beer machine?!?

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ceezo

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Just tried brewing my first batch with the beer machine and its the 6th day and it says to taste if but it tastes sour. What should i do? Is it ruiend?
 
Green apple or sour?

In any case, I have one and it works fine when using normal ferment schedule. The super quick 10 day idea they recommend is not too good. Leave it for six weeks at 65-70 degrees. Then a week in the fridge. It takes 7 or 8 weeks for most beers to get done.

It will taste sort of like beer in this rig at two weeks....and it will be fully carbonated. But it is far from good tasting beer. You can let it ferment and age for the normal time. Beer needs to age.
 
Beers are rarely ready in 10 days. I would suggest you ferment the beer for about 3 weeks, add the priming sugar for carbonation and wait another 3 weeks at about 70 degrees then cool for 24 hours or more then try it.
 
No it should not have psi in red zone. Border green red is ok. Put some water on top of the bubbler and make sure it is bubbling through the relief valve.
 
Assuming it is under pressure, push softly down on the relief bubble and see if it lets off some pressure. Push it side to side pushing on the edges.
 
Sorry im a pain lol but yes if i move side to side it releaves pressure which i have been doing.
 
Sorry im a pain lol but yes if i move side to side it releaves pressure which i have been doing.

That's good news. Maybe it was stuck and you freed it up. So pour a little water on top and see if bubbles are flowing. And is the pressure running in the green zone?

Let's stop it from blowing up. The relief may have been installed wrong. If necessary, unscrew the cap and re-install the relief bubble per instructions.
 
Ok so i reinstalled the pcv and still no bubbles. Should they occur when it gets in the green zone? Aslo when it gets to the red it doesnt get very far in the red but when it gets there i always release back to green
 
It takes quite a bit of water on top to show bubbles. You could let it go a ways into the red zone. But don't let it sit on the maximum for any length of time. Hopefully it will bubble somewhere in the middle of red and then get broken in and drop to green.
 
Keep us posted on how it turns out. The ability to ferment with pressure is an advanced feature.
 
Ok well im letting the brew sit for a while and everything seems to be goin good now. I do have a question tho. Can i add any kind of flavor when breing in the beermaster?
 
To a limited extent, yes. I'd guess that fruit might not drop with all the carbonation present and could clog the tap.

If you are talking about dry hop - it worked fine for me but I did move it to secondary to get the hop particles to drop out.

When you let off the pressure at this point, it is gonna foam up big time. So let the pressure off a little at a time to avoid an overflow.

Did your pcv start working?
 
Ok cool thanx. Yes the pcv seems to be working now. Thanx for all of ur help
 
Very interesting, seems like it's just a fancy Mr. Beer?

This one is a bit different. It is intended for all functions - wort prep, fermenting, carbonating, and serving. Dry pre-hopped mixes (no boil) are the OEM offering, but any ordinary OG 2.5 gallon recipe can be loaded.

Tank pressure stays at about 5 or so psi after the ferment completes and uses small CO2 cartridges to keep the pressure up after serving some. Small enough to fit in the fridge.

[ame]http://youtu.be/_hjrpyygKgE[/ame]
 
So i still have my beer fermenting but when i bottle it and start a new batch it says not tp add more yeast. Is that really true?
 
I have not tried that yet. But I read here that lots of guys pitch new batches on top of the previous yeast cake when they do 5 gallon batches. I guess it works!
And you do not need to add more yeast. There is lots of yeast in there afterwards, much more than what you put in there the first time.

I have one here sitting on the kitchen counter that is at day 7 of the ferment. The pressure started rising overnight and it bubbled good for 4 days. I'm gonna leave it there for two more weeks and then put it in the fridge for 2 weeks. That's a similar schedule to the keggers. It might work, it might not.

Let me know how the tasting goes. I bottled the first batch with this machine after one week in the ferment. It was full of green apple flavors until it hit 6 weeks in the bottle....then - kapowie! It was awesome after that!!!
 
Ok thanx. Is there anything special i need to do for bottling bc mine didnt come with the stuff to bottle
 
Here's the best instructions that I know of:
http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter11.html

If you already know how to bottle for standard brewing, it is pretty much the same. You'll need to let off the carbonation pressure so that you can move the beer to a bottling bucket or carboy. That will take an hour or so. Do it slowly so that it doesn't overflow. You might do it the day before. It's pretty hard (and messy) to bottle when the beer is carbonated. You can transfer it to a carboy it will go flat in a day or two and be ready to bottle. A 3 gallon carboy works well.

And that article by Palmer goes a long way to explain things much better.

The Beer Machine is more like "mini-keg" than it is a fermenting bucket, for sure. Bottling is harder than normal since it is already carb'd. The bottling accessory for it does help a lot with bottling the carb'd beer, but it is a handful to use it.
 
Ceezo - how about an update on that brew you did with your beer machine?

I let the APA mix brew on the kitchen counter for the last three weeks. Into the fridge tonight for some taste trials this weekend. I drew a warm sample into the tasting glass for the first time last night. Taste is pretty fair, hard for me to tell how good until it is cold. It is on the cloudy side and I hope that changes as it cold crashes. Natural carb is very impressive.

BMAPA.jpg
 
Continued.....

After refrigerating for 4 days, the tasting results from 3 tasters (other than myself) had the following to say.
Taster #1. It's good to go and was ready for more.
Taster #2. It's young and should have been aged some more.
Taster #3. Not my favorite. Boozy, flavor is off.

The carbonation after refrigeration was low. I added CO2 pressure each day to try to keep it in the middle blue zone, but each day it would drop to yellow. I'd guess that the relief valve is temperature sensitive and is weaker in the fridge compared to room temperature. At room temperature the relief holds indefinitely in the high blue zone.

The inability to hold pressure in the fridge appears to be a design flaw. Need to come up with a simple way to fix that.
 
Continued 2...

To review, this Beer Machine APA mix was pitched, allowed to ferment for 19 days at room temperature, then chilled and tasted. It was young at that point, and when chilled the relief valve was not strong enough to hold good carbonation even with continued Co2 cartridge additions twice per day.

I let it ferment/condition for an additional 11 days at room temperature. Worth noting is that the relief valve does work "OK" at room temperature. It maintained pressure at 7 psi for the duration with just one blast from the cartridge.

I filled a growler at room temperature and chilled it for an hour. All carb was lost as it chilled.


Tasting side-by-side with Bud Light as a reference point, this home brew was aged well and without any off flavors. It is on the sweet side, and there is a slight bitter. It is a little too sweet to be a favorite for me, but I think that many would love it. Of course, without carb; things are skewed and it is likely even better when carb'ed.

I'll conclude a few things at this point for the Beer Machine:
1. There is no magic ultra speedy fermentation miracle here
2. The mix made a decent beer after aged for 4 weeks
3. There is a design flaw in the relief valve operation when chilled.

I'll add a feature to fix the relief valve so that it holds pressure when chilled. The next batch for it will be a BIAB APA.

BMAPAGrowler.jpg
 
Hey sorry i never got back to u been very busy. Anyway so my first batch came out bad. Idk what went wrong. I just started my second and i dont no why i cant keep the pressure under the red zone.i have tried messing with the rubber seal on the contole velve. I cant figure it out
 
Hi all, first post, great site. Like others, I received the infamous Beer Machine for Christmas and once I started to do some research realized that this was not the ideal product for brewing. I found this site and began to scour the threads, looking for any glimmer of hope that this thing might produce a drinkable product.

This thread seemed to provide that hope.

So I'm bumping it in order to share my recent blog post about my Beer Machine adventures. I hope you enjoy laughing at my mistakes. One thing I will say is that just fumbling around with the Beer Machine ignited a passion for home brewing. I now realize that this is something I can actually do and I'm really looking forward to giving it another go with better products.

Have at it if you like: My Beer Machine blog.
 
The beer machine may be the greatest invention in human history and civilization without it might be doomed to an eternal dark age, but any product with a promotional video *that* cheesy deserves to fail, burn, and be erased and scoured from the memories of all living things.

If Edward Jenner had made a promotional video like that, we'd be better off with smallpox.

It's going to take a *lot* of bashing my head with a brick to get that CBS reporters obnoxious voice out of my head. Here I go ... *ow* ... *ow*... *ow*... there goes my ability to conjugate german verbs ... but "here's a bag of pretzels, ed" still remains ... *ow*
 
I received the beer machine for Christmas back in the mid 90s. I actually brewed on it quite a few times. I never had any pressure issues though, as it seems the old style pressure relief valve might have been better at holding in just enough pressure during fermentation to also carb up the beer. The beer wasn't great and so as more micro-brewed beer entered retailers around my area, the beer machine got tucked away, never to be used again. My wife sold it a few years ago in a garage sale.

Knowing what I know now, the beer was definitely not the best, but I really thought the little keg system worked well. I wish I had kept it around though. I'd love to scale down a recipe now to 2.5 gallons and see how it would turn out fermenting then serving in the Beer machine.

I think their biggest problem is with the instructions. They promote being able to start tasting after 7 days. That's just bad. I understand they want to sell units on "Quick Craft Beer" But, I think they'd be doing a better service to move that back to 21 days.

I actually enjoyed messing around with the thing while I had it, but as I said, the beer, meh. Pre-hopped extract beer kits just don't do it for me. I think you could do a lot more with it, just brewing 2.5 gallon batches from all grain or extract recipes. Would probably be a good candidate for BIAB.
 
So a few weeks back I primed the remaining beer in the Beer Machine and bottled into 22oz bombers. After chilling in the fridge, I cracked one open last night and heard the SHHHHH of a carbonated beverage. Now carbonated, this stuff ain't too bad. I won't be making another official Beer Machine kit but I will be brewing some beer at my friend's house this weekend so I guess this machine did its job and got me hooked.

IMG_0728.JPG
 
Oh boy, I've got the bug now. I assembled some ingredients and as soon as I had the house to myself I brewed up a batch of beer and stuck it in the Beer Machine. I blogged about it of course. I'm looking forward to seeing how this comes out.

I started brewing the same way! I got a Beer Machine 2000, and the beer was pretty bad. Still, it gave me ideas that I really good make beer and after a few years I started with a "real" kit and ingredients and brewed up a batch. That effort turned out very good, with beer I was happy to share, and that is what created this monster. :D

I went from a Beer Machine 2000- to an all-electric indoor HERMS with a tippy dump, little by little. I didn't think my husband would notice the "little tweaks" but apparently he has. :drunk:
 
I went from a Beer Machine 2000- to an all-electric indoor HERMS with a tippy dump, little by little. I didn't think my husband would notice the "little tweaks" but apparently he has. :drunk:

Haha, that's why I'm continuing to use el Beer Machine. My darling wife isn't exactly thrilled that I've added homebrewing to my ever growing list of hobbies/enjoyments. But the Beer Machine was a gift so she can't complain too much about me using it. I figure if I continue to make use of the BM instead of introducing secondaries and such into the mix, I'll avoid drawing her ire (at least in theory.)
 
Haha, that's why I'm continuing to use el Beer Machine. My darling wife isn't exactly thrilled that I've added homebrewing to my ever growing list of hobbies/enjoyments. But the Beer Machine was a gift so she can't complain too much about me using it. I figure if I continue to make use of the BM instead of introducing secondaries and such into the mix, I'll avoid drawing her ire (at least in theory.)

Haha, theory has been disproven. After bringing home my buddy's Better Bottle, bottling bucket and such she has now expressed her displeasure at so much beer being made in our house. "Don't worry honey," I said. "I'll be giving a lot of it away."

Anywho, my second Beer Machine batch is complete. I made the NB Chinook IPA recipe but instead of bottling using the spigot (since I was out of CO2 cartridges) I decided to just rack to a bottling bucket. Worked okay except that it foamed over when I opened the cap at the top of the BM (opened it too quickly. Or maybe it sloshed around too much when I brought it up to the kitchen.) After that mess, bottling went smoothly and I'm looking forward to sampling in a couple weeks.

Now that I've got some real equipment, I have a feeling the Beer Machine's days might be numbered. With all the components to clean and assemble, it's just so much easier to use a fermenting bucket instead. I'll still do 2.5 gallon batches but I already made a stout that's in the bucket. I may however use the BM to brew a batch of EdWort's famous Apfelwein since I can just tuck it away somewhere for a few months. Or I could use the BM as a secondary if I want to cold crash something before bottling (since it fits in the fridge more readily than a bucket.) Still that would mean my wife had signed off on me taking up a good amount of fridge space to cold crash more beer - that is supremely unlikely at best.
 
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