I originally wasn’t going to Brew for this competition but a cheeky day off before we went on Holiday to Norfolk and it’s a go !
I went with  5 hop varieties,  Fusion,  First Gold, Hallertau Blanc, Olicana and Pioneer.

Brewday on the 8th of July went straight forward, with the Brewpi Herms in charge .

Whilst on Holiday  another BrewPi Controller monitored the fermentation and the new Baronbrew TlLT  measured the SG

As soon as I was back from Holiday it was put into the secondary and dry hopped.

Today it’s been bottled and Kegged after 3 days of being Dry Hopped. OG 1.064 FG 1.013  approx 6.7 % and I am looking forward to trying it in the next 2 or 3 weeks, best make sure there’s enough left for the competition……

One or Two of my Brewing Friends belong to the Northern Craft Brewers group (They have a website but most of the day to daystuff is on their facebook group page) . Our small group of brewing friends regularly communicate using a whatsapp group created after the breakup of the Olicanabrewing home-brew group..  ‘Bromo‘ shared a recipe for an upcoming competition in October. He asked for feedback and comments, after several of our group commented and gave him feedback, I thought I’d have a go myself, what the heck…. a little bit of friendly competition never goes amiss.

So I Used Beersmith to do my own recipe

As mentioned in my previous post the brew day went slightly awry after the element in my HLT failed just as the mash profile was about to be fixed using my BrewPi configured to do HERMS. I Also decided to use Propino malt as the base malt instead of my usual default of Maris Otter.

The OG came in at 1.060  a little below par but I decided to keep it as it came out instead of boiling it out further to get a higher OG.

After 5 days in the primary FV loosely following a profiled fermentation I transferred into the secondary

During its time in the primary my Brewometer/Tilt arrived from the USA , so at the time of the transfer I sanitised it and popped it in .

This has tracked the Secondary Fermentation, giving me a visual indication for the ideal time when fermentation has all but stopped to add my Hops for the Dry Hopping.

I took the opportunity to sample the brew before the dry hopping. My Initial conclusion was not enough hops, the back bone was a little too malty and it didn’t have that Crisp Hoppiness that its American Cascadian cousins have ! Lets see what 3 or 4 days of dry hopping  at 14˚c brings to the palate…….

I finally got my HERMS panel finished and installed in my Shedquarters .

It’s had two shakedowns, both times it has had different problems. On the first run I decided to do an Anchor Steam Clone. The BrewPi was set to Fridge constant mode to get the HLT up to strike temperature and then after doughing in, on changing modes to Beer Constant the Beer probe temperature switched to 85˚C and stayed there, stubbornly refusing my attempts to 1) remove and then re assign the probe and 2) swap out and configure a standby probe. I only sorted it by cycling the power on the controller…. note to self add an external  switch, I don’t want to either open up the panel or SSH in to the Pi  to issue

sudo shutdown -r now

midway through  a mash….

On the second Run things went smoothly (well nearly ), Fridge constant mode  successfully switched to profile mode after dough in  and was holding the temperature on the  at beer sensor ( probe in a T piece just after the tap on the Mash Tun ). There was approx a 2˚C temperature difference between the Beer sensor and the Room sensor which was just hanging into the top of the grain bed.  this second brew was a test for an NCB competition to brew Black IPA but only using English hops. Things seemed stable at 64.5 ˚C , so I left it in search of a cup of Tea.  I checked just before the profile was about to start its ramp up to 76.5˚to  fix the wort profile and noticed it was down a whole 1˚C.

The Element had gone !

In my efforts to diagnose it, I switched the BrewPi spark to  test mode  but this seemed a bit  buggy! The state of the outputs seemed to be locked into profile mode and wouldn’t allow me to change them, yes, the display on the spark changed but the logic seemed to be locked in to what it was doing previously… only changing when I  came out of test mode and changed it to mode OFF  and then back into test mode ..I am glad I put an isolation switched socket on two of the outputs !.  Brew rescued by just putting it in the copper and starting the boil without fixing the profile…(it was down a couple of points on the forecasted OG but I can cope with that…) Recipe below for completeness..

Whilst the Black IPA was in the FV the Brewometer from @Baronbrew that I ordered 3 weeks prior arrived .

I checked it’s calibration….(  I left it uncalibrated as it was spot on)

sanitised it and then when the Black IPA was transferred to the secondary over the weekend in it went…

I’ll post another screenshot when it looks like the Fermentation has stopped. This looks like a really  promising bit of electronics and my thanks go out to SBowler in the BrewPi Community for his integration of the Brewometer/Tilt into the BrewPi.. and of course BaronBrew for making it…

I’ll just finish off with a picture or two of the HERMS Panel with the door open showing its internals.

cheers

oh and NCB = Northern Craft Brewers..

This weekend we should have been seeing friends but unfortunately this didn’t happen (I missed out on BeerTownMalton and the NCB meeting in Sowerby Bridge too )  so …
I made a bit more progress on the HERMS panel. The LV side is nearly complete.

For Power I used a reclaimed  WII PSU  12v @3.7Aand a 12-5 v step down board with USB ports to power the Raspberry Pi and the spark shield,  I need two more heatsinks after my failed attempts at using an old CPU heatsinks…

and I need to get some more DS18B20 probes. The previous batch from an Amazon supplier ‘Tenflyer’ just don’t Work. ! so either its’ a faulty batch ..or… their wire colour code is wrong ! so thats 5 x RJ45 connectors wasted… I even went so far as to chop the RJ45 off one and splice in a known working probe from another supplier, all to check the RJ45 was crimped ok.. it was…!

So Now to decide on HV outputs and switches and protection…. !
Do I go with wires tails from the box bottom or go 16A CEE and switches in the Door Panel ?

or a combined interlocked 16A CEE

decisions, decisions …

My PartiGyle brews are coming along and will be swapping into secondaries soon.  did notice some odd swinging from the new @BrewPi spark thats now on the fermentation fridge so I have just updated the firmware to 0.4.3 hopefully it will settle down.

It’s been a busy Extended Weekend !
Foundations for the shed are now extended , they just need to cure before the Egyptian style roll back happens..

Friday the 15th saw me doing another PartiGyle,  this time using 10Kg of base malt . Ist runnings used for another DIPA a Simcoe -Citra based brew hopefully coming in at 8% ABV and The second runnings used for a Coffee Porter  .

The 1st runnings gave me an OG of 1.075 so it should hit the 7.9-8.0 % mark The Second runnings were just left to steep and not recurculated and came in at 1.036  a little low….
Since the Brewpi fridge in the Shedquarters has the Simcoe-Citra brew in it I have had to have the Porter fermenting in the Cellar ..

I have also progressed a wee amount on the Brewpi Spark for Herms Control. The RJ45 board has arrived and I have made a mounting for the Spark Shield to go onto the DIN Rail in the cabinet.

Easter saw me upgrading my HLT to have a SS coil for HERMS Mashing, All went well and I was very impressed with the Q-Max cutter used to punch out the correct hole size for the BSP fittings.

So on the Tuesday after Easter  I tested the HY HERMS setup by doing a Pale Ale , Using my 2015 season Homegrown Brewers Gold Hops for Bittering. I used a recipe based on Rich’s Brew.

OG was a little under spec at 1.042 but apart from that Everything went well and the Wort came out of the Plate heat exchanger at a nice 21˚c.

Progress on my BrewPi based HERMS controller has stalled a little ! I couldn’t get the cables from my probes into the RJ11/12 plugs

I have abandoned the RJ11/12 plugs in favour of RJ45’s

and so intend to have both RJ12 and RJ45 Din rail mounted adaptors fitted to my panels that I can use official BrewPi merchandise as well as home brewed, I could even use Cat 5 patch cables for interconnects…. I just have to wait on delivery from Audiowind..

I am not quite sure why Elco decided to use RJ11/12 but i’m sure it doesn’t matter in the long run….