Busy Busy Day

Yesterday turned out to be long and productive.

The Apfelwein I put together six weeks ago was bottled:

The bottle drying tree with thirty cleaned and sanitized twenty two ounce bottles

Six and a half gallon carboy filled with fermented and cleared Apfelwein

A glass of the finished product minus carbonation

Twenty nine bottles filled with cider and primed for natural carbonation

At this point, the Apfelwein tastes like rocket fuel made from apples with an almost dry white wine quality to it. Cabonation should take three weeks and after a total of six weeks the rocket fuel quality should have mellowed out quite a bit. The ABV is at 8.8% and may rise slightly during carbonation.

Later in the day a good friend of mine came over to help brew a Blonde Ale. This type of beer is light and color and has a lighter flavor. I decided that this beer would be easy for my first all grain batch because it doesn't use a lot of grain or other ingredients. It sticks to the basics: water, grains, hops, and yeast. This beer should be ready to bottle in about a week and to drink two to three weeks after bottling. We finished about 9pm after starting around 3:30pm. Two trips to Staples had to be made to buy a scale to measure the hops and than exchange the non-working scale in the middle of brewing.

Boil kettle set up

Spent grains in the mash tun.

The wort boiling away towards the end of the hour long boil. The device on top has a bag that holds the hops. The copper tubes are connected to the wort chiller to bring the hot wort down to a suitable temperature for adding yeast.

Finished wort cooling down.

This beer should be a little below 4% ABV when it is done and the color should lighten up quite a bit. I forgot to take pictures of the beer once it was transferred into a carboy. It is in the basement fermenting at a good rate now and it began bubbling away C02 late last night.

Happenings with my "brewery"

I have been somewhat busy the last few weeks building a few pieces of equipment to be able to brew a batch of beer. I have one thing left to build and then it will be time for brewing the Centennial Blonde I have been planning for awhile.

So, on to what I have built:

Here is the final product of the keg I cut up a few weeks ago. I have mounted a three piece stainless steel valve and a sight glass with a thermometer and graduations. Not pictured is the inside of the kettle where there is a stainless steel pickup tube that goes to the bottom of the keg.

A wort chiller, which is used for cooling down hot wort ("raw" un-fermented beer) before adding yeast and beginning fermentation. Hoses were mounted on each side and one side is hooked up to a garden hose.

This is a detail shot of the coil and the copper wire I used to tie everything together.

I also built an inline water filter with a carbon insert that will remove the chlorine from tap water. I can hang the filter on the side of the keg and control the flow with a valve. I will post pictures of this later.

The cooling coil and kettle were leak tested last night and, with any luck, I can finish interpreting a water quality report I got and build one last piece of equipment today. That way I can brew tomorrow in addition to bottling the Apfelwein I started six weeks ago.

#2

While I like the name of the blog I started about brewing two days ago I believe this name is better. I was driving home from dinner last night listening to a song called "Here Comes the Neighborhood" by The Lawrence Arms. The song is about gentrification in Chicago, and really any other big city. However, one of the lines is "Its a playground fueled by beer" and I figured that would be more interesting than "four hour habit". So, I changed it up a little bit and got the name of this blog, A Playground Build by Beer. Link to the one and only entry from the other blog is here:

http://fourhourhabit.blogspot.com/

So, onto the events of the last two days.

These days I am pretty cheap. I try to not throw tons of money onto credit cards or take my checking down too low. So, rather than spend $250+ on a stainless steel kettle with a valve on it to use for boiling wort (see below of definition) I set out to find empty beer kegs to convert into a brew kettle. This is nothing new in the world of home brew. Many people have automated breweries at home that use empty beer kegs for various stages of the brewing process. In fact, Sam Calagione, the founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewed Ales http://www.dogfish.com/ started his brewery on a setup consisting of three converted beer kegs on a rack with various burners, hoses, valves, and pumps attached to them.

I ended up finding a guy in Virginia that had four kegs for sale at a decent price. My email conversation with the guy was a little strange and gave me a weird feeling about the whole thing. My phone conversation prior to meeting him made me wary of the entire deal. It turns out that he isn't just a terrible typer. It sounded like he either had a stroke, was on drugs, or just had a problem keeping his jaw, tongue, and voicebox coordinated. He said that he was an hour away from the address he gave me which was a little strange. I texted his address and name to my roommate just incase I got murdered. In person, the guy was really nice but definately had serious issues with the noises coming out of his mouth. Garbled, barely intelligible, random, etc etc. I still managed to talk him down $10 for two kegs though.

Enough with the talk, here are some pictures of what I did to one of the two kegs.

Starts like this:




Ends like this:




How did it get there?



Thats right. I attached an angle grinder to a PVC pipe. As you can see, the entire design hinges on the stick I jammed between the grinder and pipe so I could operate the on off switch.


As for it's operation:

As you can see I am very safety concious so I wore safety glasses. However, that was offset by the fact that I wore flip flops and shorts while cutting. I managed to not lose any limbs while cutting but my feet and legs were covered with stainless steel dust. For the next keg I will be wearing pants and shoes.

All thats left to do is order a valve and mount it. After that I can get to brewing beer.