I don't sell my beer right now but I do leave a tip jar out. Course it don't do me much good since my friends tend to "forget" to put money in it but if I am lucky I get enough to cover the cost of what they drink which isn't very often.
Ended up that it was the regulator on my stand afterall I just wasn't operating the new regulator right. Spent three hours taking the burners off and apart checking orifices. Blowing air through the part of the stand that serves as the manifold looking for blockages. Finally while on the phone with the builder of my stand I discovered that the on off knob on the new regulator has to turned 3 or 4 times to be on and not just a 1/2 turn. So with that WOOOSH we were cooking with gas finally!
Still on the hunt for a new electric motor to power my mill I got a cheap plug in drill to power it in the meantime (mistake)
Crap posting this with an Ipad so I can't seem to attach pics. I will post the pics when I get home after work in the morning.
So after the first brew day fiasco I was ready for a 2nd go. Did another batch of Apfelwein and Hard Cider. Beers were a Nut Brown Ale and what I call Full Moon Ale, since it tastes similiar to Blue Moon Ale.
Nut Brown first, ground the grain, drill managed to do it with not too much trouble.
What a joy being able to use the burners on the stand and the pumps and the everything went great. Using the SS coil in my HLT filled with ice worked perfect as a chiller. Bonus was that it also warmed the water up in the HLT making it take less time to heat up for the 2nd batch.
On the second batch things didn't go so smoothly. First I pushed the drill too hard and it caught on fire. Had to grind most of the second batch by hand. During brewing I got a stuck sparge (been researching and I am leaning towards switching to batch sparging instead of fly sparging, I think the loss of efficiency is worth not having to constantly fiddle with everything) then I had some friends show up during the boil. I was showing them around and not paying attention and have a massive boil over
I managed to salvage the brew but added about 3 hours to my clean up
So it gets better everytime and I am learning more too.
I know down the road when money allows I will be going all electric. Man those LP burners throw out some heat. I think electric would make for more comfortable brew days and be a lot easier to maintain temps with.
So here are some pics. I also got about 3/4 of the exterior of the building painted. My brother is coming down to help this weekend and so I fully expect the house and trim to be finished. We are also gooing to rip the white vinyl sidibg off of the shed and use the same sheathing as on the house and paint it to match right now it looks weird being white. So after the weekend I will post up pics of the finished exterior. My landlord will then pay me for the work in materials to be used for the brewery so I expect very soon to be ordering the flooring (green rubber type flooring) and to be framing in at least the walk in cooler but I hope also the wall seperating the utilty/laundry room from the brewery.
Also this weekend I will be doing more Apfelwein and hard cider and I am brewing a batch of wheat beer that I am going to divide into 5 gallon batches and use on to make a black rasberry wheat with rasberries picked on the property and the other 5 gallons will be a blueberry wheat with blueberries from a guy who sells them off of his property on my way to work.
