Complete Joy of Home Brewing" for when you are away from the computer, and you will be well on your way to making beer that's better than nearly anything you can buy.

As long as I am putting up links, the Recipator is what I use to create, size and tweak my all-grain recipes. I don't do extract any more. I started out doing several of them in 2004, when I took up the hobby, but quickly moved to the more gadget-intensive and, I believe, flavor-superior all-grain brewing.

Many people sing the praises of ProMash, but the Recipator is free, and I spend enough money on hobbies as it is.

For calculating strike temperature and mash volume, I use the calculators at the Green Bay Rackers site. That's also free ;-)

I am a very short-time member of the Star City Brewers Guild here in Roanoke. These guys make some pretty awesome beers, and have beautiful brewing set-ups! They also put on a lot of events, hold contests, and are great proponents of the hobby.

As a dad of a recent teen and another soon-to-be teen, however, I find my Saturdays to be very important times to be with my family. So that's another reason for this blog. I can't be a hard-core club guy, so this site will hopefully give me an alternate way to connect with other brewers.