Brewing Evolution

[AZRedhawk44]

I haven't been brewing much beer lately.  I enjoy the process and the product, for sure, but the cheap bastage way I tended to brew was just a LOT of work. 

I did it over a high power propane burner in a 7 gallon stainless steel cook pot.  I'd bring my mash-in water to about 180* or so and pour it onto my grains (the grains cool the whole concoction to my targeted mash start temp), which sit in a home-made mash tun made from a Home Depot water cooler with a homemade filter applied to a replacement ball valve to strain out grain after the mash soak.  I'd then drain out my wort and sparge the grains to get as much sugar as I can, sometimes even re-mashing the first batch of fluids back into the mash tun, depending on the gravity of the output.  Then I'd put the final collected wort into my steel cook pot again and run my boil.  After that, it's racked to primary fermenter for 7-10 days and then to secondary for the remainder of time it needs, finally to be kegged into a cornelius ball lock keg.

It was a LOT of fluid transfer.  And my favorite recipe, a rye beer, tended to be VERY slow at the mash/sparge step.  Brewing 3-5 gallons of beer became a full day commitment.

I went out on a limb and got myself a single-vessel brewing system.  Mine's made by Kegland, called the BrewZilla 4.0.  It has just shy of a 10 gallon internal capacity, which means it can make maybe as large as a 7 gallon batch of beer depending on grain load and boil characteristics.  There are extension towers for it to make it able to brew more though.  Mine's a 110v version but they make a 220v version that goes up to 2000 watts in heat.  Mine only hits 1500 but it seems pretty darn nice for that.  So it's electric heat instead of gas, and there's also an integrated fluid transfer pump in it for either recirculation during mash or transferring to fermenter when done.  It has fancy bluetooth integration with peripherals though I'm not seeing a need for any so far, and it can be programmed to run a cycle through an online website.  Yes, my beer cook pot has wifi. 

So I go last night to make my rye beer.  The nuts and bolts of my recipe is a 90 minute mash at 155*, a sparge, and a 90 minute boil.  It brought 3 gallons to 155* in 15-20 minutes.  As I mashed in my grains I decided to go for a full 5 gallons for the mash cycle.  Plenty of room and it only took another 15 minutes to bring the added fluids and grains to the target temp.  The pump did a commendable job recirculating the mash from the drain to the top of the mash bed.  I got far better sugar extraction from this method than I ever did through my prior low tech method.  I sparged by adding 160* water from an electric kettle in the kitchen, about 1.5 quarts at a time, for a total of 6 quarts.  When sparging, the grain basket just lifts out of the main vessel and you rotate it 45* and it supports itself on rails, dripping the fluids that reside in the basket.

I sparged until I hit about 5 gallons of wort to boil then started my boil.  It hit boil in about 15-20 minutes, and I went into its settings and brought the power level down from 100%/1500 watts to about 65%/1000 watts and it happily maintained boil.  When done I used a wort chiller in the boiling vessel... I ran garden hose water through it and brought it down to about 110 or so (AZ "cold" water doesn't get much colder than 85* right now) I transferred to a new fermenter I also picked up; I went with an SS Brewtech "Brew Bucket" with a built in thermo well and a funnel shaped bottom.  The drain/output tube is above the funnel and will keep my pickup tube from gathering trub and yeast during transfers.

I went to go put my shiny new fermenter into my chest freezer I use to crash-cold or for stable ferment temps... and the stinking thing won't turn on.  I use a temperature controller between the freezer's power and the wall to power cycle it to hold at a particular temperature.

I ended up putting the fermenter outside for the night and that brought it down to about 80* in the morning, but my yeast pitch temp needed to be 62*.  I immersed the fermenter into my camping cooler full of tap water and threw in all the ice and ice packs I could scrounge up, got it down to 50* and over lunch I went and got a submersible aquarium water pump and a bunch of 1/2" hose.  I moved my temp controller to control the water pump, put the t-stat probe into the thermo well in the fermenter, and wrapped about 4 coils of tubing around my fermenter then put a sweatshirt over it.  We'll see how well this works... I also ordered a replacement relay for the chest freezer. 

I don't like how much room the chest freezer takes up and want to go to a more space efficient model.  I think I want to move on to liquid jacketed fermenter cooling.  Last night I ordered one for my current fermenter.  I don't think I'll go crazy and go glycol cooled, probably just stick to water cooling.  Most likely I'll get a tiny dorm fridge and put a large bucket of water in it, then put pass-thrus in the wall for cold water to come out.

Most of my ferments are closer to 70* rather than 62, but I'd like to be able to lager (that requires 50's) and cold crash (high 30's).  Unsure if I can do that with water in a dorm fridge.

I definitely like the process modifications from doing single vessel brewing with the BrewZilla though.

[zxcvbob]

Try freezing some 1L and 2L plastic pop bottles of water (don't fill them all the way so the ice can expand.)  With the lids on, of course.
 When you get the wort down to about 100 and need to chill it farther, rinse an ice bottle or two in StarSan sanitizer and drop 'em in.

My next beer was going to be a Weizenbock.  Then I discovered that the wheat malt I thought I had is really rye malt.  Not sure if I'll make a strong Roggenbier (Roggenbock? 50% rye and 50% dark Munich) or save the rye for later and make something like a Belgian Dubbel.  I have some dark candi syrup taking up space in my brewing junk box, and I have plenty of pilsner malt, so I'm leaning towards the dubbel, and save the rye until I can get some rice hulls to mix with it.

[Ben]

This sounds both interesting and complicated. The last time I brewed beer was probably 7-8 years ago, using the extremely complex...

[AZRedhawk44]

Anyone care to get technical for a second, regarding BTU's?

Looks like my chest freezer is kaput.  Put the new relay in it and it does start up now (it didn't before) but even though the t-stat switches it on and the compressor starts, the temp doesn't drop.  It's been running for a little over 2.5 hours now with a chest full of air and it's at 79* F. 

I want to reduce the amount of room my brew setup takes, and I have considered getting into jacketed fermenters and a cooling solution.  The glycol chillers are a bit too spendy for me at this point and are also overkill for my purposes, but I've come across other folks who have used aquarium water chillers.

The basic premise is you have an insulated reservoir (a smaller chest cooler, for instance) full of water, no more than maybe 3 gallons.  You have a pump that is triggered by a thermostat controller when your fermenter is getting too warm.  The pump takes water from the reservoir, pumps it into the aquarium chiller which chills it even more (and also has a small reservoir of its own).  The water comes out the chiller and flows through the fermenter jacket, drawing heat from the fermenter.  The water recirculates back into the chest cooler to begin the cycle again.

Aquarium chillers are sold in 1/10hp, 1/4hp, 1/2hp and larger sizes.  The 1/10hp claims to move up to 1000BTU's, and the 1/4hp claims to move about 3000BTU's.

1 BTU is defined as the amount of energy to change 1 pound of water by 1 degree F.  There's 8 pounds in a gallon of water so shifting a gallon one degree should take 8 BTU's.  Shifting 3 gallons by 40 degrees should take 960 BTU's.  This means a 1/10hp aquarium chiller should be able to take 3 gallons of water and chill it to 40 degrees below ambient, right?  There's going to be some thermal losses due to the cooler absorbing some heat, obviously.  Or other parts of the system taking in heat.  The yeast itself will typically only generate about 800 BTU's over the entire ~10 day fermentation cycle, most of the heat in the system comes from absorbtion from ambient.

I could then have a 3 gallon reservoir of 40 degree water (assuming ambient temp is 80 degrees) to cycle through insulated fermenter jackets and maintain a target fermentation temperature up to 40 degrees below ambient?  If so, such a setup would take up a LOT less room than my chest freezer.  I could even control temperature to separate fermenters by using solenoid valves tied to separate thermostats, to gate the water in different directions.

Assuming I had a 2 gallon total reservoir, I should be able to shift the temp 60 degrees from ambient, right?  Not that water will flow at 20* F, obviously.  But I could get closer to freezing with less water in the system, and 1000 BTU's could bring 2.5 gallons to mid-30* temps in an 80 degree environment?

[AZRedhawk44]

The aquarium chiller in question, available in 1/10hp or 1/4hp powers.

https://www.amazon.com/Active-Aqua-AACH25HP-Hydroponic-Chiller/dp/B07BHHQLKR

[Bogie]

Yesterday, I got off work, came home, checked stuff, went and picked up my new Kindle (named Crunchier), and then went to the micro up the street. I had three beers, and some pretzels with beer cheese, came home, and crashed (I had clopened after a double the day before).
 
I think the tab, with the tip, was around $30.

[AZRedhawk44]

Well, I went and got a 1/10hp aquarium chiller.  Found a local aquaponics shop that carried them.

I've got a little Igloo ice chest, in which I have about 2 gallons of water.  My low pressure aquarium pump is in there, running at 160gph.  It outputs to the aquarium chiller, which has a 1 quart reservoir inside it.  The aquarium chiller outputs to 1/2 inch vinyl tubing I have wrapped around my stainless steel fermenter... I'm still waiting on delivery of a proper water-channeled insulating jacket for the fermenter.  I then put a spare jacket of mine over the fermenter.  Then there's a return line that brings the water back to the Igloo chest to run through the system again.

The chiller is able to keep the entire capacity of the water in the system down in the low 40's right now.  However I don't think I'm quite able to pull enough heat out of the fermenter.  Not enough cold contact patch versus the amount of heat it's pulling in from ambient.  I need more coils of cold piping around it.  I've got the fermenter's thermostat controller set to turn off the aquarium pump at 61 degrees.  Right now the fermenter is at 65 degrees though.  I'm going to change the insulating jacket I am using and see if I get better results from a better insulator.  61-63 degrees is the desired range for this particular batch.

As long as I can shift the thermal load of the current volume of water to be mostly in contact with the fermenter rather than mostly pooling in the Igloo chest, and/or eliminate more interchange with the ambient 80 degree room, I think this will work fine.

I know the popular high end chiller thing to do is to use immersive chilling coils.  I'm just not a fan of that because it's an enormous cleaning task and a potential contamination vector.  Another way to do this is to use purpose-built fermenters that are double-walled and have a chilling "jacket" built in to them for water to pass in and out.  Those fermenters are about $1000 each though.  I figure an externally insulated and internally conductive bladder that cycles its coolant should work just as well, and for a lot less money.

[Bogie]

Fill the tubes with antifreeze or 90% alcohol, and use dry ice?
 
Every year or so I buy a fountain pump at Harbor Freight, because that works just fine for pumping coolant in the workshop. I had a "real" pump, but it died. These seem to do about as well as long as I filter most of the metal particles.

[RocketMan]

Is vinyl tubing a good heat conductor?  Would it work better using copper tubing, assuming you could find a way to maintain good contact between it and the fermenter?

Edited:  Here is a link to a study on that very subject, though it relates to solar heating.  The link downloads a pdf file.  Copper is far and away more efficient than any plastic on conducting heat.

https://www.healthyheating.com/HH_Integrated_Design/Week%205/CPRT192002010.pdf

[zxcvbob]

Fill the tubes with antifreeze or 90% alcohol, and use dry ice?
 
Every year or so I buy a fountain pump at Harbor Freight, because that works just fine for pumping coolant in the workshop. I had a "real" pump, but it died. These seem to do about as well as long as I filter most of the metal particles.

Propylene glycol, not regular ethylene glycol antifreeze.  PG is nontoxic and won't ruin your beer if a little leaks into it.

I know the popular high end chiller thing to do is to use immersive chilling coils.  I'm just not a fan of that because it's an enormous cleaning task and a potential contamination vector.

They are hard to clean well.  So I just rinse mine and call it good.  Put the coils in while the wort is still boiling hot, and let it soak for a few minutes before you start circulating water or coolant.  The heat will sanitize it.  I don't use my immersion chiller for beers that I don't boil just because of the contamination risk.

[AZRedhawk44]

Propylene glycol, not regular ethylene glycol antifreeze.  PG is nontoxic and won't ruin your beer if a little leaks into it.
They are hard to clean well.  So I just rinse mine and call it good.  Put the coils in while the wort is still boiling hot, and let it soak for a few minutes before you start circulating water or coolant.  The heat will sanitize it.  I don't use my immersion chiller for beers that I don't boil just because of the contamination risk.

Right, I use an immersion coil for cooling boiling wort too.  And I just hose it off after use, and drop it back into boiling wort to sanitize.  But I'm talking about temp control during fermentation.  You would not want to put that in your 70 degree wort and run chilled water through it to control the wort temp without anal retentive sanitizing.

Although... I suppose it might be possible to use the same immersion coil for bringing boiling wort down and in the fermenter.  I'd have to adapt the one I have to fit the lid of my fermenter, and I'd have to drill fitting holes through the fermenter lid.  It becomes a question of whether I sanitized the whole thing by immersing it in the boil though at that point.  I don't like the idea of having little flakes of hops all over it from the boil and bringing it down to handling temp, letting it sit exposed to air during the fluid transfer, then putting it into 80-100 degree wort in the fermenter.

Nah.  I just like the notion of jacketed cooling better.  Nothing to clean.  I have one of these on the way.  A lot more thermal mass and surface area contact than my 2-3 wraps of tubing around the fermenter, probably better insulation than just zipping a jacket around the whole thing too.

[AZRedhawk44]

Is vinyl tubing a good heat conductor?  Would it work better using copper tubing, assuming you could find a way to maintain good contact between it and the fermenter?

Edited:  Here is a link to a study on that very subject, though it relates to solar heating.  The link downloads a pdf file.  Copper is far and away more efficient than any plastic on conducting heat.

https://www.healthyheating.com/HH_Integrated_Design/Week%205/CPRT192002010.pdf

This is why a dedicated double walled jacketed fermenter is obviously superior. 

https://shop.grainfather.com/us/gf30-basic-cooling-setup.html

Just kinda spendy. Double walled jacketed fermenters designed for this are $700 and up.

With the aftermarket Cool Zone jacket I linked earlier, I should be able to get nearly the same efficiency and independent temperature control for multiple vessels, at about $75 per fermenter above the cost of the fermenter itself.  Whether it's a Home Depot bucket, a glass carboy, or a stainless steel fermenter.

Right now I'm losing a lot of cooling efficiency to condensation on my various lines.  Not a lot on the fermenter itself right now because it is wrapped in a jacket, but the lines are dripping wet.  Once I scale this out with solenoid valves and separate temp controllers for perhaps 3 separate stations, I'll insulate all the lines.

[MillCreek]

I am following this with a great deal of interest.  The single-vessel brewing systems came along after I stopped homebrewing (the current wife does not drink beer; it was too difficult to consume 5 gallons by myself before the bottles expired; and there are so many good IPAs out there right now).  I do help a friend of mine who has a traditional grain and extract system and I gave him all my kettles, carboys, fittings and bottling equipment. I used a copper immersion coil cooling system and it worked pretty well.

[zxcvbob]

You're brewing is way beyond mine so take this for what it's worth.

One way to do temperature control is to brew styles of beer that match the ambient temperature you have, with careful selection of yeast strains.  (oversimplification, don't try to brew lagers in the summer)  That's kind of the approach I'm taking, although I brew ales in the winter and put a heating pad, temperature controller, and insulation on the carboy.  I really should try a real lager this winter...

[AZRedhawk44]

You're brewing is way beyond mine so take this for what it's worth.

One way to do temperature control is to brew styles of beer that match the ambient temperature you have, with careful selection of yeast strains.  (oversimplification, don't try to brew lagers in the summer)  That's kind of the approach I'm taking, although I brew ales in the winter and put a heating pad, temperature controller, and insulation on the carboy.  I really should try a real lager this winter...

My big brewing passion is mead.  It seems to be far more demanding with temperature than beer requires.  So when brewing beer I still tend to apply the same meticulous temperature control to the beer as I do to the mead.

I am following this with a great deal of interest.  The single-vessel brewing systems came along after I stopped homebrewing (the current wife does not drink beer; it was too difficult to consume 5 gallons by myself before the bottles expired; and there are so many good IPAs out there right now).  I do help a friend of mine who has a traditional grain and extract system and I gave him all my kettles, carboys, fittings and bottling equipment. I used a copper immersion coil cooling system and it worked pretty well.

This new setup is getting quite expensive.  It was $1000 for the mash machine and the stainless fermenter.  You could skip the fermenter I guess, but I like that it has a drain spout on the bottom and a funnel that gathers the trub and yeast.  Repeated racking is annoying and this design reduces or eliminates that.  A chest freezer is cheaper than the aquarium pump and assorted bits, but it takes up a lot of room and can only target 1 fermentation temperature.  I've done the room temp fermentation thing, haven't been pleased with the results at all.  Again, that's mead though... beer is far more forgiving (within reason).  I also don't like bottling beer, though I do like it for mead.  Kegging is far nicer.  I wish I had sankey style kegs instead of my corny kegs, I want to change to sankey sixtels.  Before my chest freezer died, I would put my kegs into the chest freezer and set the temp for dispensing there.  Now I need a different solution, and I might as well get a kegerator.  So I need to go out and buy one when this batch is close to being done.  So a two-tap kegerator is likely to follow me home in the next week... that's likely to be another $750 or so.  I'll set it up for cony kegs for now, but sankey conversion will cost a bit more.  With sankey, I can go buy commercial beer kegs and put them in my home taps if I want, alongside my own beers.

I'm going crazy overboard... but I'm also in tentative discussions with a restaurant owner in one of my favorite remote parts of Arizona to maybe open a microbrewery in the town and replace his beer distributor.  He cannot get kegs at all due to remoteness, and he's buying bottled beer by the case and paying through the nose for it.  I want land in this town and I want to be able to contribute to the town rather than being a techboi who moves in from somewhere urban and doesn't add anything to the community.  So I'm trying to streamline and regularize my processes and recipes on new equipment, get things that are scalable to the small micro(nano?)brewery scale where I might make 50-100 gallons a month, and have knowledge and equipment to put product into commercially viable vessels (sankey kegs) and sterilize them upon return for reuse.

So all this is costing me a few grand right now in nice brewing equipment.

[MillCreek]

^^^As a former analytical chemist and homebrewer, I have from time to time pondered semi-commercial brewing as I retire.  However, in the Puget Sound area, you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting four or five other homebrewers with the same idea, and as you say, the capital expenditure to do this is very impressive and the return on investment is not guaranteed.  I see the ads for home-based to small commercial brewing setups selling their equipment when they could  not make a go of it. I still have these dreams of me singing and dancing in my lab coat surrounded by lots of shiny stainless steel equipment.  Kind of like Walter White, as I think about it.

[K Frame]

" I still have these dreams of me singing and dancing in my lab coat surrounded by lots of shiny stainless steel equipment. "

Walter White! The Musical!

[zxcvbob]

I brew good to occasionally-extraordinary beer, usually 4 gallons at a time, with very meager equipment.  I have fun doing it and my friends like the beer.  I wish my wife didn't hate the smell of hot malt, or I'd brew more often.  (Do all wives complain about that?)  If I tried to scale it up to even small commercial scale it would ruin a good hobby, and my recipes might not scale anyway.  Just the business aspects would be enough to ruin it for me, and then there's all the regulations and permits and licenses and different tax rates and agencies to deal with.

If you can make a go of it and still have fun, that's great.  Just research the required government paperwork and do some market analysis before you start buying lots of custom stainless steel.

[AZRedhawk44]

If you can make a go of it and still have fun, that's great.  Just research the required government paperwork and do some market analysis before you start buying lots of custom stainless steel.

Yeah, aside from the kegerator, I'm done buying new stuff at this point.  Maybe one more stainless steel fermenter and assorted electronics to fork the cold water output to two separate temperature targets.

My dad is retired and is a former CPA.  I've been talking with him a little bit about this project and he's interested in helping out with it.  He's agreed to try and dive down the paperchase trail to see exactly how much licensing is involved.  I've spoken to someone on the Arizona Liquor Control Board about it and have a general idea in what's involved, but haven't gone down the Federal rabbit hole yet.  Who knows... maybe I'll also open a shooting range in metro Phoenix and sell my own beer and mead there, along with cigars and handguns.  Do my "All Things Fine" convenience store thing.

[Bogie]

The guy who used to own my favorite neighborhood pub has retired. His outfit is in the boonies, and is called "Guns and Honey."
 

[AZRedhawk44]

"Guns and Honey."

I can't help but think of Gewehr98 and his sig line:  "Oh bother," said Pooh as he chambered another round.   

I went out over lunch and got a kegerator.  I went a bit above the bare minimum on it, and got a Komos 2-tap model.  This one will hold up to 4 of the 5-gallon corny ball lock kegs.  Costco's parallel offering from Danby, though it has 2 taps, only holds two corny kegs. 

Also, this one has really nice tap design.  This one is offered in Intertap design as well as Nukatap.  I went with Nukatap.  These are forward-sealing taps, eliminating a lot of real estate for potential bacterial infection.  The Nukatap also has less thermal mass than Intertap or budget taps on other kegerators, meaning it transfers less heat to my poured pint.  The tap tower is also chilled, so I should get a lot less foaming on a pour than a comparable condition pour from the Danby at Costco.  And they're polished stainless steel, rather than chrome plated steel.

I probably could have saved $400 by just getting the kegerator right now and holding off on the aquarium chiller, since I have nothing kegged and ready to drink.  Could have controlled fermentation temp with the kegerator and just set it at 62*.  But once I had anything kegged, I'd want the aquarium chiller for the next batch to ferment anyways since serving temp is too low to ferment anything.  No big deal, just would have been a delay on the $400.

[Bogie]

When I was living in suburbia, prior to the whole "fall in love and get stupid" thing, my house had come with a big ol' two door fridge.
 
It didn't fit in my revamped kitchen, so the moving guys took it down to the basement. I drilled a hole in the door, and it'd hold a half-barrel and a co2 bottle, with the freezer side filled with thick-walled mugs.
 
Overall, it worked out pretty good. Jen's dad borrowed the works for a party one day, never saw 'em again.
 
Everclear would be a good thermal transfer fluid.

[AZRedhawk44]

Last night I went and built a keg washer.

Nothing fancy... just a cheap Harbor Freight submersible sump pump.  I built a PVC pipe scaffold on top of it with appropriate tube barb fittings to branch off to my cornelius keg fittings, and a PVC tube extending up into the interior of the keg.  I capped it, then drilled holes in the tip and all along the tube so it sprays high pressure water or cleaning solution against the interior of the keg, and the CO2 and beer draw tubes are flushed due to the barb fittings.  The keg is inverted on the tube, the pump is set inside a 5 gallon bucket with appropriate cleaning solution, and I let it go for 10 minutes and go do something else.

So much nicer than disassembling the input/output interfaces and sanitizing each part, or scrubbing the interior of the keg.  Cost about $100 to build.  For comparison, SS Brewtech offers one for sale pre-built, for $250.

I should be able to adapt the concept for use with sankey style kegs, too.

[RoadKingLarry]

https://babylonbee.com/news/popular-new-craft-ipa-just-bottle-of-pine-sol

[zxcvbob]

I just bottled a gallon of strawberry wine that I started in February. (?)  It has been sitting in my basement all summer, waiting for the cloudiness to drop out and it never did.  I assume it was pectin haze.  (strawberries don't have much pectin, but strawberry preserves do and I used a jar of that and a pound of frozen berries*)  A week ago I added a half teaspoon of Sparkolloid, which doesn't claim to be effective against pectin but I figured it couldn't hurt anything.  It dropped clear overnight.  I gave it a week for the sediment to pack down so I could bottle it more cleanly.

It's gorgeous (pink, not red), but tastes a little weak.  I put it in European sparking lemonade bottles and added priming sugar.  I don't know if there's any yeast left to carbonate it, but if not the little bit of sugar will help bring out the flavor.  I will try to wait a month before I open one.

*maybe it was two jars of preserves and a pound of frozen berries, I can't remember.  Someday I'll start writing this stuff down.