Although it seems like I haven’t been brewing much recently, that’s not strictly the case… I just haven’t been posting much. For whatever reason, my blogging tendencies are waning and I just don’t care enough to do it with any frequency. Since my last post I have brewed 20 gallons of pale ale as well as taught an all-grain class, where we brewed up 10 gallons of Peated American Brown.

Yesterday was a somewhat impromptu pumpkin brown ale. I had been planning on brewing one for several weeks, but I didn’t even bother checking out what ingredients I had on hand until the brew was basically upon me, and at that point the homebrew store was closed so I had to make due with what I had…. Despite this, I think my “Iron Brewer” session will turn out really nice.

I started out by mini-mashing the pumpkin seperately on the stove for quite a while. 2 lbs of pale malt went in the pot with the flesh from two pie pumpkins, and I held it in the 140-155 range for a couple hours.

As I was weighing out the grains for my prospective recipe, I realized I had no 120L crystal malt, so a quick substitution for Special B took care of that small problem. I was also lacking any chocolate malt, so next up was a substitution of Carafa and Pale Chocolate. The mash was textbook, and as it ran off into the kettle, I took a huge grain bag (left from my extract days), dumped in the pumpkin mash, and let it steep while the runoff finished up. The mesh bag did a fantastic job of keeping all the grain and pumpkin out of the wort, although it formed a weird type of concrete in the bag which was very difficult to drain. I essentially had to squeeze the extra wort out while continually scraping the inside of the bag to allow it somewhere to go. It was a strong affirmation of why I don’t put pumpkin in the mash tun anymore.

As the wort came to a boil, I realized that I didn’t have any of the intended Magnum bittering hops. Another quick substitution of Bravo for the bittering and Vanguard for Flavor/aroma and I leapt past that problem. As the end of the boil drew near – ACK! Almost no pie spices! So a quick pantry raid for powdered ginger, nutmeg and allspice cured that. Who knows if I got the proportions right – it smelled good, and I was somewhat restrained in my application, so it should turn out just fine.

The original gravity came out at 1.057, right on target, and the fermentation is now chugging away at 66 degrees, so everything seems five by five. I swear that I must be cursed (or at least really shodiliy prepared) when it comes to pumpkin brews, but at least I feel it will turn out tasty.

Today I took a day off to brew a batch. DuPont, like many other companies, struggles to deal with the current economy, and has asked its employees to take a total of 10 days voluntary unpaid time off (VUTO) in 2009. September has been completely crazy, and before I knew it the end of the month snuck up on me and I needed to squeeze one in September, lest I have another month with 2 (which really hurts the paycheck, let me tell you).

The batch of the day was 10 gallons of american amber ale brewed with all homegrown hops – 3oz of Nugget and 5oz of Zeus. I went with a very simple grain bill, 18lb of 2-row, 2lb of Crystal 60L, and 12oz of Pale Chocolate for color. The mash was very uneventful, and I collected the entire 13.5gallons in about 45 minutes with no stuck mash. I actually did this batch “old school” and left my fancy-schmancy grant, control box, and pump skid in the basement and the PC stayed off. It was a nice change of pace.

The hop schedule was actually pretty typical, with an ounce of Zeus first wort hops (WOOT!), 1oz of Nugget for bittering at 60 min, another ounce of Zeus at 10 minutes, and slugs of 2oz Nugget and 3oz Zeus at 5 and 1 minutes, respectively.

Beginning to end it took about 6 hours, so it wasn’t taxing by any means. I am still not thrilled with how long cooling takes since the groundwater temperature is hovering around 72-74 degrees, but I expect in another month I’ll have my more typical 30 minute cycles.

My starting gravity is around 1.047, so I’m probably looking at a 4-4.5% beer, which suits me just fine. After the Harvest Ale I brewed with Brian that came out alot higher than intended (like 7.5% instead of 5.5-6%), this should be a relatively easy-drinker. I am also hoping it really lets the homegrown hops shine through.

 Today was my first brew since the 20 gallon batch of Choking Sun Stout over a month ago. It was brewed with my friend Brian, and this time around we decided to use some fresh-picked hops to make a Harvest Ale. I cut the bines down at around 11am, and they were thrown into the kettle around 2:30 or 3pm – doesn’t get much fresher than that! They were still a little soggy from the rain last night, so after we picked them they were spread out on a screen and slowly dried off a little with an oscillating fan. They were certainly not “dried” – we just got the extra water off their exteriors.

The brew itself was a no-nonsense IPA recipe with primarily 2-row malt and a pound of crystal 10L. The brew day went very well with no major hiccups – except we apparently got some ridiculous yield on the malt. I’m not sure how, but the gravity turned out to be 1.066 instead of our intended 1.055, so it’ll be ~2% ABV stronger and the extra malt will mask some of the hoppiness we intended. The raw wort tasted good, so I’m not worried that it’s not bitter enough – it just might not be what we originally envisioned. There was only a small span of time when it rained, but I was still very glad for having set up in the garage.

I am growing more excited about the cooling weather… it hints at many more brew days to come. I hate having to do it in the heat, particularly when the groundwater temperature is above 80 and you can never get the wort cool enough to pitch without other means, and the arrival of fall and colder temperatures is certainly a welcome change.

The beautiful thing about 20 gallon batches is with so much beer, it’s almost begging for you to get a little weird with at least some of it. Since 10 gallons of this batch is destined for a specific purpose, that left me with another 10 gallons to spike with 2oz oak chips and 5oz bourbon oak cubes.

The 2oz of french oak chips I lightly steamed on the stove for 10 minutes. Hopefully this does two things for me – opens up the cellular structure a little to make it easier for the beer to be absorbed and released, and kills of any microorganisms that might be living hiding within. The other 5 gallons got a dose of 5 oz of cubes that have been soaking in Jim Beam for 2 years, as well as 1/2 cup of the bourbon liquid it was sitting in. I shouldn’t have to worry about spoilage bacteria from those, unless its some freaky bourbon-loving bug that can survive for years… Once bottled, both my boys in Atlanta and I will wind up with a case of each beer.

The other 10 gallons will likely be transferred to secondaries sometime mid-week and ultimately kegged for Choking Sun’s art show coming up in November down in Atlanta. Drew is planning on a return trip in September to brew 20 gallons of something light-colored and hoppy, since that will appeal to those that aren’t into dark beers (freaks).

Been slowly making progress on my backlog of to-dos for BrewzNET. I only code for around 30 minuntes in the morning and 30 minutes during my lunch break, so the going is slow. More on that some other time. I’ve also started posting videos of the BrewzNET development on YouTube (cringe), but a colleague in Australia has started playing around with the BrewzNET screen designer and (not suprisingly) has found some of the functionality challenging to just figure out on his own. At this point I’ve got 3 videos – 2 on how to create pipes and 1 demonstrating some of my Widget classes – but over time that will grow into a video instruction library of doing stuff within the screen designer.

Yikes. The offspring are awake. Time to go be dad extraordinaire instead of a geeky homebrewer…

Saturday my cousin and I tackled a 20 gallon batch of Choking Sun Stout, our house standard stout and a favorite of my cousin’s and his band mates. 10 gallons of this batch is destined for a band event in Atlanta (the namesake of said stout). The day went pretty well, despite me feeling extremely overheated and suffering from a severe lack of organization and attention at times. Despite my hiccups, I’m convinced this batch will turn out fantastic.

The inital part of the brew began flawlessly – We mashed in and nailed our target temperature. We heated our sparge water and mash-out water additions in plenty of time, and the final temperature of the mash before we began sparging was mid 160s. The grant transferred the wort to the kettle perfectly, and everything was humming along.

Then I payed more attention to my PC and realized the SQL Server service wasn’t running, and all my readings for the first 2.5 hours were being spit out to an error log flat file. CRAP. So I start up SQL server, use the “Process SQL Backlog” option in BrewzNET, and everything seems to be OK – for about 5 seconds. BrewzNET throws a UI error, and I get kicked into the debugger. After the panic-driven addition of a TRY/CATCH code block to trap the error, more errors pop up. I stop BrewzNET and take a critical look at what is going on – and realize that the Error log was processed and deleted, but I had stopped BrewzNET before it had actually processed the SQL statements, so I just canned 2.5 hours worth of data. Aaaaaaaaargh! Oh well, at least the beer is fine. Just my data is toast. I restart BrewzNET and catch the last 20 minutes of the sparge, which continued without any problems – no stuck mashes, no grain crud in the kettle, etc.

The boil begins and I use my new timer widget to track the elapsed time and boil addition times for hops… Which seems to work well, so long as I pay attention to it. I completely forgot to add the immersion chiller at 20 minutes remaining (it went in somewhere around 10 minutes), missed my 10 minute additon by about 1.5 minutes due to futzing around with the immersion chiller, forgot to add the whirfloc until about 3 minutes remaining… Ack! Once again, none of this will impact the beer quality or taste, I just felt extremely frazzled and out of sorts. This was not my standard textbook by-the-numbers brew behavior.

We got the wort chilled to 68 degrees, oxygenated it and pitched the yeast. Carboys were carefully moved to the basement, and fermentation had kicked off within 12 hours. The 12 gallon fermenter rose to around 72 degrees, so I had to scramble a little to try to bring its temperature down. About 4 hours later the 12 gallon fermenter blew out the airlock, so I had to re-sanitize and replace it… along with a few drops of foam control to prevent further blowouts. Things are chugging along now.

Lessons learned:

1. Keep your eye on the ball – namely brewing beer, not playing with computer applications or socializing and drinking beer.
2. Program an audible alert into the timer widget. Hearing an alert go off is invaluable when you’re not standing infront of the monitor.
3. Put more than hop additions into the timer – add the immersion chiller, Whirfloc and yeast nutrient too.
4. Build in a subroutine to check whether the SQL Server service is actually running or not. Would have been much less traumatic if I had realized earlier than later.

This past Sunday found me and my brewing colleague Brian roasting out on the back porch, brewing up a batch of Pale Ale using Summit and Bravo hops. We got started around 10am, when the temperature wasn’t too bad, but over the course of the day it got a little uncomfortable, with highs in the upper 80s. We spent most of the day out there, retreating inside only a few times to cool off and grab more cold root beer or water.

The brew day went very well. We nailed the mash-in temperature of 153 degrees, and the sparge rate remained relatively constant over the course of wort collection. Towards the end we could tell the mash was compacting a little bit due to occasional slugs of kernels in the mash tun outlet line, however the crud never got severe or frequent enough where we were concerned with wort quality. The total sparge time was just under an hour – perfect timing. This batch was also the native run for the new Hot Liquor Tank insulation jacket my wife engineered for me (shown in the pic above), which seemed to do an exceptional job keeping the sparge water nice and hot. Last time we lost about 10-15 degrees in the HLT, whereas I did not notice any loss this time around. The boil and cooling cycle was uneventful, except for us employing the pump skid to recirculate ice water from a cooler through the immersion chiller to drop the wort temperature from ~105 down to 75 deg F. This time of year it is impossible to hit a decent pitching temperature without ice – the average groundwater temperature is in the upper 70s, and it’ll take 1+ hours to get down into the 80 degree range without ice… we managed to get it down in about 45 minutes, with about half of that using the pump / ice bath.

We wrapped things up somewhere around 4pm, and Brian’s fermenters were rocking by about 10pm (he re-pitched fresh yeast from a previous batch), while my 2L WLP051 yeast starter took a little longer to get going (about 12 hours). By about 1pm on Monday, my fermenters were kicking off tons of CO2 and had a good inch of krauesen on them as well. I have started employing the poor-man’s fermentation temperature control method of using wetted dish towels and a fan blowing on the fermenters to keep the temperature below 70, and it works very well; even though my basement is around 72 degrees, the fermenters are sitting at a steady 68 despite all the fermentation activity.

Brian and I have another 20 gallon pale ale recipe in the pipeline, but have not firmed up a date to brew it yet. I am certain it will go as smoothly as this one did – we’ve got the routine down pretty good now and work very well together.

I am always hesitant to throw works-in-progress (WIPs) out where the general public can feed off it like ravenous pirhanas. When I used to haunt a development forum regularly, I grew jaded to how others view incomplete applications, and how quickly things can be posted to places like “planet source code” with someone else’s name on them after they do a quick replace of variable and subroutine names (mostly by script kiddies that don’t have an ounce of coding skill in their entire bodies, but it’s still like getting ripped off)… I’ve never quite shrugged off that baggage. In addition, if I am not happy with its current state, what makes me think that others will be happy with it?

Truth is that I’ve grown nervous that the thumbdrive my source code sits on could meet some traumatic end, my home PC could crash, and my work laptop could die (its on its last leg as it is, I think) and I’d be completely hosed, losing months of updates. I really uploaded it more as a backup measure than for others to dissect, however it is there if you are so inclined… (you pirhana you).

• BrewzNET VB2008 source can be found HERE
• Pump Control Box PICAXE Basic source can be found HERE
• XBee auxiliary board circuit (how the control box sends stuff wirelessly) DIPTRACE file is HERE

You can also find them by digging around on the “Skydrive Files” links over on the right hand side.

Once I’ve got this application in a truly presentable state that is usable and doesn’t make me cringe, I’ll document the crap out of it and package everything up in a nice how-to and post it… but don’t hold your breath that it’ll happen in the next year or so.

Well, I am not sure what is so patriotic about it, but I did brew a porter this July 4th weekend. It is a batch where half is going to my dad (he loves porters), and we are planning on visiting for a week in August, so getting this beer into bottles should be possible before that. The brew day was relatively uneventful, aside from getting a lower (!!) than expected extract efficiency, but the grain crush and the sparge rate both probably contributed to that. I sparged in just over 30 minutes (pretty fast for me), and when I was mashing in I noticed that many of the kernels were cracked, however not as much as usual – Time to spend some time with the mill and make sure everything is clean and adjusted properly.

I captured the session with BrewzNET… and realized how slack I’ve been on coding and upgrading it. For the past 3 or 4 months I’ve been talking about getting the plotting / charting classes operational, and that still hasn’t happened (aside from some initial class prototypes). Truth is that I’ve been up to my eyeballs in VBA code at work (SAP, Lotus Notes, Access and Excel), and the last thing I want to do when I get home is more programming. Hopefully I will get past that sometime soon… BrewzNET really needs some attention. I also need to build the return manifold for the mash tun – Once that is in place, I can start using the control box to turn the second pump on and off, and keep all my kettles on the same level.

Next weekend my friend Brian and I will be brewing a 20 gallon batch of pale ale – It’s been a number of months since we’ve done a 20 gallon batch, and I’m really looking forward to it. Busting out the big boy kettles and a batch so large you can’t lift them is always exciting to me… and the resulting 20 gallons of beer always feels very well worth it. This batch of IPA will be all Summit and Bravo hops, with a healthy dose of Vienna malt thrown in for light sweetness, so it will be a bit of an experiment for both of us. Funny – I remember fretting over doing a 10 gallon batch of “Experimental” beer. Now I’ll throw an unproven recipe in the 20 gallon kettles without batting an eye. I guess you just get used to your equipment and comfortable in your own skills (and those of your friends that brew with you) and it ceases to be an issue.

Currently on tap are the Coriander Pale Ale and the Raspberry Wheat. The raspberry wheat is quite a sight to behold – Deep pink, almost red – And the berries are definitely full-on in the aroma and flavor. Its a very nice summery beer, and they go down almost too easily. The coriander pale is also very good – The simcoe gives you a bit of a smack when you first sip it, but once your taste buds adjust to the hop onslaught, they also go down a little too quickly as well. I need to get back into designing tap labels – for the past few months my tap labels have all been ghetto-fabulous back-of-the-business-card-with-a-sharpie. Pretty slack…

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.

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!