1-Gallon Brewers UNITE!

Has anybody here used these? http://morebeer.com/products/tapadraft-6liter15gal-bottle.html

They seem nearly ideal. I'm tempted to pick up a couple to play around with.

 

I've been using one for several months now and I love it. Been doing 2 gallon batches, I bottle right out of the fermentor using carb drops. It's quick easy and I've brewed some really good beer. I'd recomend this fermentor to anyone.

 

I haven't used mine for quite some time but when I used to brew bigger batches I'd always bottle some up in a Tap A Draft bottle. Worked well for me and it fits well in the fridge, it kept it for a month or so without going flat too.

 

I always like the idea of the TAD system, but I heard they were finicky/issue prone on the valve side.

I won't lie, though, I did think about getting a few of the bottles at one time for fermentors, but decided the 2gal buckets were easier.

 

I used the TAD system for quite some time. It worked fine and I was happy with the results however, I found a few quirks I had to iron out: If you get the system, replace the caps with the poly seal screw caps. The first batch I did, I used the ones that came with it and got small leaks when carbing. The design has changed since I had mine; you could put two CO2 carts, one on each side, or one CO2 and nitro cart for your stouts. Made it really nice. Lastly, the tap began to weaked over time and although I never had it pop open on its own, I started looping a rubber band around the handle just so I could sleep at night. All that being said, again, I was not unhappy with its performance, especially about how easy it was to keep in the fridge or take to the brew club meeting.

Hope that helps a bit,

Prost,

Joe


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I don't necessarily have any interest in using TAD as it was originally intended, though I have to admit: it'd be convenient at times for taking beer out...

I'm more interested in the bottles as fermenters. A 1.5 gal container that I can see into and will take a stopper for air-lock and/or blowoff is appealing... Especially for $8-9/ea...

 

I have to agree with that. It would make a good fermenter. The only concern I would have would be the head space for the krausen. You could definitely use a blow off tube in the bung if need be, especially with some of these proteinacious beers like hefeweizens. The price is right and you know it can stand at least a moderate amount of pressure. Shoot, give it a try, if it doesn't pan out, you're just out $8-9 bucks.


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Thanks for the help previously everyone. I just brewed my first batch ever last night. 1.25 gallons of a blonde ale. Everything went pretty smoothly throughout the process. The OG was about 4 points shy of the target, but otherwise everything seemed to be where it should be. The cooler that I put my fermenter in started pretty warm (about 80 degrees), but I added ice packs and it got down to 60 degrees overnight and seems to be holding steady for now. No activity in the airlock yet, but it hasn't been very long. Hopefully those yeast get to work soon so I can get to trying my creation!

 

Did you wait until you got it down to 60f before you pitched the yeast?

 

I pitched once I got the wort down to about 72 degrees in an ice bath in my sink. At that point I was running out of ice to add to the water bath and the temperature was pretty leveled out. I then put the fermenter into the cooler with ice packs and the temperature got down to about 70 within an hour or two, so the fermenter may have been a little on the high temperature side for a few hours tops.

 

Sounds like everything went pretty good for a first batch!

Did you do any aeration of the wort after cooling it down? Shake the fermentor?

 

I did. My pour from the pot to the bucket was pretty vigorous and then I shook the bucket for about a minute or so.

 

acarter - Good on you for the aeration!

What was your pitching rate? What yeast did you use?

 

I used safale s-05 and pitched about half a packet for 1.25 gallons

 

acarter - Sounds like your good with the pitching rate. Is it bubbling yet? Give it 24 hours and you should start seeing some activity.

The only other thing I can think of is raising your ferm temp up a bit. 60F is on the low side of ideal for S-05. 65-67F might kickstart it. :rockin:

 

Ok thanks I may bump it up a hair then

 

Great to see another small batch brewer! What kind of beer did you make, ACarter?

I'll second the bump up the temp a bit, US05 loves the mid-60's, it can get a little "peachy" in the low 60's. If you want to ferment that cold and have a nice, clean yeast go with Notty. It'll behave similar to US05, but tolerates cold better.

Man, I need to get my grain order in - the weekend approaches!

 

Good to know. I thought colder was better. I'm brewing a blonde ale

 

A lot of people have made me think colder was better as well I have I small room connected to my bedroom with a small little "bat cave" as we call it and it stays cooler in there than the rest of the house around 70 tops plus its nice and dark I do believe that's gonna be my fermentor room until summer then gonna rig up a extra fridge I have where I can control the temp and brew 2 gallon batches all year long

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Here everyone's trying to go cold and I'm trying to figure out how I can get temps up to the 80's for a saison/wit...

Basement's hanging out in the 60's right now, sump corner's in the upper 50's. I should really get a lager going...

 

I just opened up the cooler to let my fermenter warm up some. It appears that the airlock is bubbling but very slowly and its pretty jerky.

 

I wouldn't have much trouble getting to 80s being in Florida. Getting it down to the 60s on the other hand...

 

I wish I was in Florida It's 3 degrees outside right now in northwest Ohio I some warm weather........ Really not about brewing just sick of bein cold.... Ok I am done lol

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Part of the reason i have been rocking the small batches is that I can boil on my stove. My wife can't wait until I can boil outside, she hates the hop smells.
Single digit temps and giant snow drifts are great for cooling though.

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We just got a little bit of a cold snap today. This morning was in the 40s and highs are low 60s today.

 

I would kill for 60's this is the coldest winter I have ever been in we had days when it was 30 below zero it's crazy our low last night was 8 below so all there is to do is drink beer and try to stay warm but ya you can cool beer outside real easy

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Do you have issues trying to keep fermentations warm enough when it's that cold outside?

 

Not sure about BeerLover87, but I know in our area (which averaged over 55 days below zero this year, some well below -30) my basement's been pretty stable in the 60's. It did cool down a little farther than usual in the corners, but I attribute it more to a deeper frost line this year than previous ones. LOTS of broken water mains this year, a couple townships have asked homes to keep water running to keep the pipes from freezing up. Heating bill's been higher than I'd like too - I feel sorry for all those folks that deal with propane!

Now that I'm getting a better handle on ambient basement temps (and humidity levels) I think I'm going to start planning beers around seasons. Just need to get some data from summer...

 

I was just asking because I'm going to be living in Oklahoma next year and was wondering how swings in temperature are gonna affect my brewing.

 

Can't speak for OK - haven't lived there since I was a kid.

I will say that one of the major investments that I'm looking into getting sometime this summer is a small chest freezer (either 5cuft or 7cuft) and a temp controller so that I can have a dedicated fermentation chamber. So much of quality of the flavor of the beer can be affected by fermentation temps, I've read multiple times on here that it's the single greatest addition you can make to your beer. 160bucks or less is cheap enough to not worry about wild temp swings for my batches.

Maybe something to think about for the future?

 

Maybe when I get the space I'll look into that. I suppose I could use the same method as I currently am to warm up my fermentations if I needed to. It seems to be working pretty well at the moment. Yesterday it held steady about 15-20 degrees below the ambient temperature without having to do anything.

 

My basement gets fairly cold in the summer the temp seems to be fairly steady but I have a extra fridge that I am making into a fermentor chamber as well for the summer I have a small room off of my bedroom that I put a blanket over the doorway and it seems to keep a steady temp of around 65-70 degrees that's where I plan on starting my very first batch tomorrow when my fermentor comes in and to sumbrewindude I have had to leave my toilet running it's on the north side of my house and loves to freeze up

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Soooooo, I was doing some chatting in one of Sammy33's threads (the small batch induction thread over in Electrical if anyone's interested - and it IS interesting...) about a new series of table beers that I want to start working on. Full bodied and flavored milds or session beers, both English and German styles. That led to some cask ale talk which will undoubtedly rear it's head on here in a few weeks.

That led to me thinking, hey - if you're going to have a few carboys tied up with low ABV product, why not do a few monster beers before - so in addition to the Keptinis (which is a mandatory), looks like I'll be doing a variation of Surly's Furious (Code Named: Livid) and a Strong Scotch Ale (Code Named: The Bruce). I figure those two (7.7/8.2) ought to keep for a bit while working on the table beers.

Man I have WAY too many recipes to try, they are way too much fun to make on the computer...

 

SBD: How full is your pipeline? How much do you have in bottle? Which bottle do you use, 12 oz, bomber, or something else? One thing I worry about is that my largest cash outlay will be in bottles.. I am partial to the Grolsch-style fliptop type.

 

SBD - That Surly Furious sounds absolutely delish. Are you going by NB's recipe? I wonder what the "dry hop blend" is?

ETA: Found this reference dry hop blend for 5g batch:

HBC - I use Grolsch bottles all the time. Love 'em. :rockin:

 

Sammy: How many of them do you own? And do you have a good web source for finding good quality ones on the cheap? I anticipate having our second fridge very full with a healthy representation of a majority of the recognized beer styles at the peak of my addicti... er.... hobby.

 

Craig - If you look in my sig you'll see all the experiments that are currently bottled. Doing a quick bottle count, it looks like 24 bottled to drink, not including the 3 big bottles (1L) of cider for the SWMBO or the 28 bottles that are conditioning (AZB will be done this weekend and ready to serve, OOA will be ready in two weeks). I usually try to keep 36 bottles of varying beers in the crate downstairs, then put six into a old sixpack carton and put it in the main fridge up stairs. When the carton gets low, I grab a new mix of beers.

On the pipeline side, I usually have 3 carboys running (this is an odd week, so only two running right now) and have bottling day on Sat to collect the yeast slurry, then brew on Sun and repitch that slurry into the new beer. Because of that, I try to time it out so a beer that uses US05 will be made after I bottle a beer made with US05. That allows me to not really worry about conditioning time in the carboy, and get a few uses out of my yeast.

Bottles I'm standardized on Sierra Nevada/Alaskan/Summit style bottles (shorties). I like the looks of them, no real reason. I did run into issues trying to put them into a milkcrate for storage, they don't fit well. If I was starting out, I'd choose a standard sized bottle (tall/skinny) with a good lip on it (like Sam Adams) for the bottler. Oh who am I kidding, I should have skipped the wing capper and gotten a bench capper right from the start. It's on my purchase list as soon as I find one of those oldschool metal bench cappers.

I'm not sure what the lifespan of a bottle is - like anything I figure there's got to be a limit to the number of times you can cap a glass bottle before it starts to develop issues. When that happens I'll like migrate over to the tall bottles. To get them I just bought a 12pack of SN or Alaskan while my pipeline was filling. Alaskan's were MUCH EASIER to delable and clean. If you go this route, pick a bottle that's got only one label on it, instead of a top/bottom/back labels. Less to clean off after an Oxyclean soak.

I've never used the Grolsch style bottles, so I'm of no help - I usually just buy the cheap gold caps (like 3 bucks for 144 caps) and have not had a problem one.

Eventually I want to get a couple cases of 16oz bottles (likely from Hinterland), so I can do bigger ABV beers in them for one and done nights. I'm not a fan of bombers - heresy I know, but I don't drink them fast enough to keep them nice and cold, and I don't like leaving an open bottle in the fridge.

 

I'm going to mix it up a bit - I've got some Warrior that needs to be used, so I'll keep that for bittering as FWH, on the late addition side I'm going to use Nugget and Simco. Also adjusting some of the malts to ones I can get locally, so not quite true to the recipe but it'll still be very close. It'll have a mix of American/English grains but I haven't fully decided on the base malts yet. Hopefully the LHBS has Golden Promise, otherwise I'll sub in something else...

 

I have like 50 of the Grolsch bottles. I just grab the 4 pack for $7.99 from the beer store at the corner. Comes with some decent beer in them too!

It takes 9 to bottle a 1 gallon batch and 20 for a 2.5g batch. This allows me to bottle a couple of 1 gallon brews and a couple of my big ole 2.5 gallon batches at any one time. Anything left in the bottling bucket I drink.

 

Hey fellas I am brand new to brewing I just purchased a 1 gal brew starter kit and some boxed beer kits (Brown ale, IPA, Black IPA, Red, Bourbon Oak Porter) all from northern brewer. I was wondering if any of you had experience with these and any suggestions.