Recent content by PorterPete

Make sure to have thermal load in there. Add a 5 gallon bucket of water or something. Without it your temps could be jumping to quickly. I had 2 gallons in a 4.7 cu ft freezer and I had to add another gallon of liquid for the temps to steady.

It was pretty interesting after I realized what was going on. I had used a nose spray that I guess wiped out my smell. All the beers smelled like were musty alcohol. After focusing on more of what I was tasting and not what I was looking for I could really start appreciating some of the subtle...

Was really looking forward to trying Stone IPA and SV Hoptimum on my search for an ultimate hoppy beer and learning the flavors of different hops. (It's research, really) After finding both rather un-flavorful, I went back to my goto beer of the month DFH 60 minute IPA. Wait no flavor either...

Got finished reading thru that link. That is an awesome resource for pinpointing flavors. Thanks. I am thinking I possibly steeped at too low of temps and also had some oxidation happen. (Bottling was a mess, had issues with keeping suction on siphon.)

The CS has been in bottles for 2 weeks. I am planning for three weeks conditioning but I couldn't resist putting one in the fridge and tasting it. I like the hoppier tones, IPAs mostly. The most recent one I have been buying alot is Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. I also enjoy a good Hef or...

I finally cracked open a bottle of my first homebrew batch (NG 1 gallon Caribou Slobber Extract). It tasted alright but really brought to light that I don't know the flavors of beer to well. I do know what I like in my beers and can taste certain tones when I know what I am looking for...

Those stick on thermometers will work. I would suggest covering them with clear packing tape so they last longer and it makes cleaning the fermeneter easier to clean. Thermowell stoppers would allow you to take an almost direct temp, without opening up your bucket. I have my temp controller...

Still waiting my parts to ship. I am not much of a code writer but it seems easy enough to allow for more sensors. The plan is to have three to four sensors. One for each fermenter and then an ambient. Do you see any issue with this idea?

Yeah the bottling bucket will make the starting and stopping of the bottling process easier. However I will still have to siphon off of the primary. Do you just tilt the primary slowly to get the last bit? Issue is the auto siphon has a half inch of plastic on the end so that you don't suck up...

Well I somewhat successfully bottled my first batch. I say somewhat cause I found that trying to bottle by yourself takes some practice. I was using the auto siphon straight from the primary (1gallon) and using carb drops. Lost the siphon twice and had a hard time getting it started while...

I was just looking at those. The BeerBug was the other Kickstarter and much more reasonably priced for a home brewer. Wouldn't be cool though to have a probe type device that you could output to your Arduino or Raspberry Pi builds...

Yeah I had the same issue. The reason for this is that it turns off at setpoint but since the freezers output is really cold it drops quickly and overshoots. So longer it has to cool down the more is going to overshoot. It should level out after time. A couple things I learned: - Make sure...

I have been wondering about the thing but opposite. I have two fermenters in a fermenting chamber. One is fermenting awhile and causing a bit of heat. This cause the cooling to come on more and holds the chambers temp down by a few degrees. While the older beer is settling out and done...

Yeah after some looking around I realized I was mixing ideas. If you went with the protoshield you really don't need the Sensor shield and vise versa. The Sensor shield would work pretty good but I had a hard time finding the connectors on DXs website and I didn't feel like ordering from two...

Well this project looks fun. I am thinking about putting this together however this would be my first go at arduino. I debated on using this setup or the teensypi setup. I decided to go with this for simplicity. From my understanding I could always adapt this setup to add the Raspberry Pi to run...