Brew Dudes

When people ask me what to buy their homebrewing pal, I always say gift cards or gift certificates.  Now I know it’s an easy (lame) answer, but most people who ask me don’t homebrew themselves nor do they have any idea what the homebrewer would want.  Since the hobby is always ripe for equipment upgrades or experimentation, I think it’s best to leave the decisions to the homebrewer on what to buy.

I think gift cards for homebrewing are an outstanding choice.  I am giddy (yeah, I typed ‘giddy’) when I have some free money to buy some new piece of equipment or ingredients.  I say (to no one in particular) get gift cards if you don’t know what to buy your homebrewing compadre.  They will thank you for it!

You can get some gift certificates at these fine establishments:

Northern Brewer

More Beer

Beer Wine

I wrote about getting brewing kits a while ago.  Learn more about the initial gift of homebrewing.

OK it’s time to fess up.  I have several mechanical issues in my brewery that I just never get around to fixing.  I brewed up 20 gallons of beer last weekend, and a couple of these issues really irked me this time around.  It really takes the joy out of brewing when you are stressing about your numbers or equipment performance.  I realize the only way to be able to make really great beer is to be able to make consistent beer; and build from there.  SO maybe I need to step back from my desire to brew brew brew, and I need to make these fixes.

1. Wort from the kettle:  I made 15 gallons of American Wheat, thinking I was going to put 5 gallons in each fermentor. I even planned for a slightly higher wort gravity so I would dilute it in the fermentor to get 5.5 in each fermentor.  However, I forgot to account for the increased hop and break material with a bigger batch size.  All the hops and break really sucked up a lot of wort, over a gallon.  I ended up with two fermentors with a good amount of clean wort, but the last fermentor was almost 50/50 break and wort material.  I am sure that one will be overly hoppy or vegetal like from sitting with all that hop material. THE FIX: I need to rebuild my dip tube and add a hop filter.  My current dip tube never keeps a good seal while siphoning up that last few dregs off the bottom of the converted keg-kettle I use.  I usually just rack with my auto siphon to get more wort out.  However, when I get to the last few gallons of wort there is all the hop and break material too.  I want to either build a false bottom with some stainless mesh screen or look into a hop-stopper device. A brewing buddy of mine built one himself, you can see it here.
2. Improved Lautering:  I use an igloo cube cooler with a stainless steel braid for mashing and lautering.  As a batch sparger, the only issue is getting that last few quarts to keep coming out of the cooler.  In batch sparging, you are really dependent on maintaining a good siphon as the tun drains.  Once you lose suction during a wort running, that’s it and you are left to the mercy of your dead space.  THE FIX: I need to lower the pickup that connects to the stainless braid.  I think I leave about 2 quarts or more of void volume in my tun.  That can be pretty significant efficiency loss in batch sparging.  The key is to be sure to be picking up the wort from as low in the tun as possible.  The ideal situation would be to be draining from the bottom of the tun from under a false bottom, like a professional mash tun would work.  I have an idea for this using an upside down keg that a friend has for me….again I need to get off my duff and get together with him to pick up that keg (bruguru I am talking about you!).  Otherwise, I’ll need to just take a harder look at how I use my current tun.
3. Better Mash Efficiency:  I got horribly low efficiency in my 15 gallon wheat beer mashing attempt… something like 60%.  I had to use 3 pounds of DME to get to my desired target gravity.  Looking back I can blame some of this on the design of my mash tun pick up assemble, but I think now it was my crush on the grains.  THE FIX: Get a new mill.  While my Corona has been a loyal piece of brewing equipment for years.  I looked at the plates and they aren’t quite as knurled as they used to be.  I had to really tighten down the mill to get the wheat malt to crush properly.  While I still believe that you can get a good crush with a Corona mill, maybe after 10 years of use it’s time to retire it.   Again it’s about consistency, and I think I just wasn’t really paying attention to the setting on the mill this time, and my mash suffered.

So those are the three major issues I am facing in the brew house right now.  What good is a great recipe if you can’t make it the same way every time.  Moreover, brewing isn’t much fun when you face the same trouble spots brew after brew because you never address the real problems.
No doubt I made decent beer this weekend (15 gallons wheat and 5 gallons of pale ale), but it irks me to know that I could be brewing BETTER beer more EASILY and efficiently if I just work on these fixes.  Well hopefully, I can find the time and the funds, to work on these equipment upgrades.  I think this will be an interesting process that I plan to document here with some pics and posts.

Wish me luck.

BREW ON!

I was reading some of the forums and I see a common theme around the rising cost of home brewing ingredients.   We all know of the hop crisis that has affected the hobby for a couple of years now (but it’s supposedly better, right?) and that has affected prices of hops (but now that it’s better, prices should go down, right?).

Now I am reading that dry yeast is going up in price.  In some places, an almost 100% increase.

Malts are getting more expensive too.  People are blaming the need for corn/ethanol production.

What say you?  Are the prices going up?  Are the costs of home brewing your own batch of beer getting too hefty?

So much for brewing your own beer as a cost cutting measure!