All posts by Richard Page

Home Brew

#BrewDay @olicanabrewing challenge update II

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I transferred the Columbus brewing challenge to keg yesterday but I’m not happy Oops
A quick sampling Of the brew from the testing tube when I measured the F.G.  left me with a soapy aftertaste ! So either it’s an attribute of the hop , which I’ve never used  before so i’m  not sure! or I’ve left it in the trub  in the FV too long ! If it hadn’t been blowing a whooley all week I’d have been down to the shed and  transferred it to a secondary . BTW. the FG was 1.008 so it’s coming in at 5.27% but I’m Very seriously thinking of doing it again but this time making sure I move it 1/2 way through to a secondary FV !!! But that ‘d be cutting it too fine for the next meeting! Hit with Brick

I’ll give it a couple of days then have another taste as it could have been the plastic cup….

Home Brew

#BrewDay @olicanabrewing challenge update

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I had Quite a successful BrewDay for the OlicanaBrew challenge.  Big Smile
The water was quite cold and it took a while to get the Buffalo Boiler that’s my HLT upto the right Strike Temp .

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Buffalo Boiler and PID set to 74˚c

In went the 16L of liquor followed by the 4.6KG of Maris Otter and 0.5KG of Pilsner Malt, The brew I decided on called for a light body and to be mashed at 64.5˚c, So I the STC1000 to stop pumping above 65˚c as I’m Still fine tuning my Recirculating Mash technique using the immersion Coil in the HLT, it was cold in the shed and I initially overcompensated with a too high HLT temperature until I knocked it down  and stirred the mash to get it back to Temp…!.Baffle

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The Sparge went well and it was back into the Buffalo for the boil.

 

25g of Columbus  added at the start of the Boil another 15G added with 15Minutes left. Irish moss added 5 minutes  before the end and then the remaining 10g added at ‘Flame Out’. I decided to pump the wort through the Flatplate cooler back and into the Buffalo to leave some of the cold break material in the copper, Not sure it worked that well so I might just gravity feed straight into FV next time…

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OG 1.048′ ish

BeerSmith estimated the OG at 1.042  so it’s slightly over , lets see what it’s FG is …..
The wort was a little on the cool side when I added the Safale US-05  ..Took it till lunchtime to get to temperature.
(ignore the brew name that was the New Years Brew )
But was already bubbling when I checkedBig Smile

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Home Brew

@Olicanabrewing Evening 2

Yesterdays Olicanabrewing evening @IlkleyBrewery went very well, there were samples brought by quite a few of the group. Gaz’s  Red coloured Beetroot IPA using a Belgian yeast was one of the more unusual ones to mention as was Simon’s (i think it was Simon, that was sat next to Alex) dark brew flavoured with 20  liquorice Teabags , there wasn’t a bad one amongst them and everyone’s brew should deserve a mention but it’d be a long list…

The car tyre valves used to pressurise and carbonate the 2L PET bottles worked really well and at a fraction of the cost of the Carbonater fitting,  I got mine from Ebay Rotherham Motorcycle shop item http://r.ebay.com/UBfqLz 
I’ll be on the lookout for Brown PETs so beers won’t get skunked…

Gaz and Nick set a brewing challenge using 18.39% alpha  Columbus Hops  ! I’ve started to ponder what to make but I think I may have muddied the water when Nick said you can use one other and  I said adjunct. I think I’d best play safe and make a SMaSH or try an IPA style

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Hops vacuum packed & ready for the freezer until needed
Home Brew

Olicanabrew 2

I’ve been quiet on the blog front again but as usual have done a couple of brews..
New years eve saw me in the Shedquarters making another batch of Black IPA. The Brewday went very well and I tried out my new present from Mrs Purpleogre, the Counterflow plate  heat exchanger . This batch of Black IPA was later Dry Hopped with my own 2013 season Cascade Hops..

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Plate chiller in action Sterilised in boiling water

There seems to be a debate about using plate chillers and the fact that the wort temperature is higher for longer and this may encourage DMS to form as it’s not actively boiling it off but  since I have a pump I may just recirculate the cooled wort back into the kettle and cool the whole lot down and then transfer into the FV…but thats for next time.!

Tomorrow is the Second OlicanaBrew evening, Which I am looking forward to, I have been trying out a way of getting carbonated Beer to the event using two 2L PET bottles, that should give 20 of us about 1/3 of a pint to sample. the beer was placed in the PET’s and all the air removed and then Pressurised to 30PSI and put in the fridge at 4 c left overnight and then repressurised and shaken, I’ve done this 3 times so far so fingers crossed it’s not too gassed !

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Motorcycle Valves

 

BrewPi, Home Brew

Dana’s Delight #Brewday, Olicanabrew evening

Tuesday evenings Visit to @IlkleyBrewery for the first  Olicanabrew meeting looked like it was a roaring success lots of friendly people and very well supported by the brewery staff, thanks for making it a free event. I bought my Ticket for the next one before I left and I also have to thank Mary for being taxi driver and joining in with the Brewing conversations, I’ll have to investigate the train timetable from Guiseley for the next one Laughing.

I started late on the planned #brewday as a trip to Abbey Homebrew in Kirkstall was needed to top up my grains as the BrewUK parcel didn’t arrive until late afternoon (I also needed two new tyres before the white stuff appears on our roads !)

This is the second of the brews that I am doing for the Christmas period . I decided to do one that everyone seems to like and is easy drinking,  Dana’s Delight  a SMaSH Using Dana Hops, just spotted an error the Irish Moss should really be 1 tablespoon not a teaspoon as shown.. !

Dana's delight

the other Christmas Brew done the previous saturday is still in the brew fridge, following a profile

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Here’s the recipe based from Beersmith repository suitably scaled for my equipement.

Chinook IPA recipe

Home Brew

Olicanabrew @Ilkleybrewery

It’s the Olicanabrew evening at Ilkley brewery tomorrow evening. Looking forward to free Beer and Pies  Smile 
Hopefully I won’t be too hung over for my planned brewday on Wednesday, I’m  planning to make another  Dana SMaSH ready for the Christmas Hols, although I might have to go searching for more Maris Otter if the @BrewUK order doesn’t arrive in time..
The big question is for the Olicanabrew night which of my Home Brews should I take? and an even bigger question How Many ? 

BrewPi, General

more on @brewpi ver0.3

Hmm here’s the screen shot from this morning, the fridge without a beer in, just set to stay at 4.5 c

brewpi screenshot
Capture of my greenpi

There are a couple of things to note..

  1. The beer sensor trace dropped out and didn’t restart.
  2. The Temperature box is Blanked
  3. When enabling the room temperature the graph doesn’t rescale and won’t go full scale even when refreshed.

This was captured using safari on my mac and I couldn’t see how to manipulate the graph, unlike when I looked at the Green BrewPi interface using my iPad, I could manipulate the graph to my hearts content, pinch, drag etc it worked fine, .. too much bias towards mobile devices ?

Tonight it’ll beTime for me to track down that commented out line in the Beer-chart.js file to re enable the range selector bars and possibly look to see why the beer sensor isn’t re enabled !

Update:

After looking through the code for the arduino the beer sensor will only get restarted if its in mode is beer (profile or constant) hmm i’d still like it to restart and log the beer temp !  Although maybe thats my autistic side coming out, if it’s stopped when it was going, get it going again even though it’s not really needed, I think i might have to see if I can live with that one…Although what if you want to log  in the off state to see what heat  gets generated by the yeast activity ? Maybe i’m pondering too much on the inconsequential  ! Oh Really?

General

Updated @BrewPi to 0.3

Well this is a small update..

Just updated my GreenPi system with the rev c  shield to the latest 0.3 version.

At first I did an update/upgrade  to the system and then installed the update tools and ran the update script. this worked well, although when it asked for a username to pop changes to my system  I was slightly fused.  I just hit enter and let it go. the script updated  the software on the Pi  and when it had finished I then reflashed the Leonardo to the latest firmware. After a restart my usual web interface appeared as the update script had preserved my changes to index page and beer panel, the downside was I still was using google docs for the brewing profile, so I Decided to run the install script in the tools directory.  Nice new interface then appeared compete with the new localised Beer profile, Nice, really nice, a lot of effort has gone in ,  but my simple changes to show the system name was now gone, I thought this was going to be  incorporated into the code base a while ago but hay ho,  easily put back, probably my fault for not being vocal enough as I’ve been absent from the Brewpi forums for a while, but it does mean i’ll have to spend some time and effort to GIT and try and incorporate my changes, it probably won’t happen, family life & all that…

hmmm where was he code to put the zoom sliders back onto that graph?

My first impressions are that its oscillating a bit in Fridge mode, should I leave it or reset to defaults ? I’ll leave it overnight to see what happens… if its still oscillating then I’ll blat it …