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What I did for beer today

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It was a sad day. Dumped my entire keg of Märzen that got horribly oxidized somehow. Still have no idea. I'm extremely careful with oxygen when kegging - fully purged keg, purged transfer lines, zero keg leaks. I guess it's bound to happen eventually. Only the third batch I've totally dumped in 7 years of brewing.

Pulled a sample of my NEIPA. Needs a little more time to settle out. I'll check it next weekend.

Pondered on what to do as far as flavoring my kettle sour.

Finally installed the RO system I've had for over a year in the box. It'll be used for the next brew.

Drank a half-liter of dunkelweizen.
 
I finished building my new brew table BIAB lift device yesterday and tried it out in action today by brewing a nice stout. One of my first projects in quite some time that I didn’t have to go back to the hardware store for anything during the build, so definitely a win there!
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So I blew my shoulder end of June, rotator cuff, haven't considered brewing since. Couple of tennis buddies came over 9/2 because they always wanted to see the 5 hours of boredom punctuated by 3-4 brief periods of sheer panic. We made a Citra/Vista whirlpooled Kveik 95F quick pale ale so chilling to 95 was like 5 minutes with tap water. Since I had an Altbier and a @Miraculix English ale in kegs already, we may have had a few also. Yesterday I kegged it. Lifting 5gal is still prolly not advised, but I know none of you folks will snitch me out to my shoulder surgeon.
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I won't snitch to your doc or PT but it's such a long painful period before and after rotator cuff repair. It's not worth it! I wasn't completely mindful of what I was doing about 90 days out and I played a silly soccer drill with the kids where the coach falls down when the ball is kicked at the target (coach). I didn't tear it again but it hurt like I had for the next 2 days. Thinking I had and another six months down was awful. Do the PT too, my second one didn't recover as well as the first one. I didn't stick with it long enough the 2nd time.
 
Today I bought some buckets, mostly for storage.
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Sometimes there are just small things to do... Most exciting part of the story: I drilled a hole in one of them and filed it to fit an outlet. Now I have an additional fermenter bucket.
 
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Today I brewed 22 litres of Mena Dru Stout (it means Black Hill in the Cornish language) The genuine stuff is brewed by the St. Austell Brewery in Cornwall.

3500g Irish Pale Malt
300g Smoked malt
180g Roasted Barley
180g Naked malted oats
180g Chocolate malt
140g Medium Crystal Malt
Fuggles 46g at 60m & 30g at 15m
Nottingham yeast
OG 1.044 expecting ABV 4.5%
 
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My recently harvested hops dried during the weekend, and I put it in one of the new buckets. Almost half a kilo fresh from the vines, 70g after drying... and a full 5 ltr bucket of heavenly fragrence.
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After initially thinking about a Helles, I ended up brewing a pale ale with the fresh Cascade yesterday. I still had half a pack of M44 dry yeast in the fridge, which was a good opportunity for a 5-litre batch.
To bitter I used some Citra, and added a total of 25g of dried hop cones to the hot whirlpool and after cooling down to the brew.
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In addition, I used a scoop of this wort to wake up the first half of the M44 yeast, which had been harvested from another brew and was resting in the fridge ever since. So today I made another 5ltr batch of Pale Ale "Juicy Kolibri" with Styrian Kolibri, which will be also dry hopped in a few days' time.
I'd say, I had a streak.
 
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Today I cleaned my blow off arm and put it back on since it was done spewing out yeast like mad. I also cleaned out the glass and put fresh sanitizer back in for the blow off to continue to bubble into.

I then got online and looked at new flasks for a yeast starter since the one I had fell over and broke when cleaning up after brew day on this last batch (I feel like I always break those things some how).

My amazon order for more pH soaking solution and cleaner also arrived as well, so I opened that box and put it away.
 
I'll be packaging up some of my Brut IPA for my local homebrew club today, plus cleaning and sanitising my All-Rounder in preparation for a Kwak-inspired Belgian Dubbel.

I'll also finally get my RO setup mounted on one of my beech worktop offcuts and onto a French Cleat so I can hang it by my outdoor tap in a way where I can move it super easily when I don't need it.
 
Was itching to brew last night but only got whole grains and no mill so tried to use a food processor, yea don`t. Took forever to get through 7kg of grains, you get dust and whole grains and nothing in between, brewhouse efficiency was absolute garbage, OG 1.035, ordering a roller mill next week.
 
I did a deep clean on my Therminator plate chiller today. A few gallons of water with PBW in the keggle, heated to 180, run through the pump, in through the out port of the chiller, back into the keggle through the whirlpool arm. Let that go for about 1/2 hour. Then I pumped the solution into a 5 gallon bucket and dunked the chiller to soak the outside (it was stickier than I imagined). Flushed everything with water afterwards.
 
Again just a small step for beer I did, but an huge step for cider: bought a new outlet for my fermeter barrel.

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We pressed and juiced pears, but when transferring from the kettle to the barrel, we realised that the tap didn't quite fit into the thread and therefore couldn't be sealed. Warm plastic has its limits, so screwing it in tighter doesn't help at all (and I wanted to avoid a 'don't do that' story by doing 'just another quarter tighter'). So I put a drip catcher underneath and quickly drove to the DIY store to buy a new valve, which then fitted. The spilled third of a litre of warm pear juice was delicious. Now there are 23 litre pear cider fermenting, I might transfer a few litres into an extra bucket in a few days and dry hop them with Lilly hops.
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On Sunday I did another hike, finding this hilarious beer-filled vending machine at the car park, where my tour started up to the summit of mount Schober at lake Fuschl. Austrians (the "no kangaroos here"-guys) are hilarious!
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What I did for beer today? Lucked out that's what! Ordered a twin roll grain gorilla mill today, asking for an in-house pickup at closing time. An hour later my phoke rings, it's the shop manager saying someone just returned a once used THREE roll pro version saying they couldn't get it to crush corn, they went over it and there's nothing wrong or broken but since it's now "used" they can't sell it for full price so if I want it, it's mine for no extra cost. Came home and immediately found the problem: the crank handle bolt is too short so the handle is slipping on the hex at the end of the axel :D that's 50 eur my way!

One thing though.. I don't have the slightest clue what setting should I be using on the gap. Any help on that one?
 
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What I did for beer today? Lucked out that's what! Ordered a twin roll grain gorilla mill today, asking for an in-house pickup at closing time. An hour later my phoke rings, it's the shop manager saying someone just returned a once used THREE roll pro version saying they couldn't get it to crush corn, they went over it and there's nothing wrong or broken but since it's now "used" they can't sell it for full price so if I want it, it's mine for no extra cost. Came home and immediately found the problem: the crank handle bolt is too short so the handle is slipping on the hex at the end of the axel :D that's 50 eur my way!

One thing though.. I don't have the slightest clue what setting should I be using on the gap. Any help on that one?
 
I did a deep clean on my Therminator plate chiller today. A few gallons of water with PBW in the keggle, heated to 180, run through the pump, in through the out port of the chiller, back into the keggle through the whirlpool arm. Let that go for about 1/2 hour. Then I pumped the solution into a 5 gallon bucket and dunked the chiller to soak the outside (it was stickier than I imagined). Flushed everything with water afterwards.
If you can get a filter/ of some sort on the return PBW to the keggle, that will catch all the bits that get lodged in the Therminator. What I would do was I would put my hop spider in the keggle and run the return hose over the top and into the spider. I would catch about a 1-2 tsp of little bits after every brew. Then I'd run hot water through to rinse and about 1.5 gallons of Starsan after that. I have a HERMS coil also in the cleaning loop.
 
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