Documenting the equipment build process for 10 Gallon All Grain Custom Recipes
One of the things I have started doing is overbuilding my starters. In doing this, I can harvest 100 billion yest cells from the starter itself. This process will be detailed in another blog post. The purpose of this post is to address the sheer size of the flask I have been using to accomplish this. Instead of using step starters, I use a 5L Erlenmeyer Flask.
Continue reading “Stir Plate for 5L Flask”
Now that we finally have a batch fermenting, I wanted to show what you can expect from the fermentation process. Nothing too exciting, so just grab a homebrew and enjoy the fermentation pics.
You can see the krausen line in the fermenter. It looks to span from the 10 to 10.5 gallon marks. Continue reading “15 Gallon Conical Trub Dump”
In an effort to never let well enough alone, I decided to add a whirlpool port to our brew kettle. I was actually unhappy with the side pickup tube that was installed. The vacuum broke way too early due to the size of the tube. The result was half an inch of wort left in the kettle when transferring to the fermenter. This wasn’t much of an issue since I could place my strainer over Continue reading “Whirpool Port added to Brew Kettle”
This is (for now, but who can really tell) the last of the big builds for our brewery. We started looking at the FastFerment conical fermenters, but at less than 8 gallons, it was pointless. This sent me on a search for something we could use for our 10 gallon batches. After looking in to many choices, we decided that stainless was just too damn expensive. Plastic seemed to be out of reach, too, until I found Continue reading “15 Gallon Conical Fermenter and Chamber”
Saturday (May 2) was National Homebrew Day and a local brewery hosted an in-house brew day for homebrewers. It was co-sponsored by our LHBS. For anyone local to me, the name of the Brewery is Draft Line and they have the best Scotch Ale I have ever tasted. Their head brewer, Jamie, was with us all day and really has a passion for brewing and sharing his knowledge about brewing. We had a great time talking with him all day, asking questions, and just having normal conversations.
Continue reading “National Homebrew Day 2015”
We found out pretty quickly that our 10 Gallon Mash Tun would not work for High Gravity or Large Grain Bill brews. I told my brew partners that we would probably need a Coleman Xtreme 70 Quart rectangular cooler for our next Russian Imperial Stout. Immediately, my brother-in-law pulled up a picture on his phone and with amazement declared, “I have that cooler in my garage! I’m not even using it”.
Continue reading “70 Quart High Gravity Mash Tun”
It’s that time again! It’s been a few brews since I have shown the labels that have been created to identify them. I never detailed our labeling process in the last label entry. I print the labels six to a page on a color laser printer, using regular paper. They’re easy enough to cut out using scissors, but there is Continue reading “Label List 2”
It seems that the part of brewing that receives the most ire is bottling. That’s why so many keg. Well, we bottle. Brewing 10 Gallons and splitting between three households does not lend itself to kegging very well. We finally got in to a groove with bottling and it does not really tend to be much of an issue for us.
Continue reading “Improving the Bottling Bucket”
I had a double brew day coming up and needed a way to do two yeast starters at the same time. I didn’t want to build another single stir plate, I knew we would be doing high gravity beers and if we wanted to get a partigyle batch off it, then we would need 2 starters going.
I also wanted to make this one look a bit better, too. Here is the equipment list I put together:
Continue reading “Dual Stir Plate”
Throughout the upgrade process, the one thing I took for granted was the HLT. I figured we would just use the pot from our 5 Gallon extract brews, no worries. Then we checked the capacity of the pot. Somehow, 22 quarts was a surprise. Yes, we boiled 3 Gallons of wort and added water in the fermentor to reach our targeted volume. but this was never really thought about until about 10 days prior to out first 10 Gallon All Grain brew day.
Continue reading “20 Gallon Boil Kettle”