HOMEBREW Digest #5365 Wed 09 July 2008


[Prev HBD] [Index] [Next HBD] [Back]


	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org


***************************************************************
       THIS YEAR'S HOME BREW DIGEST BROUGHT TO YOU BY: 

                     Your Business Name Here
    Visit http://hbd.org "Sponsor the HBD"  to find out how!
			 
    Support those who support you! Visit our sponsor's site!
********** Also visit http://hbd.org/hbdsponsors.html *********

DONATE to the Home Brew Digest. Home Brew Digest, Inc. is a 
501(c)3 not-for-profit organization under IRS rules (see the
FAQ at http://hbd.org for details of this status). Donations
can be made by check to Home Brew Digest mailed to:

HBD Server Fund
PO Box 871309
Canton Township, MI 48187-6309

or by paypal to address serverfund@hbd.org. DONATIONS of $250 
or more will be provided with receipts. SPONSORSHIPS of any 
amount are considered paid advertisement, and may be deductible
under IRS rules as a bsuiness expense. Please consult with your 
tax professional, then see http://hbd.org for available 
sponsorship opportunities.
***************************************************************


Contents:
  Oxidation of Frozen Liquid? (Robert Tower)
  New to Homebrewing (Thomas Rohner)
  re: New to Homebrewing (Joseph M Labeck Jr)
  Sankey Kegs ("A.J deLange")
  Deoxygenating water (Thomas Wilberding)
  Re: Software and Equipment ("Dave Larsen")
  souring (Matt)
  Product Design,Reverse Engineering & Manufacturing from China ("yada")
  RE:  New Brewer information ("David Houseman")
  A Trick for the Conical ("LANCE HARBISON")

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The HBD Logo Store is now open! * * http://www.hbd.org/store.html * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Suppport this service: http://hbd.org/donate.shtml * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Beer is our obsession and we're late for therapy! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Send articles for __publication_only__ to post@hbd.org If your e-mail account is being deleted, please unsubscribe first!! To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE send an e-mail message with the word "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" to request@hbd.org FROM THE E-MAIL ACCOUNT YOU WISH TO HAVE SUBSCRIBED OR UNSUBSCRIBED!!!** IF YOU HAVE SPAM-PROOFED your e-mail address, you cannot subscribe to the digest as we cannot reach you. We will not correct your address for the automation - that's your job. HAVING TROUBLE posting, subscribing or unsusubscribing? See the HBD FAQ at http://hbd.org. LOOKING TO BUY OR SELL USED EQUIPMENT? Please do not post about it here. Go instead to http://homebrewfleamarket.com and post a free ad there. The HBD is a copyrighted document. The compilation is copyright HBD.ORG. Individual postings are copyright by their authors. ASK before reproducing and you'll rarely have trouble. Digest content cannot be reproduced by any means for sale or profit. More information is available by sending the word "info" to req@hbd.org or read the HBD FAQ at http://hbd.org. JANITORs on duty: Pat Babcock (pbabcock at hbd dot org), Jason Henning, and Spencer Thomas
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:43:45 -0700 From: Robert Tower <roberttower at sbcglobal.net> Subject: Oxidation of Frozen Liquid? I've been doing some experimentation priming with frozen apple juice concentrate. The concentrate comes in 12 oz. cans but to prime 5 gallons at the normal rate I've determined 8 oz. to be correct rate. If I'm priming 10 gallons I'll have to use 2 cans and have 8 oz. leftover. I was thinking I could sanitize a 12 oz. beer bottle and fill it with the 8 oz. of leftover concentrate, cap and refreeze. Then the thought occurred to me regarding that 4 oz. of head space and oxidation. Will the oxygen in the head space be able to oxidize the frozen concentrate to a significant degree? My gut tells me the concentrate isn't going to oxidize under these conditions but then my gut has been known to be wrong occasionally! I figured I would get some expert feedback from the resident chemistry experts. Thanks! Bob Tower / Los Angeles, CA Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:56:30 +0200 From: Thomas Rohner <t.rohner at bluewin.ch> Subject: New to Homebrewing Hi Daniel I started out with a 7gal pot and a HDPE fermenter (not conical) and a cheap capper. I did a couple of extract 5gal batches this way. I didn't have to invest a fortune. Soon i found out that i want to go all grain and a larger batch size. I started with building a counterflow chiller, a 3 tier brew tower (all pots heatable with 10kW propane burners) with converted 50l(12.5gal) kegs. I used "Phil's phittings" for the chiller and "Easy masher" for my mash/lauter tun. I'm still happy with that after more than 250 batches. Bottling a 12.5gal batch was a PITA, actually it wasn't the filling, but the cleaning/sanitizing of the bottles. 2 years ago, we got a commercial dishwasher from my brew-buddies brother.(He works at a company building them...) If bought new, it has a 30 grand price tag. With this beauty, we bottle a 100 bottles in under 1 hour. We have a kegging setup with more than 10 corny kegs and some sankey types, we have a double head flow-through cooling dispenser to hook up warm beer and dispense it chilled. But we seldom use it. Hooking up, cleaning the beer lines is just more of a hassle to us than opening a bottle. Before we got our bottle washer, we thought about putting some beer taps into the wall of our walk-in cooler. This way the kegs and the beer lines stay cooled. If you intend to keg, think of building or buying a beer fridge with taps as well, but to start out i'd definitely bottle. We use our HDPE fermenters 60l 17gal for 10 years now, we never had a infection. We can lift them into our converted freezer to ferment. I think temperature controlled fermentation is more important, than a SS-conical. I got 3 100l 27gal SS pots from a fellow brewer for free. They just stand there and look good at the moment. We intend to enlarge our batch size one more(the last?) time. The actual brew tower will go to my other brew buddies vacation home in Greece... He want's to spend his vacations frugally... Daniel, i advise you to start out with a cheap setup. You will find out what fancy equipement you need, when you brew. I makes a big difference, if you brew extract or all grain. My next thingies to build for the new 100l setup include a motorized mash mixer and a fixed motor on the grain mill.(we used a power drill for several tons of barley up til now) What would Nike say? Just Brew it! Cheers Thomas Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:49:30 -0400 From: Joseph M Labeck Jr <jmlabeck at joesjokearchive.ws> Subject: re: New to Homebrewing Hi, Daniel; First, welcome to the hobby. Homebrewers, as a group, are some of the nicest, most helpful people on the planet. I've been brewing for around 15 years. I use extracts and specialty grains, and I've always bottled. I've always said, except for sanitizing, it's all personal choice. Do what makes you happy. I happily brew at the low end of the start-up cost scale. I use a plastic water bottle ($9 at Target) as my fermenter, and bottles donated from friends ($0). However, I would say, if you have more to spend, by all means spend it. Having a hobby is all about enjoying your time doing it. A little extra money for a little extra enjoyment makes perfect sense to me. Happy Brewing Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:48:15 -0400 From: "A.J deLange" <ajdel at cox.net> Subject: Sankey Kegs RE: >I recently went to using commercial sankey kegs and they are much nicer to work with but not very cheap. Finding a source for them is another problem altogether since I know of no one selling them to homebrewers.< Sabco used to be distributors for Franke but Franke now sells direct. They will sell to homebreweres and apparantly intend to go after that market upon completion of a plant they are building in the US. At the current time you can get kegs from them but you may have to wait for a couple of months until a run is complete in Germany and the lot crosses the pond. Prices are hideous because of the demand for stainless. In a year or so the price jumped about $100 (half barrel). Even so the price of a 1/4 barrel sankey is about the same as a new 5 gal soda keg (and you can squeeze in an extra 2.5 gal of beer). The nicest thing about Sankey is dispense parts are available anywhere (any bar supply store, Rapids, Micromatic etc) and you can hook them up to any dispense system that takes commercial kegs (and which has the proper coupler). The downside is that you can't open them up for cleaning without some difficulty (or a special spring compressor tool) which means that they must be cleaned by chemical means in the blind. The real issue is beerstone. Once that stuff starts to form scrubbing (you obviously have to take the spear out to do this) with acid is about the only way to get it out and rinsing with acid after every few cleanings is the only way to prevent it (that I know about). A.J. Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2008 10:19:29 -0400 From: Thomas Wilberding <tom at wilberding.com> Subject: Deoxygenating water It is my understanding that in addition to reacting with the dissolved oxygen, that metabisulphites will also reduce chlorine and chloramine to chlorides and sulfate ions. http://byo.com/mrwizard/1211.html So in addition to removing oxygen, you are also removing chloramines from your municipal supplied water. A nice two for one benefit! Anyone have the detailed chemistry on the proper dosage of potassium metabisulphite to use to effectively accomplish both tasks? It seems that A.J.'s experiment was empirically measuring how much to use to effectively lower the oxygen levels (thanks AJ!), but I wonder if all of the chlorine or chloramine was also reduced? Thanks, Tom Wilberding Midland, MI Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2008 08:31:40 -0700 From: "Dave Larsen" <hunahpu at gmail.com> Subject: Re: Software and Equipment > RE: Software - I'm a Linux guy, so I use qbrew, and it has Windows > ports for XP and Vista. > http://www.usermode.org/code.html > Promash will run on Linux using Wine, a Windows emulator. I think that is great because I rarely get anything to work under Wine. The only issue I've had with Promash on Linux is that the fonts aren't quite right, so some of the text labels for fields wrap, making some of the screens look ugly. They are functional, however. Dave Tucson, AZ http://hunahpu.blogspot.com/ Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2008 08:41:22 -0700 (PDT) From: Matt <baumssl27 at yahoo.com> Subject: souring How to consistently and effectively perform "natural" souring of a beer with lactobacillus remains a mystery that homebrewers have yet to crack. (If I am wrong about that I would love to be corrected...) The most common available lacto strain (Wyeast) has, for me, not been an effective souring agent when added either post- or during fermentation in the quantity sold and fermented below 80 degrees F, even after a month or two. There have been some recent reports of better secondary souring activity when the ferment temp is raised above 85F. On the other hand I failed to get any significant souring when pitching the lacto slurry directly into 50 mL of fresh wort in a sealed test tube held at about 30C. I personally believe that lacto strains that can effectively sour already-fermented beer are rather difficult to come by. On the other hand they certainly do seem to exist. More experimentation is probably called for and hopefully someone will find a readily available culture that is effective (and then we can turn our attention to the subject of control). Ideas include acidophilus capsules and Bulgarian yogurt. Some people have had success by not boiling at least some of the wort after mashout--an old Berliner Weisse trick that presumably introduces only the desirable thermophilic homofermentive lactobacillus (other significant bacteria having been eliminated by the heat). By the way a ridiculous amount of accurate (translated primary source) information on Berliner Weisse is available on Ron Pattinson's blog "Shut Up About Barclay Perkins." Pediococcus will sour beer pretty predictably I believe, but you may need brett or some other mechanism to remove the diacetyl it produces, and at that point I think you're talking about something other than simple souring. Adding refined lactic acid is almost a "perfect" solution other than the aesthetics of it. I do not believe lactic acid from a bottle is different from lactic acid from lactobacillus. (This is really to say that I do not believe lactobacillus generally perform some function beyond just producing the acid, a function that somehow "rounds out" the flavor. Brett do, if that's what you are after.) But that is a different discussion. Matt Return to table of contents
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 03:59:32 +0800 From: "yada" <kxhakh at tom.com> Subject: Product Design,Reverse Engineering & Manufacturing from China Thanks for your attention! We are an engineering firm in South China with a creative, enthusiastic and practised team of engineers. Our services include: 1: 3D Structure & Mechanical Design 2: PCB Design & Layout 3: Syetematic Solution Development 4: Reverse Engineering from Samples 5: Automobile stamping tools 3D design 6: Low Volume Production & Prototyping 7: Manufacturing (for both small and volume run) In the last 7 years, we completed over 300 projects and helped numerous businessmen to success in their market. Those finished projects contain: GPS navigator (3.5" display) ZigBee Telemetry (300-10000 feet) RF remote controller for unmanned helicopter (2 miles) Hazardous gas detectors & transmitter Ultrasound ranging module (accuracy 0.05%) Wireless mouse & keyboard (30 feet) Mobile power brick (20000mAh) Solar power unit (10-300 watts) Switch power supply (300 watts/110vAC for industrial use) Speech recognition & fingerprint recognition (neural network technology) E-compass for dead reckoning If you have immediate project, fee free to contact: Mr.Allen, Ling HotLine: 86 755 88832548 Email: m3169 at tom.com Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2008 18:08:24 -0400 From: "David Houseman" <david.houseman at verizon.net> Subject: RE: New Brewer information Dave Harsh said: > Just remember that none of the cool toys that lots of us have are > required to brew great beer. Many swear by their fancy gadgets, but > the biggest step in quality in most people's beers are from a wort > chiller and swearing off dry yeast. I agree with most of what Dave said except the part about dry yeast. While dry yeast of the 90's and before, and perhaps that which comes with the canned kits, are not what one wants to use, modern dry yeasts, Lallamand for example, is excellent. It has much more to do with the procedures in using any yeast than dry or liquid. Nottingham for example is an excellent yeast. The Safale and Saflager yeasts are excellent. But learn how to use them properly for best results. David Houseman Return to table of contents
Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:22:59 -0500 From: "LANCE HARBISON" <harbison65 at verizon.net> Subject: A Trick for the Conical I've recently been reading on the HBD some opinions about whether a conical is good to have. A couple issues brought up is the difficulty in extracting the yeast from the bottom and cleaning in place. Yeast extraction is an art form. It is a finesse operation. The best way, IMO, is to suspend an 8 inch, or so, piece of plastic tubing from the bottom dump valve. The bigger the better. At the end of the tubing is a second stop valve. During fermentation the upper valve is wide open and the lower valve is closed. This allows one to see first the trub (if any) then the yeast collect in the tube. When it becomes time to drain, simply open the bottom valve and go to it. At time, however, the first drainings may be quite sluggish like peanut butter. This is where the tubing comes in handy. With the bottom closed and top open squeeze the tubing like milking a cow. This forces yeast in the tube upward into the upper valve, thus helping to break up the peanut butter. If that doesn't work, you can always take the lid off and poke around with a piece of welding rod (or coat hanger) to break up the sludge. Once that is accomplished, slowly begin draining. Draining slow prevents too much beer from escaping. If beer does come out, which is likely towards the final draining, just place the collection vessel in the fridge and after the beer rises to the top drink it (it will be yeasty, but still good). As far as cleaning a conical, I've yet to get my arm into a carboy. Ha ha. Lance Harbison Pittsburgh Return to table of contents
[Prev HBD] [Index] [Next HBD] [Back]
HTML-ized on 07/10/08, by HBD2HTML v1.2 by KFL
webmaster@hbd.org, KFL, 10/9/96