What I did for beer today

[day_trippr]

Spent all of yesterday converting my grinding station to use a new geared 2-roller Crankandstein mill. Had to run for parts twice but got it all ready to go. Then, this morning, as I was getting the brewery set up for a batch tomorrow, I tried to run a couple of pounds of base malt to clean out the oil and machining debris - and failed, miserably.

My 42 inch pound gear motor just does not have the balls needed to spin this mill - and I'm pretty sure I know why: the mill has the gears inside at the ends of the rollers, and when grain gets into those gears it takes much more torque to power through. If I fed a constant but thin stream of grains such that they covered the entire gap excepting the gears the motor and mill worked fine at normal speed, but as soon as some of the grains made it into the gears the motor immediately stopped dead.

Soooo....I spent the next hour putting the old Cereal Killer mill back in the grinding station and was able to grind the 30 pounds of grain needed in the morning while I got the brewery ready to go in the AM. I suspect I'll be sending the mill back to Mr. Crankandstein as I've been having no luck finding a monster motor like the American Ale Works that everyone raved about for driving geared mills (they're out o' business, of course) and what I can find costs three times what the friggin' mill costs. I could buy $100 non-geared mill every few years for less.

Oh well...

Cheers!

 

[OakIslandBrewery]

Spent all of yesterday converting my grinding station to use a new geared 2-roller Crankandstein mill. Had to run for parts twice but got it all ready to go. Then, this morning, as I was getting the brewery set up for a batch tomorrow, I tried to run a couple of pounds of base malt to clean out the oil and machining debris - and failed, miserably.

My 42 inch pound gear motor just does not have the balls needed to spin this mill - and I'm pretty sure I know why: the mill has the gears inside at the ends of the rollers, and when grain gets into those gears it takes much more torque to power through. If I fed a constant but thin stream of grains such that they covered the entire gap excepting the gears the motor and mill worked fine at normal speed, but as soon as some of the grains made it into the gears the motor immediately stopped dead.

Soooo....I spent the next hour putting the old Cereal Killer mill back in the grinding station and was able to grind the 30 pounds of grain needed in the morning while I got the brewery ready to go in the AM. I suspect I'll be sending the mill back to Mr. Crankandstein as I've been having no luck finding a monster motor like the American Ale Works that everyone raved about for driving geared mills (they're out o' business, of course) and what I can find costs three times what the friggin' mill costs. I could buy $100 non-geared mill every few years for less.

Oh well...

Cheers!

Sounds exhausting. I shoveled dirt and gravel, put down landscape fabric and rubber mulch, seems easier than what you described.

 

[day_trippr]

It was more aggravation than actual effort. Plus, for some reason The Spousal Unit had the AC off and windows open on a hella humid day so I was pretty much soaked in my workshop which did not help my situation.

The ramifications of "inside gears" never occurred to me. My bad...

 

[T Murph]

Wow @day_trippr that is concerning to say the least. By bearings inside the rollers, do mean like the rollers in the attached photo?

 

[T Murph]

Preparing equipment to brew tomorrow. Cleaning, checking things out and getting yeast ready. My helpers think I'm OCD because I do things like this. I have 4 gallons of PBW solution in this fermenter cleaning the entire inside. So I lay it down and turn it every 15 minutes to get all of the inside clean including the cooling coil. Maybe I am a little OCD but I don't have infected beers.

 

[OakIslandBrewery]

OCD? I was thinking something else. If it works for you, stick with it!

 

[day_trippr]

By bearings inside the rollers, do mean like the rollers in the attached photo?

I was referring to the gears being inside the mill instead of outside.
The bottom mill is the Crankandstein, the top is my old non-geared Cereal Killer.

Cheers!

 

[HM-2]

Will be clarifying my Mountain DIPA in preparation for kegging. Fastest beer turnaround I've ever managed. 6 days grain to keg including a 2 day dry hop. Not expecting it to be ready to drink until the weekend as it's liable to have some hop bite for a bit, but still very impressive.

Two packets of WHC High Voltage fermented at 32°C/90°F provides for some truly gargantuan fermentation performance.

 

[day_trippr]

Got dis beyotch on the fire after a ridiculous start:

- went to strike but nothing was coming out of the wort pump to the mlt. Why? Because the out vs in lines at the pump were swapped.

- Then I realized I had loaded the grains before laying in the soaked rice hulls. Took the mlt out on the deck, poured the grist into buckets, laid down the hulls and poured the grist back in.

- Went to strike again but noticed I hadn't installed the float arm for the autosparge valve.

All those oopsies were resolved without harm and Recirculation is happening. Finally!

Keeping cool-ish on a hot an humid day...

Onwards!

[edit] Fly sparge in process...

So far no extra eff-ups!

[wrap up] Whirlpooling a half pound of hops at 170°F...

Wort chilled, carboys filled, pitched, and gassed, and hooked up to my "krausen katchers" to send the fermentation games out to a pair of daisy-chained kegs.

And now the waiting game...

Cheers!

 

[ClaudiusB]

I fixed the light.

 

[day_trippr]

"The Patron Saint Of Converts" is an interesting logo...

 

[HM-2]

Mountain DIPA kegged up. The flat warm sample tasted great!

Also pulled apart my kegerator taps to deep clean them and fit the return springs. I need to clean them a lot more frequently than I have been, they were absolutely gross.

 

[flipster]

I'm making some plans for my next UBRK project, should be a California Common. On one hand I harvested the yeast for it a few month ago and on the other, I read about toasting malts, so I wanna give this a try.
The resulting biscuit malt I made smelled heavenly, I'm really looking forward to this.

Also I bottled ~5 ltr of the recently brewed Münchener Helles today, carbonated to 5g/ltr. And put it back into the fridge.

Now I'm sitting in the ICE train to Frankfurt and texting my update while rushing with almost 300 km/h trough the beautiful Hallertau, and getting a glimpse of the this years hops harvest. It's growing like weed (haha) this year.

 

[T Murph]

I averted a huge mess this morning. Yesterday was Brewsday Tuesday I brewed a 5 gal batch of Octoberfest and put it in my CF5 to ferment. Although I made a started I was concerned about the yeast I pitched as it was a repitch from May 7th. The starter was fine by all counts when I pitched it but when I went to check on this morning, there was no activity in the blow off bottle. I immediately became worried that the yeast wasn't going to be sufficient. I began recounting my steps trying to determine what might be the problem. So I decided to test the prv to see if there was any pressure building in the fermenter. Low and behold pressure was evident so I looked at the qc and realized I had connected it to the floating dip tube port. Oh crap, fortunately it had not yet built enough pressure to push the fermenting beer out through the blow off. I quickly switched the blow off line to the gas port and wallah bubbles like crazy into the blow off bottle.

Gladly no mess was made and I didn't loose a batch of good Octoberfest. You may recall just a few months back I did that same thing with a batch of Watneys Stout Clone in a Fermzilla but by the time I checked on it, it had dumped the entire contents all over the place. Lost a complete 5 gallon batch of beer and a day doing clean up. Gee I hope I never do that again.

 

[Bramling Cross]

I could buy $100 non-geared mill every few years for less.

It really sucks whenever you finally take the plunge and get that nice new piece of kit that you've been thinking about for years and it turns out that it dashes, rather than fulfills, your hopes. As someone that has experienced that more than a few times, I'm sorry it happened to you.

It really sucks.

For what it's worth, my analysis of the situation has resulted in the same conclusion.

The Cereal Killer gets the job done, it lasts for years, and when it inevitably starts having problems you don't feel obligated to monkey around with it and subsequently turn otherwise enjoyable brewdays into exercises in frustration. My first Cereal Killer survived about eight years of 1.5~ brewdays/month. I'm currently on year four with my second. But I have very high hopes for this one because...

I've found that conditioning my malt has made a big difference in increasing the longevity of my mills. I was very, very hesitant to start conditioning because the mere thought of damp flour caking up my rollers and bearings seemed horrifying. Why on earth would anyone want to do something so stupid?

Once I took my brave pills and tried conditioning, though, I've found that my rollers and bearings are much, much cleaner because flour production has diminished almost to nothing. My mill cleanup on brewday requires no compressed air, just a paint brush. Better still--and this makes me nervous as hell--but I see no reason to tear down the mill and clean its working surfaces on a quarterly basis. There just isn't that much to clean up anymore. I've moved that out to a yearly cadence, but I may move it back to a half-yearly interval depending upon the results of this Fall's cleaning.

Best of all, conditioning takes, at most, 5mins tops? It's a lot quicker than trying to get a mill properly cleaned.

I took the plunge on conditioning for LODO reasons (frankly I found it made no tangible difference) but I'm sticking with it for pragmatic reasons. It's a bit more demanding on my drill, but it makes the brew day much easier and enjoyable while boosting my efficiency a smidge.

That's been my experience, for what it's worth. I hope you found this useful and I'm sorry your awesome new mill didn't work out for you.

 

[BrewZer]

Picked up 6 gals of spring water for the No-Boil Hefe Exbeeriment and pre-staged the Summer 48 for transfer to the bottling bucket tomorrow morning. Gonna sanitize bottles and tubing in the AM for the bottling session, then scrub out the fermenter and throw the Hefe ingredients right back into it.

 

[connell89]

Sounds interesting. Please post the outcome.

Going to bottle/keg my SMASH today. It wasn't very hoppy at fermentation time but we will see at bottling.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Yesterday I brewed 19 litres of a Belgian IPA
2700g Pilsner malt
1000g Munich Light
1000g Abbey Malt
30g Magnum at 60m
24g EKG at 15m
30g for 20m at 85C
M31 yeast.
The Abbey yeast had a very fine crush and kept blocking the bottom plate. BHE down from 75% to 70%.

 

[BrewZer]

Bottles in the sink, soaking in bleach solution along with bottling bucket spigot parts. Staged the conditioning crates for the 3-week carbonating ritual, and went over the Hefe instructions again -- "it says" you don't even have to stir the ingredients, just dump them in the fermenter with half the water, then add the other half to mix things up a bit. We'll see, I guess.

 

[T Murph]

I had a difficult time sleeping last night as my mind couldn't stop thinking about temperature control outside of placing the fermenter inside a refrigerator. This is now the third batch of beer that I have brewed using a 20 gallon ss pot as an ice and water vessel with a little pond pump to circulate cold water through the cooling coil in a CF5. It works satisfactorily with the help of an Inkbird controller however it requires regular ice block additions throughout the day and night. But having the Inkbird alarm wake me at 3 am to add ice is annoying to say the least.

Well I had an epiphany while lying there awake last night. Why not utilize a small single keg kegerator that is just sitting around doing nothing, to keep a bucket of water cold that can be pumped through the fermenters cooling coil?

I removed the draft tower and ran the electrical wire and hoses through the hole in the top of the kegerator with the pump submerged into a bucket of water and ice. This little kegerator will freeze a keg of beer, unfortunately that happened, so it will just be a matter of keeping an eye on it to make sure it don't freeze the bucket of water and adjust the thermostat accordingly. If this works as I expect it to, I'll get to sleep the night away as my lil yeasty buddies turn that wort into beer for me.

 

[BrewZer]

I had a difficult time sleeping last night as my mind couldn't stop thinking about temperature control outside of placing the fermenter inside a refrigerator. This is now the third batch of beer that I have brewed using a 20 gallon ss pot as an ice and water vessel with a little pond pump to circulate cold water through the cooling coil in a CF5. It works satisfactorily with the help of an Inkbird controller however it requires regular ice block additions throughout the day and night. But having the Inkbird alarm wake me at 3 am to add ice is annoying to say the least.

Well I had an epiphany while lying there awake last night. Why not utilize a small single keg kegerator that is just sitting around doing nothing, to keep a bucket of water cold that can be pumped through the fermenters cooling coil?

I removed the draft tower and ran the electrical wire and hoses through the hole in the top of the kegerator with the pump submerged into a bucket of water and ice. This little kegerator will freeze a keg of beer, unfortunately that happened, so it will just be a matter of keeping an eye on it to make sure it don't freeze the bucket of water and adjust the thermostat accordingly. If this works as I expect it to, I'll get to sleep the night away as my lil yeasty buddies turn that wort into beer for me.
View attachment 853980

Frank Zappa would be proud.

ETA: Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the bottles are capped and the brave little soldiers are sleeping soundly in their crates. Funny story -- I used to use cardboard boxes for conditioning, but my family bought me some milk crates to keep the bottles in so the cardboard wouldn't disintegrate and dump 12 bottles of beer on the floor.

So crates.

 

[day_trippr]

While pondering my current grain mill situation decided to get out of my office chair and see if giving my venerable Cereal Killer a good clean and lube might help. Took it apart on the bench, hit the rollers with a brass brush to really get the knurling "clean to the bone", cleaned the frames and roller ends bright, blew out and lubricated the ball bearings, then reassembled it - with the idle roller reversed to expose the fresh edges of the "back side" knurling.

I'm fairly encouraged that the rollers are so free now my issues might be resolved. I'm planning on a batch of my raspberry hibiscus wheat beer on Tuesday and will find out then for sure. I will have my other even older Barley Crusher available in a pinch though it's gapped for wheat and oats right now...

Cheers!

 

[BrewZer]

Since I'm using the big Cool Brewing bag cooler to control ferment temps, I need some way to get my fermenter into and out of the bag without killing my back. So I poked around online and saw harnesses for carboys and other fermenters but saw comments warning that the straps will slide on you, letting the fermenter slip out of the harness. Amazon had a 10 meter roll of nylon strap and a bag of 10 sliders for about $17, and I'm saying to myself "I can fix that!" so I ordered it and with a little cutting and burning, this is what I came up with... and using eight sliders, no sewing required!

 

[BrewZer]

While pondering my current grain mill situation decided to get out of my office chair and see if giving my venerable Cereal Killer a good clean and lube might help. Took it apart on the bench, hit the rollers with a brass brush to really get the knurling "clean to the bone", cleaned the frames and roller ends bright, blew out and lubricated the ball bearings, then reassembled it - with the idle roller reversed to expose the fresh edges of the "back side" knurling.

View attachment 854012

I'm fairly encouraged that the rollers are so free now my issues might be resolved. I'm planning on a batch of my raspberry hibiscus wheat beer on Tuesday and will find out then for sure. I will have my other even older Barley Crusher available in a pinch though it's gapped for wheat and oats right now...

Cheers!

Excellent job! I'm surprised to see that only the drive roller has bearings -- did you lube the other roller?

 

[day_trippr]

Both rollers have bearings - the idle roller has them pressed inside the ends and they turn on the adjusters.

Cheers!

 

[T Murph]

Both rollers have bearings - the idle roller has them pressed inside the ends and they turn on the adjusters.

Cheers!

Nice work. I know it was a labor of necessity and love but it is like a new mill now.

That raspberry hibiscus wheat sounds very interesting. I would like to brew a batch if you care to share your recipe.

 

[day_trippr]

My pleasure! Don't pay too much attention to the BS3 meta data, I use Bru'n Water for all my water needs.

Cheers!

 

[Wigglebutts Brewery]

Brewing up a Mosaic IPA smash…. hops - 8oz of which 6oz are dry hopped. Last batch was crushed by bottle exchange folks…

Week was busy filling/cleaning a couple cases, setting up equipment for cask beer on the road (FOTR picnic next week). I brewed a London Porter to serve cask for Iron Brewer competition, wish me luck! Pictures will follow!

 

[BrewZer]

Well, the MoreBeer Flash Brewing Hefeweizen kit is in the fermenter. Took about 20 minutes with all the sanitizing (since there wasn't any hot side, I wanted to be extra sure everything was not just sanitized, but SANITIZED!). Other than that, we did everything exactly as specified in the directions included in the kit.

The second water addition did a lot of the mixing I thought I'd have to do by hand.

I think I'll call it Frankenweizen's Monster owing to the exbeerimental nature of the brew -- to me, anyway. I'm sure more than a few of MoreBeer's employees tested this mix out before they marketed it. I hope, anyway...

On the plus side, the new fermenter harness worked like a charm! I'll be strapping one of my Inkbird recording temperature sensors to the side as soon as it warms up to room temperature (it was in the garage freezer).

 

[bkboiler]

bottled 29 bottles of a simple cider at 1.004...a bit drier than desired....
but put in a "simple syrup" of DME (dosed with a small 5mL plastic syringe from my kids liquid Tylenol) to achieve 3.0 vol of CO2.
Or hopefully more like 2.5 volumes and a bit more sweetness since it was fermented with safcider tf-6, which I'm hoping doesn't totally ferment maltotriose.
just racked directly to bottle using an auto siphon and bottling wand...easier than I was expecting.
The new bench capper made it a breeze...
The Monster bottle rinser and bottle tree were helpful compared to manually filling them with a funnel and dumping (for sanitizing)...I tried a brass bottle pre-rinser on my utility sink I installed a few weeks ago, but I don't have hot water supplied to it, so when I put the bottle rinser on the spigot, and turn on the cold water, it flows backward through the hot water inlet all over the floor ...simple $7 cap will fix that!