This thread will contain a description of the worst brew day I have ever had... I just need to get through the brew session in one piece first....
-walker
-walker
M*ther F*cker!
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Cheesefood
Well-Known Member
Walker-san said:
Hmm. I've been tossing around the idea of brewing today. Remind me again of why I shouldn't.
Ize
...
Walker-san said:
My spidey senses are telling me it involves physical damage, AND crappy efficiency.
Ize
OP
OP
Ize said:
Faulty equipment, loads of improvising, some destroyed equipment.
I'm SURE my efficiency will suck, but I don't care at this point. I just want to get this f*cker in the carboy and forget it ever happened.
Reverend JC
2500 gallons year to date
I should have warned you yesterday that this weekend may be a bad brew weekend.
My propane ran out 35 min into the boil yesterday. And i am guessing there was a weak flame for about 10 min of that 35 min. so actual biol time estimated around 25 min. time to run to u-haul and buy more propane 22 min. time to get back to boil, 10 min.
hope yours is only this bad. i guess i broke nothing yesterday.
My propane ran out 35 min into the boil yesterday. And i am guessing there was a weak flame for about 10 min of that 35 min. so actual biol time estimated around 25 min. time to run to u-haul and buy more propane 22 min. time to get back to boil, 10 min.
hope yours is only this bad. i guess i broke nothing yesterday.
boo boo
Well-Known Member
And that reminds me to top up my 2 propane tanks this week.
Evan!
Well-Known Member
Ooooh, damn. This is why I have 4 tanks. That, and there's few things that screw up a barbecue party worse than running out of propane in the middle of grilling up burgers and steaks.
OP
OP
i had weak flame for the last 20 minutes b/c my tank is basically empty, too.
damn thing just went into the fermenter. still need to pitch and clean-up.
damn thing just went into the fermenter. still need to pitch and clean-up.
OP
OP
Missed the OG by 9 points, and there are a lot of grain particles in the brew.
This is going to be teriibly astringent. I doubt it ever makes it into a keg.
I'll taste when it's ready to rack to secondary. If it's as astringent as I think it is going to be, this is going right down the drain.
-walker
This is going to be teriibly astringent. I doubt it ever makes it into a keg.
I'll taste when it's ready to rack to secondary. If it's as astringent as I think it is going to be, this is going right down the drain.
-walker
Bernie Brewer
Grouchy Old Fart
Happens to the best of us, Walker.
Of course it doesn't mean you have to like it. Get back on that horse.......
Of course it doesn't mean you have to like it. Get back on that horse.......
EdWort
Well-Known Member
Reverend JC said:
Interesting. I called off my brew day today cause SWMBO has too much for me to do. I'm still kegging though, but I hate it when my Son of Fermentation Chiller is empty.
cweston
Well-Known Member
Reverend JC said:
Hmm... maybe there's something to that. I brewed Friday--had more tropuble than I've ever had hitting my mash temps, had terrible efficiency.
I have two propane tanks--I always fill one as soon as I empty it. So that's at least one thing I don't have to worry about going wrong.
Desert_Sky
Since 1998
you used a hydrometer this time didnt you
see, thats why
see, thats why
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cweston said:
That's no joke. I always argue with SWMBO about having a 2nd tank handy. She always claims there is no need to have two.....
I'm like WTF! When do you you think it usually runs out???? She thinks about it a second and says "Whatever!!!"
This is one of the things I disregard. No point in argung when I know I'm right.
Walker-San I'd splurge for the extra deposit have at least two on hand all the time. I had a bunch of grain dust in my first partial mash, it still tasted pretty good on the way to the 2ndary. In fact I thought it might be a little sweet at 3 weeks.
How much did you find was left behind?
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Walker-san said:
What were you making? - Keep good records... It might turn out better than you think!!
Will you notice high astrigency with high IBU's? The two on deck look high...
uglygoat
Well-Known Member
you can usually trick the local retarded walmart help. just buy the exchange at the counter. ten bucks says the kid who unlocks the rhino cage won't even bother asking you for the empty. go on a sunday morning, when there's no responsible help.
that said, i didn't do anything brew related this weekend, besides imbibe with family on paddy's day. didn't have the brew senses tingling, so i did nothing, but drink
that said, i didn't do anything brew related this weekend, besides imbibe with family on paddy's day. didn't have the brew senses tingling, so i did nothing, but drink
alemonkey
Well-Known Member
I wouldn't write it off yet...I made an imperial RyePA that was my worst brew day ever...sparge was stuck so bad I had to use the kitchen colander. All kinds of grain got into the boil when I accidentally dropped the colander in the pot . I missed my target by 10 points or so, but it still ended up being one of the best beers I've ever made. I was worried about HSA from all the splashing, but it's almost a year old now and I have two bottles left. I can't detect any oxidation.
. I missed my target by 10 points or so, but it still ended up being one of the best beers I've ever made. I was worried about HSA from all the splashing, but it's almost a year old now and I have two bottles left. I can't detect any oxidation.
à Flannagáin
Well-Known Member
Just to add to the list, I had a terrible brew day 2 days ago... everything was going great until the boil.... figure I'll stop there, this thread is already depressing enough
See, Boston was hanging out with ME today, giving ME all the good luck. Hit my mash temp balls-on. OG was a little low, eh, who cares? Had JUST enough propane for the 60-minute boil, you could feel there was about two, three minutes left of propane in there when I was done. Hell, I even remembered the Irish Moss this time.
Oh, did I mention, Kai made us smoked, pulled pork sandwiches? Mmmm.... and his lagers? DAMN those are TASTY BEVERAGES!
Sorry, am I gloating now? You better get yourself a Good Luck Boston to help out next time...
Oh, did I mention, Kai made us smoked, pulled pork sandwiches? Mmmm.... and his lagers? DAMN those are TASTY BEVERAGES!
Sorry, am I gloating now? You better get yourself a Good Luck Boston to help out next time...
EdWort
Well-Known Member
Schlenkerla said:
That's right. There's no need to have two. There's a BIG need to have 3 or 4 on hand!
It's an easy argument to have two; that way, you can run one completely empty before refilling or swapping, saving $$ in the long run.
Evan! - FOUR tanks?
Evan! - FOUR tanks?
Kaiser
Well-Known Member
the_bird said:
And we know why: you forgot the 5.2.
It was pretty cold out there, but a nice brew day after all. I ate 3 of those pork sandwiched and got a stomach ache.
Kai
I could have had a disaster if it weren't for the Beer Gods smiling on me. I dropped this full MF'r trying to lift it to this bench. My right hand around the neck, left hand underneath. Done it dozens of times.
My left had must have been a bit wet cuz just as I got it right to the edge, I bumped the shelf, the neck slipped out of my hand, the weight of the carboy fell against me and knocked me on my butt...bounced off my leg and hit the floor from about 6 inches. I saw an entire weekend of mopping up wort and picking broken glass out of my ass flashing before my eyes.
Thank the beer Gods I followed my own rule and placed a piece of carpet underneath the area first.
This carboy bounced, sloshed, spit wort in my face, wobbled like a weeble and came to rest...upright.
Aside from a lifetime of adrenalin pushing my heart rate to about 180...no harm done.
Walker_San...sorry bout your misfortunes.
My left had must have been a bit wet cuz just as I got it right to the edge, I bumped the shelf, the neck slipped out of my hand, the weight of the carboy fell against me and knocked me on my butt...bounced off my leg and hit the floor from about 6 inches. I saw an entire weekend of mopping up wort and picking broken glass out of my ass flashing before my eyes.
Thank the beer Gods I followed my own rule and placed a piece of carpet underneath the area first.
This carboy bounced, sloshed, spit wort in my face, wobbled like a weeble and came to rest...upright.
Aside from a lifetime of adrenalin pushing my heart rate to about 180...no harm done.
Walker_San...sorry bout your misfortunes.
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BierMuncher said:
Lucky You!!
Be gingerly with it next time. Glass has ways of gettting stressed. Just one little thing can make it shatter. Do yourself a favor and buy a handle or a sling for that big boy.
OP
OP
This is going to be a long post....
I have a problem with my mash tun. It's bit me a couple of times, but I have always been able to work around the problem.
This is a cross section of what my mash tun is supposed to look like:
Notice that "nipple" on the bottom of the tun. This is (I presume) the injection point for the hot plastic when they manufactured the cooler. It is just a small hump that sticks up a little off the bottom of the cooler.
Dude and Swami have the same set-up as me, and they don't have any problems. I presume that MOST people don't have problems, because Norther Brewer sells a lot of these set-ups.
Anyway, MY problem is that the above picture is not how my tun actually looks. The floor of the cooler itself is slighty convex and looks more like this:
So, as you can see, that plastic nipple is pretty f*cking close to the bolt that serves as the inlet to my siphon out to the bulkhead. Once you pile a few gallons of water and 10 pounds of grain on top of that false bottom, it can actually push the false bottom down onto that nipple. When that happens, the nipple effectively seals off the inlet to my siphon and nothing drains.
Like I said, this has happened to me several times. I've always been able to stick a spoon or paddle or something down in along the outer edge of the false bottom and kind of force it off to the side a little. This opens up the siphon inlet and things start flowing. Once flowing, it normally stays flowing and I can drain the tun quickly.
Yesterday, however, I could not get the thing to flow no matter what I did. After messing with it for a looooong time, I eventually managed to detach the friggin hose from the bulk head with the spoon I had down in there torquing away. It took me a while to figure out that I had done that, but I eventually realized what had happened. So, I dumped the contents of the tun into by old bottling bucket, re-attached the hose to the bulkhead, and dumped the mash back in.
It stuck again.
Fed up, I dumped the mash back into the bucket and put a platic bottle cap under the false bottom , off center, in an attempt to raise the whole thing off the bottom of the cooler and let liquid flow.
I put the mash back into the cooler and tried again.
It stuck again. This time, it was because I had raised the thing off the bottom TOO far and grain was making it around/under the false bottom and clogging up the siphon.
At this point, I had been trying to drain my initial run-off for about an hour and a half. I was furious and I decided to go ghetto.
I had a very large grain bag that I used to use for holding large amounts of hops in the boil. The thing is actually MEANT to be used inside of a bottling bucket to create a poor man's lauter system, so I thought, "Well... then that's exactly what I'll do with it."
I put it into the bucket and dumped all of my grain into it. When I opened the spigot, HOORAY! It was flowing! It was working! I was running the liquid through a fine mesh screen to catch any grain that might come through, and I started to notice that there was a LOT of grain particles.
Then... the flow stopped.
WTF!?
I kept blowing through the hose to unclog it and eventually got my initial run off into the kettle. Eager to have this nightmare over, I dumped in my sparge water, stirred it up, and let it drain. Again, the flow would stop, I would huff air back through the line, and it would start up again for a while. The whole time, I was seeing a lot of grain particles come through the line and get caught in my screen filter.
After a half an hour or so of doing this, I finally had my wort in the kettle and started heating. I should have been DONE brewing at this point, but I was just now starting to heat for a boil.
As the wort heated up, I went to the fence to dump the spent grains. When I did this I noticed that the big grain bag had torn open. The bottom of it had come undone. THAT explains why I was clogging up and getting so much crap through the line.
There were more things that happened over the next couple of hours, but that is for another post. It's time for lunch now.
-walker
I have a problem with my mash tun. It's bit me a couple of times, but I have always been able to work around the problem.
This is a cross section of what my mash tun is supposed to look like:
Notice that "nipple" on the bottom of the tun. This is (I presume) the injection point for the hot plastic when they manufactured the cooler. It is just a small hump that sticks up a little off the bottom of the cooler.
Dude and Swami have the same set-up as me, and they don't have any problems. I presume that MOST people don't have problems, because Norther Brewer sells a lot of these set-ups.
Anyway, MY problem is that the above picture is not how my tun actually looks. The floor of the cooler itself is slighty convex and looks more like this:
So, as you can see, that plastic nipple is pretty f*cking close to the bolt that serves as the inlet to my siphon out to the bulkhead. Once you pile a few gallons of water and 10 pounds of grain on top of that false bottom, it can actually push the false bottom down onto that nipple. When that happens, the nipple effectively seals off the inlet to my siphon and nothing drains.
Like I said, this has happened to me several times. I've always been able to stick a spoon or paddle or something down in along the outer edge of the false bottom and kind of force it off to the side a little. This opens up the siphon inlet and things start flowing. Once flowing, it normally stays flowing and I can drain the tun quickly.
Yesterday, however, I could not get the thing to flow no matter what I did. After messing with it for a looooong time, I eventually managed to detach the friggin hose from the bulk head with the spoon I had down in there torquing away. It took me a while to figure out that I had done that, but I eventually realized what had happened. So, I dumped the contents of the tun into by old bottling bucket, re-attached the hose to the bulkhead, and dumped the mash back in.
It stuck again.
Fed up, I dumped the mash back into the bucket and put a platic bottle cap under the false bottom , off center, in an attempt to raise the whole thing off the bottom of the cooler and let liquid flow.
I put the mash back into the cooler and tried again.
It stuck again. This time, it was because I had raised the thing off the bottom TOO far and grain was making it around/under the false bottom and clogging up the siphon.
At this point, I had been trying to drain my initial run-off for about an hour and a half. I was furious and I decided to go ghetto.
I had a very large grain bag that I used to use for holding large amounts of hops in the boil. The thing is actually MEANT to be used inside of a bottling bucket to create a poor man's lauter system, so I thought, "Well... then that's exactly what I'll do with it."
I put it into the bucket and dumped all of my grain into it. When I opened the spigot, HOORAY! It was flowing! It was working! I was running the liquid through a fine mesh screen to catch any grain that might come through, and I started to notice that there was a LOT of grain particles.
Then... the flow stopped.
WTF!?
I kept blowing through the hose to unclog it and eventually got my initial run off into the kettle. Eager to have this nightmare over, I dumped in my sparge water, stirred it up, and let it drain. Again, the flow would stop, I would huff air back through the line, and it would start up again for a while. The whole time, I was seeing a lot of grain particles come through the line and get caught in my screen filter.
After a half an hour or so of doing this, I finally had my wort in the kettle and started heating. I should have been DONE brewing at this point, but I was just now starting to heat for a boil.
As the wort heated up, I went to the fence to dump the spent grains. When I did this I noticed that the big grain bag had torn open. The bottom of it had come undone. THAT explains why I was clogging up and getting so much crap through the line.
There were more things that happened over the next couple of hours, but that is for another post. It's time for lunch now.
-walker
OP
OP
Yeah, I expect to notice it. The IBUs will mask it somewhat, but astringency lingers long on the tounge and is not pleasant at all.Schlenkerla said:
OP
OP
Schlenkerla said:
I do have two of them. One dedicated for brewing and the other one attached to the grill. The one on the grill ran out on Saturday (but I didn't know it because I wasn't the one grilling.)
I'm going to get a third one.
McCall St. Brewer
Well-Known Member
It's a lucky thing they have forums like this where people can "feel your pain." I suspect that if you told a non-homebrewer about this, they would wonder why you don't just go down to the corner store and buy a six-pack and drink it!
When things go bad, they can really go bad, eh? Sounds like you need to transfer all your fittings and false bottom to a new cooler. I have the same setup from Northern Brewer and mine seems to work fine. Yours must have a slight defect in the bottom of the cooler. That defect would not be a problem for anyone planning to fill it with Gatorade and drink from it at a football game, but it certainly screws things up for your purposes, doesn't it?
When things go bad, they can really go bad, eh? Sounds like you need to transfer all your fittings and false bottom to a new cooler. I have the same setup from Northern Brewer and mine seems to work fine. Yours must have a slight defect in the bottom of the cooler. That defect would not be a problem for anyone planning to fill it with Gatorade and drink from it at a football game, but it certainly screws things up for your purposes, doesn't it?
Chad....have you attempted to use the other cooler as your MLT? Is it warped the same way as that other one?
And--it may have been a combination of reasons why your mash was stuck. 4 lbs of rye can do that. My RER mash stuck like a mofo too.
And--it may have been a combination of reasons why your mash was stuck. 4 lbs of rye can do that. My RER mash stuck like a mofo too.
Kaiser
Well-Known Member
Walker,
Can you drill holes into the side of the nipple below the screen or cut slits into it with a angle grinder. This way the nipple can still work as a support for the screen, which is nice, and the wort can flow in as well.
Maybe you already thought about this.
But yes I can feel your pain. I has 2 hrs lauters before b/c the mash kept getting stuck.
Kai
Can you drill holes into the side of the nipple below the screen or cut slits into it with a angle grinder. This way the nipple can still work as a support for the screen, which is nice, and the wort can flow in as well.
Maybe you already thought about this.
But yes I can feel your pain. I has 2 hrs lauters before b/c the mash kept getting stuck.
Kai
Brainstorming here....
What if you got a piece of round C-PVC, maybe three inches or so in diameter, maybe an inch high. Cut a crapload of holes in it, just leave enough structure to keep it intact so that it can support the weight of the grain. Place that around the nipple in the center of the mash tun and set the false bottom on top. This will support the center of the false bottom, keep it from compacting all the way down to the nipple. The holes will allow the sweet wort to flow into the center of the tun to the inlet. Need a lot of holes so that this flow doesn't get restricted and you lose the suction.
I don't know if that would work, but if it does, it's a fifty-cent solution.
Does that make sense?
What if you got a piece of round C-PVC, maybe three inches or so in diameter, maybe an inch high. Cut a crapload of holes in it, just leave enough structure to keep it intact so that it can support the weight of the grain. Place that around the nipple in the center of the mash tun and set the false bottom on top. This will support the center of the false bottom, keep it from compacting all the way down to the nipple. The holes will allow the sweet wort to flow into the center of the tun to the inlet. Need a lot of holes so that this flow doesn't get restricted and you lose the suction.
I don't know if that would work, but if it does, it's a fifty-cent solution.
Does that make sense?
Willsellout
Well-Known Member
the_bird said:
I don't even think you have to drill a bunch of holes...maybe just a few because the false bottom will strain for you right?
Willsellout said:
The holes wouldn't be for straining, just for making sure that the wort can flow unimpeded. You don't want a bottleneck to develop, air pockets to form, and mess up the siphon.
the_bird said:
I think it would be hard to find the right length, especially as the grain bill changes. Stuff might scoot around the ouside if the length is too long.
I'm not sure if the bottom has any flex. That could complicate things as well.
I think a new cooler is in order. The rest of us should pay close attention to this design problem when we are buying coolers.
Willsellout
Well-Known Member
I just went with the simplest way with mine; SS braid. Worked well with my PM last weekend.
Dan
Dan
the_bird said:
That actually sounds like a good solution....
I like the support ring idea. It only has to be 1/4 inch taller than the sum of the nipple and the nut. The false bottom is probably flexible enough to seal the sides.
I'm seriously thinking about hooking into the house's propane tank (130 gallons). Even though I can leave the portable tanks down by the pole barn and they'll get filled, the truck only comes out every other month.
I'm seriously thinking about hooking into the house's propane tank (130 gallons). Even though I can leave the portable tanks down by the pole barn and they'll get filled, the truck only comes out every other month.
