Recent content by gturner6ppc

It's stainless! 1) I bought a 12-quart stainless steel cookpot from Kroger's, on sale for $9.09. 2) I bought some 3/4" steel rod from Lowe's, along with a bunch of 20mm sealed roller bearings, which where on sale for $2.97 each (they're 6204-ZZ). 3) I used some scrap wood to make a 3"...

The book "Brewing - Science and Practice" from the CRC Press has almost a whole chapter on Milling. In part, it says: Roll (or roller) mills are commonly used in breweries. The rollers work in pairs. The malt grains are delivered to the first pair of rolls by a feed roll that determines the...

If you can get some end rolls from a conveyor it would probably be easier to make a mill. They're much larger diameter (6 inches or more) and much thicker, but you'll need to find a piece of scrapped conveyor.

Dry grain can last years as long as it's not attacked by bacteria, mold, insects, and mice. Your grain undoubtedly spent many months in a silo before it got to the maltster, then spent more months on a shelf somewhere. Kept cool and dry, it could sit for years, but that would cost money due to...

Holy smokes! Is that you Kyle? I thought you was dead, killed by them beer craving creatures that came out of the woods! What happened? Are any of the other fellas still alive? :p Yeah, that's still my story, and I'm naming electric_beer as an eye witness. :D It's better than the...

I'm definitely interested, as I have been home malting tall fescue to make a yard beer. :)

I've used a Corona mill for years, but my local big box supplier installed a roller mill in the store. Unfortunately it's out of adjustment and leaving a large percentage of the grain untouched. So I've got the idea in my head to make my own roller mill out of a couple of 12 quart cook pots...

Well, me and some college friends was holed up in a rented cabin in the Ozarks and the beer we'd stockpiled started to run low. For some reason my car wouldn't start, not sure why, and during the middle of the night someone, or something, yanked the wires out of the one truck we had. We...

This morning it struck me that perhaps we should use hydrometers that have the same coefficient of volumetric thermal expansion as water, so we don't have to adjust the readings for temperature. A quick look at a table of the coefficient of expansion of different plastics identified...

Well, the prisms are hollow, made of slides, so they don't bend the light unless the inside fluid has a different index of refraction than the outside fluid. By putting them in a box filled with pure water I eliminate most of the refraction relative to wort so my beam can travel a fairly...

The slides I got were exactly 1" wide, so yes, the path length might be a problem. I wish I had something smaller for the front prisms. As it stands, cutting through the top of five prisms is going to give me about an inch and a half of path length through the wort. I was thinking of using a...

Yes, I could do something like that (I have full access to a Bridgeport mill and a lathe), but most of the industrial brewing references say an 8" to 10" roll is pretty standard. I have a pair of solid 8" diameter by 2" wide round steel sections, but hobbyists are going to have trouble working...

Thanks. But at this point all I've done is use some super-glue from Lowe's to make four prisms out of microscope slides. The change in index of refraction isn't all that much, which is why I'm using bunches of them to keep on bending the beam. I have the CRC handbook tables and wrote a...

Has anyone built their own refractometer? Currently I'm playing around with the idea. I got a bunch of microscope slides from the hobby store and glued them into 60 degree prisms. I did some quick ray tracing and four to seven of them laid side by side and filled with wort, with the other...

I've been thinking of building a mill, too. My project is a bit odder, though. At Kroger's I found a 12 quart stainless steel stock pot on sale for $9.09. It's ten inches in diameter. Somewhere around here I've got a piece of 3/4" Thompson rod (case 60) and a pair of 3/4" self-aligning...