First brew!

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Psywar

Supporting Member
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Joined
Dec 3, 2014
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Hello, Everyone!

I got interested in brewing in Nov. 2014 and I joined these forums in Dec. 2014.
2 years later I finally bought my first setup.
I have been doing a ton of reading on these forums and I felt like now was the time to pull the trigger. In between Christmas and New Years of 2016 Adventures in Homebrewing and Beverage Factory had some pretty insane deals on gear. So I just went ahead and got everything I would need to brew and keg.

Last night was my first brew day.
I made a giant starter the previous day and I thought I had screwed it up, but it seems like it all turned out.
I pitched the yeast at 9 PM last night and as of 9 AM this morning the airlock is bubbling.

I bought a Kegerator and my first beer is a Lager so I am going to use the Kegerator to drop the temp of the primary to 50ish deg F.
Then later in the process down to 40deg F.

I actually wanted to build this beer for my Dad and I did not realize all of the steps and temp requirements before I got all the stuff for this beer. So I am really glad I got the Kegerator now lol!

Since this is my first brew. I have no beer so I have nothing to put in the kegs as of right yet. So this is going to work really well (I Hope).

Anyways, as I mentioned I made a Lager last night.
Everything went as planned.
The beers estimated OG was 1.059 and I ended up with an OG of 1.062 temp was 71.2F
I gave it a good shaking to ensure the water was mixed with the wort when I topped it off. I am fairly certain I got a pretty correct reading.

If all goes to plan the beer should come out about 6.43% ABV.

I am super excited!

Here are some photos below of most of my junk.

Enjoy! :mug:

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Below is pictures of my closet I cleaned out to turn into a fermentation closet for my next beers.

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Kegerator Photos:

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First Brew Day!
I was drinking the New Belgium Ben & Jerry's Choco. Chip IC brew. :mug:

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Thanks for reading and checking out my photos!
Finally glad to be officially part of the community.
Cheers! :mug:
 
Congrats on joining in on the addiction. Do you have a temperature controller for the kegerator? (Assuming you are going to use that for fermentation.) Its probably possible to use the internal thermostat to control temp, but it will be much easier and more accurate if you spend about $30 and 30 minutes putting together an STC-1000. Just a thought.

Congrats again on the hobby and the first brew.
 
Awesome man! I love the kegerator. I am on the hunt for me one. I have not pulled he trigger on a large system yet, I am still small batch brewing. I intend to purchase some 6.5 gallon carboys and stuff on my next payday.
 
Congrats on joining in on the addiction. Do you have a temperature controller for the kegerator? (Assuming you are going to use that for fermentation.) Its probably possible to use the internal thermostat to control temp, but it will be much easier and more accurate if you spend about $30 and 30 minutes putting together an STC-1000. Just a thought.

Congrats again on the hobby and the first brew.

Thank you!
I do not have a temp controller yet.
I do have one on the way along with one of those heater wraps for the bucket and carboy.
The Kegerator has a temp controller on it and I was just assuming if I set it at about 48F it would ferment between 50-52F since I know the yeast fermenting also causes heat.
I might open it up later today and drop in a sanitized temp gauge just to see what it is currently reading since it has been almost 24 hours in the kegerator.

Awesome man! I love the kegerator. I am on the hunt for me one. I have not pulled he trigger on a large system yet, I am still small batch brewing. I intend to purchase some 6.5 gallon carboys and stuff on my next payday.

I think small batch might be the way to go for beginners.
I am really hoping these two 5 gallon batches are drinkable lol.
I was considering starting out with the 2-gallon brew-in-a-bag setups.
Just to get a handle on it and then jumping from their right into all-grain.

The kegerator I got from Beverage Factory was pretty inexpensive.
They have a dual tap kegerator as low as $610. I paid about $800 for mine but I upgraded the tower to stainless and I got perlick faucets.
 
Very nice! Yea I am eyeballing a kit from NB. I already have alot of the stuff ill need, because I am an avid wine maker. However, most of my Carboys and such are full, That pipeline never runs dry lol.
 
Very nice! Yea I am eyeballing a kit from NB. I already have alot of the stuff ill need, because I am an avid wine maker. However, most of my Carboys and such are full, That pipeline never runs dry lol.

Haha!
Yeah, I can already see more carboy's in my future.
I have an Imperial Stout I want to make for my 3rd brew and that is going to have to sit for a very long time. So I will likely need a new carboy for that.

I totally love that you went big starting out and got the kegs and everything. So much aggro skipped.

Thanks! I was hoping that was going to be the case. I helped a friend bottle a 5-gallon batch a few years ago and it was a lot of work and just a huge mess.

Wow, that setup looks like that of someone who has been brewing for years. Looks awesome.

Thanks! I just hope that my beer turns out like someone who has brewed for years lol! :D
 
Awesome setup, you did it the right way good luck, much better then making 20 1gal mr beer kits with voss water
 
Awesome. I've been looking at that same 3-tap kegerator from kegco as well. Would love to hear an in depth review after you've been using it awhile.
 
Awesome. I've been looking at that same 3-tap kegerator from kegco as well. Would love to hear an in depth review after you've been using it awhile.

Yeah, dude. I can do that.
It might be a while. I have almost 2 months before I can keg the Lager.
I am making a Frankenstein Scottish Ale this weekend (Hopefully) so I have a little bit on that as well. My third keg I was planning on doing Soda Water so I can kick the soda habit completely. I had been buying bottles and cans of it and it is just expensive overall. So being able to pump a keg full of tap water and then just carbonate it is pretty awesome.

While I am using the Kegerator currently to ferment this Lager I have noticed a few things I wish were a tad different.

You will want to know beforehand how you want to run your setup.
In my case, I wanted to run 2 beer kegs and one soda water keg. Both require 2 different PSI's so I had to go with a dual regulator.

Well, you cannot really fit the CO2 tank plus a dual regulator in this kegerator unless you run the regulator upside down and even then it is pretty tight with 3 kegs. I also noticed during my mock setup running it this way I run the risk of the keg bumping the regulator knob and changing the PSI settings.

The Kegerator does come with a bracket to mount the CO2 tank outside, but again with the dual regulator you have two lines that would need to come into the Kegerator.
The Kegerator only comes with one access hole. I contacted Kegco and they said I "can" drill another hole next to it and nothing will be in the way, but by doing so I would void the warranty.

So I wanted to skip that option. I am in the process of sending back my dual regulator for a secondary regulator. Since the Kegerator came with the CO2 tank and a single regulator I can just run the main regulator at 30PSI and do a "Y" or "T" fitting to a second regulator at 12PSI for the beer.

Then also on the same note of there only being one access hole into the Kegerator.
I also ordered a Tower Cooler. It is a fan that you place inside of the kegerator and it pushes air the cold air inside through a tube and up the beer faucet tower to keep everything up there colder and it is supposed to keep your beer from foaming.

Anyways it requires you run a small power cord to the fan. The access hole is not large enough for the fan power cord and the CO2 gas tubing.

Kegco installed a plastic bung using two screws that are mounted through this access hole. So I am thinking about pulling the bung out and then making two cuts about 1/4th of an inch apart and sliding the bung back in. Hoping that the gap will be wide enough for the cord to slide into the gap while allowing the CO2 gas line to still fit in.
Not sure if it will work yet, but it is my idea to keep from having to drill another hole into the kegerator.

Another thing that would have been nice would have been mounting points inside of the kegerator. Pre-drilled holes for screws or maybe even preinstalled hooks of some sort.
I am not sure how I am going to mount the secondary regulator or the 2-way air manifold. I will probably just see if I can find some of those 3M adhesive hooks and do something like that to mount everything.

As I mentioned before I am currently fermenting the Lager in the Kegerator and I bought one of those Inkbird ITC-308 Digital Temp gauges.
I have that in the Kegerator and I noticed that the Kegerator runs between 1 and 2 degrees colder than what the temperature setting is set at.
Not a huge deal, but something to watch out for if you ferment in yours.

Then on that topic:
So when I bought the Kegerator one of the selling points for me was it said you could ferment inside of it. The Kegerator can go to 75F down to 32F.
I thought this was fantastic being winter here in MI. I was going to Ferment both of my beers at 65-66F inside of the Kegerator.

Well, I found out that the kegerator will not heat up if you set the temp to 75F. It will only keep the temp. So if you can somehow heat the inside up to 75+deg the Kegerator will kick on to cool it down and keep it at 75F, but it will not heat up for you.

So being as cold as it is here I could not get the inside of my kegerator to go above 63F inside of my house. When I put it out in the garage it won't work as a fermenting station at all unless we are doing cold storage.

So that was disappointing and a bit misleading when I was looking at it on the website.

Overall I am really happy with what I got for the price and I have not even had a chance to really use it yet.

I will try and remember to give a full and hopefully better review when I get a few months use out of it.
 
My guess: He was probably an experienced member of the community who had been reading these forums for years, and had a lot of fun doing what he did here for a while.
 
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