I bought a ten gallon cooler for a mash tun.  I decided that the 5 gallon cooler just wasn’t cutting it with the bazooka screen.

The next step is to buy a false bottom with some tubing and a 3/8 to 1/2 fitting to connect to my ball valve spigot.

Then, I should be on my way to brewing that Saison I have been writing about for weeks.

My brother “acquires” items from time to time.  I saw him yesterday and he gave me something he thought I could use.

A quarter keg:

I had some hesitations but took it anyway.  He said he was going to throw it out if I didn’t take it.  I just couldn’t see something like this go to waste.

My main hesitation in taking the keg was how to properly clean and sanitize this quarter keg for dispensing homebrew.   I have not done much investigation into it, outside of reading some posts that confirmed my fears that this thing is hard to clean and sanitize. 

What do you think?  Is there a way that I can use this for storing and serving homebrewed beer? 

Should I just open up the top and make it a secondary kettle?

What are the options?

With a beer fridge, I needed to buy another piece of equipment to really take advantage of its climate controlling abilities.

That piece of equipment is a thermostat that you can override your fridge’s internal temperature gauge.

This device will enable me to keep specific temperatures for fermentation. Instead of having to depend on cold winter basement temps and ice, I can ferment a lager any time of year. Plus, it should help me with ale fermentations in the summertime too.

I am pretty excited to give this thing a go. The next lager I am brewing will be a rauchbier and the fermentation will be happening on an “away game”. I think we will be brewing at my friend Brian’s house and fermenting there too.

I bought this one at Northern Brewer.  Let me know if you have had experience with it. 

With my latest brew session, I wanted to try something new out in my equipment.  Late last year I got a false bottom and stainless dip tube assembly with the hopes of turning one of my sanke kegs into a mash tun.  I want to build a direct-fired mash tun, but the false bottom (FB) I got is a little small in diameter and I am afraid I’d get some scorching of the wort.  So while I try and figure that one out I decided I could still put the FB to work in the brew kettle and use it as a hop screen.  Normally I use pellet hops, but this time I went with all whole hops.  Pellets would definitely just slip through the FB.

My first impression of using whole hops was that it was rewarding.   There is something a little more magical to seeing whole hops floating around in the kettle then using pellets.  Seems more traditional and heart warming.

At the end of the boil my FB worked great, it held back all the hops and I still had a great flow rate through the whole draining of the kettle into my two carboys.  I even had 4+oz of orange peel and coriander seeds in the kettle.  The seeds were nicely held up in the hops as a filter itself.  I am sure that I got plenty of cold break through the hops and FB, but maybe some of it stayed in the kettle… who knows really.

I liked this so much that I may go completely to whole hops for my next couple sessions just for kicks.  The only concern I have with whole hops is availability and freshness.  My LHBS seems to have a pretty good turnover so freshness should be good.  But sometimes I can’t find any EKG whole hops.  Which is a shame because I make a lot of English inspired beers and like EKG the best.

I think using the FB and whole hops may be one small step in moving closer to using a plate chiller or counter flow chiller in the near future.  My resistance to such tools has been separating hop debris out of the wort to prevent clogging of those types of chillers.  Certainly a counterflow and FB-whole hop combo would work well in this regard.

BREW ON!

I think the key to lagering is to buy a fridge.  My wife bought me a refrigerator for my birthday last month and it has come in handy for the lagering of the Maibock.

Right now, I have the cider that we made last October conditioning in there and some maple porters from two years ago.

I’ll get a thermostat for it eventually.  This set up will eliminate the fusel alcohol issue I had last summer when my basement was in the high 70s in the month of August.

If you can get your hands on a used fridge, I think it is a good investment.

I had been thinking about using a couple corny kegs as fermentors.  Maybe even trimming up some dip tubes to be able to CO2 push finished beer out of the kegs to clean serving kegs.
Here are some of the things I am concerned about.

1. Using the standard gas out port for my airlock set up (tubing and a water jug), may have more restriction than I am used to.  A source of regular clogging perhaps?

2. The corny keg only holds about 5.25 gallons.  This almost ensures the need to blow off every time, and as stated in part 1 cleaning that narrow a diameter tubing would be a pain each time.  The fix would be 4 gallon batches.  I nice idea for experimenting with recipes, but my mash tun and boil kettle are all somewhat optimized for 10 gallon brew sessions.  Do I really want to ferment in two kegs for each batch?

3. The stainless keg is a superior container for sure.  Light, easy to move, relatively indestructible.  But I’d be competing for keg fermentor space all the time vs. keg serving space.

Fermenting in Corny kegs just doesn’t seem to have a enough plus sides.  Am I missing any?

See these other posts about fermentor choices also:

Fermentor Vessels

Glass or Plastic

I had to post this wonderful piece of information about yeast and yeast starters.  A great great brewer friend of mine, Wade, over at the BKB forums posted a reply to a discussion we were having about yeast starters and cell #s provided in the yeast packages we all typically buy from WhiteLabs and Wyeast.

Wade, a.k.a. 1n1m3g in cyber-land, is currently working on his PhD in the biological sciences arena and works exclusively with yeast for his research.  He and I have talked in the past about yeast; and he really knows his stuff.  When Wade is not working in the lab or being a great father and family man he can be found bumming around with the Boston Wort Processors.  A homebrew club here in the Boston area. (Please consider checking out their upcoming Homebrew Competition)

So please take a minute to read and digest the post I have copied below.  Its a bit long, but it’s amazingly informative.

From Wade:
“OK, OK, i guess I can try to make some sort of contribution to this discussion here.  I think there is a bit of confusion here about the yeast that come in the liquid from the homebrew stores, either smack packs or vials.  There are two key terms everyone should be aware of and the differences between the two.  One is yeast viability and the other is yeast vitality.  Viability is easy to define as it basically describes the overall number of yeast cells that are alive.  If you were able to count the cells under a microscope and then plate out a small, countable number of cells onto an agar plate the viability of the yeast would be the number of cells that actually form a colony as compared to the number of cells you plated.  Vitality, on the other hand, is a more ambiguous term that describes the overall health of those viable cells.  In brewing terms, it could be described as how fast the cells could divide and as well as how efficient they are at fermenting sugars.  Cells will have high vitality if they have sufficient fermentation precursors stored up.  For example, oxygen is required to build up sufficient cell wall components prior to fermentation because during fermentation (in the absence of oxygen) these cell wall components are not synthesized and are depleted upon every cell division until a lower limit threshold is reached and the cells can no longer divide thereby decreasing fermentation efficiencies.  So, even before you pitch your yeast, you can easily have a population of cells with high viability but low vitality if not properly prepared.  For example, the older a vial or smack pack is the lower the viability is as well as the vitality, but I think that vitality drops off much faster than viability over time. 

So back to the question of starters.  Creating a population of cells with high vitality requires that you give the yeast the proper nutrients that prime them for fermentation.  I think this is where Wyeast smack packs are superior to White labs yeast vials.  When you pop the smack pack you release vital nutrients to the yeast so the somewhat dormant yeast greatly increase their vitality.  There is no way to do this for White labs unless you use a starter to wake them up.  A starter is useful for both because depending on the starter technique you use you can greatly increase the total number of viable cells while at the same time increase the overall vitality of the entire population.  The most important component for the starter is oxygen.  Why force the cells to start fermentation in a starter when you are just going to pitch them into an oxygen rich wort, which inhibits fermentation, only to have that oxygen quickly depleted requiring a switch back to fermentation?  If you use a stir plate to add oxygen continuously to the starter you can greatly increase the overall numbers of cells in a smaller volume of starter wort.  These cells will have built a nice ample store of the cell wall components required for proper attenuation of your beer.  If you prefer the more traditional method of a still starter you will be better off if you give the starter a stir twice a day or so to scrub out the built up CO2 and introduce more O2.

I think a better place to add things like yeast nutrient (i.e. Servomyces) would be at pitching or a day or two into the fermentation.  The yeast nutrients add things like metal ions required for enzyme function as well as free nitrogen required to synthesize these enzymes.  Adding this to the fermenting wort of your beer will give the yeast a boost as they use up the limited nutrients that come from the malt.

I use a stir plate for my starters because I don’t use smack packs or vials, but am instead building up my population step by step from literally a single yeast cell.  I need the extra oxygen to get to the proper number of viable cells with the added benefit of also getting high vitality.  Either way, though, if you are using store bought liquid yeast, make sure the package is as close to the manufactured date as possible and if you have the capability, use a starter of any technique (stir plate of otherwise) to increase cell vitality.

Wow, is that enough of an explanation?    Cheers!”

(Standing) BREW ON!