Very true. But some of us are into lowballing the equipment. (It's still more expensive than we'd like to admit)
When starting with all-grain brewing and no mineral (distilled, RO) or low mineral (RO, spring) water, water adjustments can be as simple as measuring spoons or gram scales (for example, see Water Chemistry – How to Build Your Water – Bertus Brewery (link)).
Funny enough, that's literally the guide I used in my case. Distilled water + 1 teaspoon cacl + 1 tspn gypsum.
Walmart (Anaheim) carries Parent's Choice Distilled Water for $1.08/gal in the baby formula section - that would be about a $13.37 savings on a 5 gallon batch. Water Gourmet in Walnut is $.25/gal, which would be a $19.18 savings!
For everything else, I have 1 liter pop bottles of ice in the freezer. I sanitize one or two with Starsan and add them directly to the fermentation bucket.
My chiller sucks too.My immersion chiller sucks. It will drop the temperature below 100 pretty quickly but stalls around 90 even if the water running thru it is in the low 60's. If I'm pitching kveik yeast, that's fine.
I may try doing a lager in the summer by just swapping out ice bottles as they thaw. Or not; I tend to brew with the seasons rather than fighting them. But it could be done
As a quick tip for ICs, agitate the coils.
$40 for 10 beers? i sure hope you're drinking them from a frosted glass from the bar with a nitro pour or something....
yeah, i think you should be able to get some help to widdle that down.... 2 gallons you say?
wait, but you can save on bathroom mirrors? just look cool before work and comb your hair in the reflection from the shiny brew kettle, and carry that feeling through the day!
)
@Miraculix I've been toying with this recipe. I think what I'm going to do is make a hop tea during the mash. Just do a 5 minute boil, with a little noble hops for flavor and aroma, then add the hop tea to the fermenter for bitterness. The boil is just to sterilize the wort and coagulate some of the protein; this recipe has a *lot* of protein from the wheat. Use the Lithuanian farmhouse yeast and ferment it hot.Thanks. I may give this a try with K1V1116 yeast then. That should give it good attenuation and some esters. (maybe the wrong esters
Edit: This might be a good recipe to try OYL-033 "Jovaru" yeast. (the yeast will cost as much as the malt, but then I can save and repitch it)
Are you stirring the wort while cooling? I stir until I get a whirlpool going and it accelerates the cooling greatly. I don't even use ice water in the immersion cooler, just my cold tap water (high 50's temp) and I can cool the 200+ degree wort down to 90 in about 15 minutes. Granted I do extract brewing with about a 3 gallon boil and add 2 gallons of cold water to reach the final 70 degree temp.
I'm using a Brewzilla 35L and I typically start to run the recirculating pump a few minutes prior to the end of the boil to make sure everything is sanitized, and then recirculate while chilling until the last 10-15min. Then I turn it off to let everything settle.
OK you're way beyond me, equipment wise. I just use a 6 gallon kettle on the stove and plastic buckets.
It is 100% under sized. I bought the unit used on Craigslist and it did not come with the original wort chiller. The one I have is homemade (copper tubing) but it seems pretty small compared to the kettle. I have not tried to agitate or move it during chilling so I'll give that a try next time.
That ones has minerals re-added. The good distilled water is with the bottled water
I see quite a few posts on saying to wash and re-pitch yeast. Can you (or anyone else) point to a reliable and sure fire way on how to do this?
Google yeast washing on Youtube, there are several really good videos. Basically you take the yeast from your primary and put that into a mason jar. Chill and let the dead yeast settle. You should see three levels in the mason jar, water at the top, live yeast int the middle and dead yeast and trub on the bottom. Syphon the live yeast into another mason jar. Add sterile water and repeat several times. Work under a propane torch. Creates a sterile environment. Take a small 8 oz mason jar and store in the frig. Every 6 months re-culture yeast again and store back in the frig.
Thank you! This looks like it is exactly what I am looking for. I have bookmarked it.
You can add some Irish moss if you want to push the hot break a little bit. Otherwise, sounds good to me! Be careful with the hop tea. I managed to overhop one of my raw ales because I tried to compensate for something which didn't need to be compensated for. I added too much hops at the end. The amount you would usually use for the batch is usually ok for hop tea as well.
An alternate is to overbuild a starter and drop some of it into a mason jar before you pitch the rest into the wort of the day, which avoids the harvesting and cleaning hassle. There’s also a genetic predisposition to harvest the more well flocculating yeasts, but this takes some generations to show up in your beer (at which point other mutations may take hold), so you may have reset with a fresh purchase of yeast by that point anyhow.
My friends who drink bottled beer always have pry off bottles to give me. I do have some flip cap bottles for when I am kegging. I can fill 4-6 pints for friends and keg the rest.
If there's something you can tie it to, sure. But none of my lids come standard with a hook, or anything protruding, to tie a string to.
I’ve read that washing has mostly fallen out of favor. Just like moving beer to a secondary for a week, it mostly isn’t needed and only increases the chances of contaminatio.
You adapt your process for the types of beer you like, the yeast you use, and the equipment you have. I've gone back to using 2 fermenters (in the bad old days we called the 2nd one a "secondary", which it seldom is unless you're brewing something weird) I start out with a plastic bucket (and if it's the right kind of yeast, which it seldom is, I top-crop it.) After a week or so, I transfer to a carboy and airlock and add a tablespoon of sugar*. When that's finished and cleared, I bottle directly from the carboy, and I pour the sludge at the bottom into a sanitized mason jar and put it in the fridge. I usually don't save the trub from the bucket, but if I do I usually wash that because it's full of hops, grain dust, cold-break protein, and other crap. That's what works for me; you might come up with something totally different and better for you.
