American Wheat

14Jun09

Wow am I behind. I actually brewed this beer last weekend, but didn’t get around to posting about it until now. A new batch of american wheat seemed like a great early-summer style choice, particularly since we have a freezer full of berries from last year, and the new picking season is quickly approaching… time for some blackberry / raspberry wheat!!! The day went pretty smoothly, once I managed to shake off the previous night’s over-indulgence. The day proved to be a pretty hot one, but I kept myself inside to avoid the sun and heat. Once again I used my grant setup to transfer the liquid and log some data.

When it came time to actually look at the data, I had a panic attack – nothing was in the database. Not a single value. What in the heck happened??? I had started all the required Windows services, BrewzNET seemed to be working just fine… After some digging, I discovered some minor programming logic issues that resulted in the connection to SQL Server never being established properly – namely it was building the connection string incorrectly.

Fortunately I am an insatiable turbonerd, and I had programmed in logic for just this kind of situation. All of the data had been dumped out to an error log text file, however I had not built the classes and forms to bring it back into the application. After a few early morning and lunch time coding opportunities, the error log viewer and backlog processing classes were done and I got my data restored. I also managed to work in custom scripting of the byte transmission translations – they can now be modified from within BrewzNET without recompiling the entire executable. The script editing window is pretty basic at this point – context colorization, a background compile feature that finds syntax errors, and clicking on the errors jumps you right to that row – but there is more I need to do with it.

 Just for kicks, I did some more Excel plots for you all to look at. You can see where the mash was headed towards “stuck”, so I re-mixed, did another recycle, and remained relatively good for the rest of the runoff. You can also see how friggin hot it was outside, as shown by the solid state relay temperature measurements. Hopefully I’ll get some time this week to code up the BrewzNET trending classes so I don’t need Excel anymore…

 I’ve got beer to keg and transfer today, and next weekend isn’t going to happen either, so next brew will likely be in 2 weeks.

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Coriander Pale Ale

28May09

This past Saturday found me and my cousin Drew out on the back porch brewing up a batch of coriander-spiced american pale ale. Sounds a little weird? I hope so. The thought behind it was to take a nice, juicy, hoppy pale ale and add a little extra citrus & spicy zing in it through the coriander. The hops were whole Amarillo and plug Simcoe, so its certainly an American Pale in character. I’m hoping it’s light and drinkable enough to quench one’s thirst during the hot summer months ahead. This was Drew’s first experience at homebrewing, and I’m hoping he enjoyed it enough to either come back and brew a monster batch of Choking Sun with me or start brewing down in Atlanta.

We logged the session using my BrewzNET software and the wireless grant hardware you’ve seen here before. I still don’t have the in-software trending capability done yet, but I did capture all the session values to a SQL Server database, and used Excel to work up a couple of trend charts.

You’ll notice a couple of things – one, the sparge rate was pretty steady once I adjusted it up to the proper range of 1-2 qts/minute. It did start to drop some towards the end, due to a decrease in mash temperature and the dropping liquid level in the mash tun, however it was far from representing a “stuck” situation. Second, the internal temperature of my control box (as represented by the SSR1 and SSR2 temperatures) increased over time – this was completely due to it getting hotter and hotter outside (the temperatures are almost exactly what the weather service was reporting)…. but they were still well below anything representing a danger to the electrical components.

The brew day went very smoothly, aside from getting a (typically) higher gravity than I wanted (1.060 instead of 1.052!!!). We had everything wrapped up by around 3pm, and spent the rest of the day relaxing and drinking the homebrew I had on tap. We actually kicked the Homegrown Amber by the time we went to bed, although I didn’t realize it until the following day.

This weekend will be an American wheat which I will likely put fruit in – we’re thinking raspberries for one fermenter and “tropical” for the other, meaning mangos, papaya, passion fruit, and anything else we can get our hands on. YUM!

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More BrewzNET nonsense

10May09

Unfortunately there won’t be any screenshots, because there really isn’t much to show – but hopefully in the next month or so I’ll make some progress with the BrewzNET main application that will incorporate the GUI screens, a historian, trending capability, and some other things I’ve got in mind into a single application. The work on that began this weekend, and after some testing yesterday the prototype appears to be working OK. It needs some major polish, but it is a step forward.

Yesterday’s test served a few purposes.

• Debug the SQLHistorian class that saves the brew sculpture data to database tables. SUCCESS.
• Prove out multiple recipients for the converted data (Historian, multiple instances of the test form). SUCCESS
• Collect sample data to the database that will allow testing of the charting / trending functionality once I’ve got that working… MIXED. Not nearly enough data for a meaningful test, but there is some… enough for it to plot lines on X and Y axes.
• Incorporating several independently developed libraries (historian, renderers, communication, etc.) into a single multiple-document test application that uses my MDITabs class to display things. SUCCESS, but good lord does that thing need lots of work. At least all the references are working and I can compile.

So once I think I’ve got something post-worthy, like once the charting is functional, I’ll have to throw a screenshot up here (or maybe some videos of it in action … oooooooooooo.) I’ve put the PICAXE and VB script compiling stuff on hold for now, since it really isn’t essential to the application for it to be functional… but I’ll ultimately come back to it.

I haven’t brewed for quite a while, mostly because we haven’t been drinking much and I’ve got a basement full of kegs already. I’m itching to brew… maybe I can convince my buddy Brian to do another 20 gallon batch of something summer-y in the next month or so. By that time we should have kicked a couple kegs and I won’t feel so silly stockpiling a little more. The summer is coming up too – so I want to make sure I don’t have to brew anything during July / August.

My hop bines are going nuts. They’re already 10+ feet. Very cool, and it’s looking like it is going to be a good year. My new trellises for the Nugget and Magnum hops are working quite well, too.

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Ghost busted

03May09

For those of you that have been following the progress of my brewing-computer efforts, namely the BrewzNET application, you may remember that I’ve been fighting a ghost in the machine for my grant control box that was throwing erratic sparge rates. I finally got up the courage today and hunted it down, although the effort left me covered in (metaphorical) slime and blood.

Much as I suspected, the root cause was poor machine-side variable management, meaning that I didn’t keep as good track of what variables got changed where as I should have. That is certainly a challenge when writing complex code for a PICAXE chip, even for a 28X1 that has substantially more capabilities than the lower-end versions.

For now I’ve band-aided the code by throwing in a couple GOTO statements that skip over the section that was causing the incorrect sparge rate calculations, and at some point in the not-too-distant future I’ll dissect the code and re-write it so the problems are truely fixed… but for now I am just content that my readings are good ones. That sets me up nicely to proceed with coding the trending / plotting classes so I can actually see a graph of the system statuses rather than just the “snapshot” control panel view.

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Strung up and out

19Apr09

Yesterday found us doing alot of work outside, enjoying the good weather and warmer temperatures. For the past 2 weeks my hop bines have been growing fast, and many were tall enough to start training on some coir rope. The Nugget trellis I have used for the past couple of years had several catastrophic structural failures last year, and I vowed that we would not have a repeat performance – so I built another monolith-style trellis out of pressure treated 2×2s. It was not quite as stable as I would like, but the opportunites to secure it to the decking were relatively limited. We shall see how well this one holds up compared to last year’s.

I strung the Zeus trellis as well, although the bines are not quite long enough to thin and train on the rope – Next weekend I will probably be out there with a pair of scissors, picking the strongest ones and starting their vertical journey. This is the Zeus’ second season, and if it is anything like their first, then I will likely get 1-2 pounds of hops from them. You can also see the old grounds for my “Liberty” hops behind the fence here – I finally had enough and ripped the rhizomes out of the ground, conceding this space to grow tomatoes and peppers instead. I suspect we’ll have better luck than we got with my hops.

I also had ambitions of making and canning 5 gallons of starter wort this weekend, but alas it did not happen… mostly because of my general feeling of apathy and disgust for almost everything. I am not sure why I feel so funky.

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Signs of Life

05Apr09

Now that the weather has improved, I was out strolling around the back yard recently and noticed all my hops breaking ground. Spring has definitely arrived, and based on the number of shoots I’m seeing from the rhizomes, I’m expecting quite a crop of homegrown hops this year. The Zeus and Nugget hops went into a 20 gallon batch of imperial amber with Brian back late last year, and we recently drank through an entire keg of that in about 2 1/2 weeks – It was fabulous! Zeus is a great variety, and provided the vines are as prolific as they were last year (if not more), I should have lots to dose my beers with come fall.

I have also finally broken out of by brewing funk – I taught an all-grain class at How Do You Brew? last Sunday, and it was a really good time. This weekend I’m going off the style map to brew 10 gallons of Peated American Brown -Yeah, that’s right. You heard me. An american brown ale with peated malt in it. Why? Because I have been brewing big batches of the same beers for a while now, and this year I’m finally getting away from that trend with all-new recipes. Brian picked me up some Peated malt during his last order, and when I opened up the bag to take a whiff, the thought of that aroma and flavor mingling with a little restrained citrus hops and maltiness came like a thunderbolt. I’ll start that process here in an hour or so. Not exactly a spring / summertime beer, but so what… it’ll be good.

We’ve got a really amazing french ale on tap right now, brewed back in February, that I am completely in love with (as is my wife). Wish we had a tap label to put up here, but I’ve been slacking hardcore on those too… It tastes very much like a saison but with a little more color and body, and it has a very pleasant ripe fruit aftertaste with no traces of fusels at all. That WLP072 yeast is amazing, and is destined to become one of my favorites. Unforunately we only have this one keg, but we do have a case of 750mL belgian bottles and 1 case of 12oz bottles as well – I think a few of those might have to find their way into a homebrew competition, although I’m not sure what the style would be – maybe a Bier de Garde? I need Brian (a certified BJCP judge) to come try it and give me some guidance.

I haven’t done a thing when it comes to BrewzNET. The grant works great, and the connection to a computer and a historian database is cool but unnecessary… Spending so much time on the PC at work has really squelched my desire to sit infront of a monitor at home too. Instead I’ve been mowing down Los Illuminados in Resident Evil 4, one of my favorite video games of all time (once the kids go to sleep, of course). Pumping PS2-rendered bad guys full of bullets is also helping me relieve some work-related stress, where I recently had a Six Sigma certification project implode in a fiery ball of wreckage after working on it for three months. ARGH! Unfortunately I’m not the sole contributor for these “professional” projects, so I can’t ensure that they are nearly always successful. C’est la vie, Mr. control-freak engineer.

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All is quiet…

08Mar09

…. on the northeastern front. I brewed a 30 gallon batch of scottish last weekend with Brian, and he did a perfect job of summing up the activities – so I won’t duplicate them here. We used the grant & pump skid to move the wort from mash tun to kettle, and it worked great – although that sparge calculation bug continues to plague me. I need to track that down and squash it… its starting to screw with my Zen a little. The whole 30 gallon aspect was very cool, and provided our beer tastes good I’m confident that Brian and I will do it again. We’ve already thrown out several ideas on what we could make and how we could improve apon this past brew day.

I haven’t had a spare moment to work on BrewzNET, recipes, or anything else for that matter during the past few weeks… Quite sad, really. It has been hellish at work, and with some seriously wacky weather swings and general apathy, I just have found it difficult to feel motivated and have spent significant time holding the couch down. My next steps on BrewzNET, when I get motivated again, will be to implement a historian (database) and trending / graphing capabilities.

I’ve got another all-grain demo coming up at How Do You Brew? on March 29th, and I don’t have a clue what we’re going to brew. I need to figure that out pronto. I’m thinking something wheaty or maybe wit-ty (har har)… to celebrate the coming spring. A ginger belgian pale might be nice too.

I have “brewed” several gallons of root beer, including a 5 gallon batch of the HopTech #1 flavor that went on tap yesterday. Unfortunately I wasn’t as dilligent at leak-checking as I should have, and ended up emptying the CO2 cylinder in the kegerator in under 24 hours due to a bad seal around the lid. Keg lube seemed to totally eliminate the problem, but the damage is done. I found this out at 12:30pm on Saturday, when every welding supply place around us is already closed (of course), so I had to bust out the 20# cylinder to “emergency” pressurize what’s in there and continue beverage service. I’ll get the 5# and 10# cylinders gassed up again tomorrow, hopefully.

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Ghostbusting

15Feb09

I have been chipping away at my to-do list in BrewzNET. One of the more notable items I’ve completed was implementation of a multi-frame static class / animated class. I have also moved away from the file path mode of storing images in favor of a single resource file that accompanies the XML text property file, which has unfortunately broke some functionality too. I’ll have to post a screenshot or maybe a video once I’ve got something worthy of sharing, but things are running pretty smoothly.

Alot of the time has been tracking down ghosts in the machine – things that SHOULD work, but for whatever reason choose not to. 95% of the time it is my fault, but sometimes it is just weird. The one that consumed most of my time this weekend was figuring out why my timer instances weren’t firing for the animations and the serial comm watchdog… as it turns out, there are two Timer classes in .NET, and one of them sucks hardcore – of course it was the one I was using. I found that by switching from System.Windows.Forms.Timer to System.Threading.Timer, all of my problems seemed to go away and things worked as expected. In hindsight this seems pretty intuitive for reasons that are too geeky to waste words on, but suffice it to say – All better.

I still have to find why the hell my sparge rate calculation fires off erratically sometimes and generates bad numbers. I am leaning more and more to poor hardware-side variable management.

The french ale from last weekend is done fermenting, and was essentially complete within 48 hours of the yeast kicking off. I obviously pitched a good amount of yeast, and it was very healthy – both airlocks blew out within 24 hours. The aromas from the airlock during fermentation were very pleasant, with strong ripe fruit overtones. I kept temperatures between 66 and 72 degrees, within the recommended range for for WLP072, so it was hopefully a pretty clean fermentation too.

Next brew day will likely be the weekend of Feb 28th – My friend Brian and I will be brewing 30 gallons of a Scottish 70/- (OG around 1.040), which will hopefully prove to be a good session beer. Anyone who knows my gear is probably scratching their head wondering “How is he going to fit 33 gallons of wort in a 26 gallon kettle??” – simple, I am not. We are brewing 20 gallons to an OG of 1.055 and will dilute the beer down with 1.5 gallons of cold water in each 5 gallon fermenter, yielding the 1.040 gravity. I have some minor trepidation of the beer tasting “watered down”, but its a session beer, right?

I may bust out the mash tun and pressure canner next weekend to make up more starter wort since I am down to my final couple of jars, but I may not. We’ll have to see if I am feeling up for it.

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Some progress

07Feb09

I managed to steal some time this past weekend (early before everyone woke up and in between home improvement projects) to work on the VB side of my BrewzNET project. Its a long way from where I want it, but I can see things starting to take shape. I have a number of menu items that send commands to the pump skid control board, will override the pumps and turn them on / off, set the target volume, and other similar functions. I’ve also got the raw value to converted value routines drafted and spitting out to a textbox. Believe it or not, the leap to displaying them on my prior GUI screen control is a pretty small one, so this week I found a little time to mock one up for the grant values to tie into (see below). This is just a first draft – I’ll definitely be adding more to it over time.

I have a few ghosts in the machine, and I haven’t tracked down whether they are circuit-side or VB-side yet, namely the sparge rate values seem erratic… On the left side of the screen you can periodically see the sparge rate jump up to 10+ qts/min which is not actually happening. I wonder if some stray bits here or there are throwing the buffer & conversion routines totally off. It could also be some weird hardware-side variable mismanagement. I need to track that down ASAP… I’ve also been unsuccessful setting the target volume to anything other than 13.5 gallons, but that should be relatively easy to remedy.

On another note, I finally got around to brewing my first batch of beer for the year – Yeah, I’m slacking pretty hardcore. Fortunately I had a big stockpile in the basement so we’re not in danger of running dry or anything, but after kicking 4 of those kegs and not having brewed, I started to think that it was time.

Today was a French Ale, or as close as an ugly american such as myself is probably going to come without feeling like a complete surrender monkey. Before anyone gets their noses all bent out of shape, realize that I have a good portion of French in my heritage, so I am taking potshots at myself here too… I expect the beer to turn out somewhere between a saison and a bier de garde, with some relatively strong belgian-type notes thrown in there. 5 gallons will go in kegs and 5 into bottles (both capped and corked).

The brew day itself was textbook, with the most eventful / agonizing aspect involving me trying to thaw out our garden hose enough to get water through it for my immersion chiller. I nailed my mash-in and mash-out temperatures, sparged all the wort I needed in about 40 minutes, and hit just about every other target I had in the recipe – except for my constant nemesis, original gravity. Once again, I was looking for near 1.053 and got much higher – so this will be (as always) a stronger beer than I conceived it as. I have started looking at my OG as a lower spec limit instead of a target because I consistently get 80-85% efficiency instead of 75%. Yes, I could also up the efficiency in ProMash to compensate, but when was the last time you had a beer and thought “Oh man, this is too strong…”

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Persistence – Check!

27Jan09

So I finally decided to hack my pump control circuit again, this time drilling next to the I2C bus lines so I could splice in connections for a 24LC16B I2C EEPROM. This allows me to store settings through on and off cycles, such as the control bits that dictate whether certain values are computed on board (rates, volumes, temperatures), the frequency for sending temperature readings, and the target collection volume.

I thought about etching a circuit board for the EEPROM, but ultimated decided that a 8-pin chip socket and this stock breakout board from Radio Shack would work fine… It does work, but I have to say that those boards are the cheapest, most poorly made PCBs I’ve seen in my short electronics hobby experience. I’m relatively certain the traces were drawn with a crayon, the copper etched with rust water, and the holes drilled with a rusty nail. My worst attempt at a home made PCB looked an order of magnitude better than these things. I don’t think I’ll use one in a project again, if I can help it.

So now that I’ve overhauled the internals, completely recoded the PICAXE program, resolved my inbound interrupt problems, and put the VB2008 base communication classes through some rigorous testing, I think I am at a very good place to start tying hardware to a PC GUI. I hope to make that a reality (at least for the grant hardware) sometime in the next 2 or so months.

I’ve got some brewing to do too… I now have 200+ pounds of base grain, a couple vials of virile yeast, and a freezer full of hops – time to schedule some 20 gallon batches!!

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