The Kettle

The photo to the left is my brew kettle. It's a 60 litre aluminium pot which I picked up a number of years ago. It doesn't look pretty and has a nice beer stone inside as well as a good thick player of protective oxides. Ideally it would be made of stainless steel and soon enough it will be, but for now aluminium does the job. I think it is important to note that at wort temperatures and pH there is little chance of aluminium leeching into the beer. If it did, it would be in lower concentrations than in more deodorants (not that a lot of UK based readers would know about those!), or in an antacid tablet.
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The tap at the bottom is a stainless steel ball valve which is connected to a stainless bulkhead. Inside is a stainless pickup tube so I can completely drain all the wort after the boil. In this photo I have a polypropylene hose barb fitted into the ball valve to facilitate removal of liquids. This was a slight oversight on my part and would melt as soon as my high pressure burner is lit underneath it. It has now been replaced with a stainless steel part which was $6.95 as opposed to $0.69 for the poly part!
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It may also be worth pointing out that the kettle will be doubling up as a hot liquor tank as well. Ultimately I will be getting an instantaneous hot water heater to provide hot liquor, which is unusual for most home setups, but its More efficient and quicker than heating up water separately.
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So that's the kettle. I'll post about the heart of the system, the pump on Friday. I plan to brew on Sunday and may include some action shots and recipe next week. Until Friday take total blessed care.

The Mash/Lauter Tun

My mash tun is an adaptation of a an earlier incarnation which was grossly inefficient. The re-design isn't great either, but it should get the job done with minimal of fuss.
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The guts of the mash tun is an old 25 litre esky. It used to have a really dodgy acetate bulkhead fitting, but I replaced this with an irrigation polypropylene bulkhead which provides a better seal and is food grade rated up till 140 degrees Celsius. The lautering manifold inside is a 12" length of stainless steel braid. It's totally inefficient for fly or float sparging but I am lazy and batch sparge anyway. The difference in efficiencies when brewing a 23L batch is hardly worth the extra effort of a continuous sparge method.
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The tap is a stainless steel ball valve I picked up from Beerbelly.com.au. These guys are probably the best source if brewing related plumbing in Australia. They also make a number of custom made bits of kit from mash paddles to full brew microbrewery pilot plants. I ordered a few bits and pieces from them and can't recommend them enough for their excellent and prompt service. The hose barb which sits on the other end of the stainless ball valve is just a polypropylene hose barb which I picked up in the irrigation section of the local hardware shop. It was 65 cents if I recall correctly. Cheap as chips.
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Again this is just a cheap interim piece of kit until I can justify spending more on a jacketed stainless steel 50L vessel with a false bottom. Even though it's cheap, it will still turn out awesome mash liqueur with minimal fuss and minimal heat loss over conversion time.
Tomorrow I'll post some pics of my boiler.

Frozen to The Core

Just a quick update to inform all about the recent events in the life of the wonderful elixir I blogged about last Friday. This brew was shaping up to be a nice hoppy dark ale but a recent turn in the weather has resulted in it become an imperial double black IPA (I made that beer style up. I figured if BrewDog can get away with this stuff then so can I).
The beer was lovely when I took a few schooners straight from the cold conditioning cube last week. On Saturday when racking from the cube to a polypin only half of the beer drained out. The rest of the beer remained behind as ice - well clear ice intermittently dispersed with hop flowers. That's right, I have inadvertently freeze distilled the beer. It's now quite bitter and super hoppy - actually it's so hoppy it has gone from being clear to having a substantial hop oil haze! I estimate that I have about 8 or so litres in the polypin. It should serve up well when served through my beer engine. I'll probably attach a sparkler to mellow down its out of control hoppiness.

Also worth noting is that the weird and wacky world that constitutes the beer blogosphere has given rise to a fake me. That's right, someone has set up an open ID account with my name and profile photo and have been commenting over at Tandleman's blog. My pretender has been giving Barry a hard time so it's not all bad. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery after all. BTW - If you see a comment that you don't think is made by me, just click the name. My profile is open, my Pretender doesn't have a profile.

The Dark Side of The Arts

A while ago I posted about my ventures back into the arts. My own chronicle or sorts. Basically I set up the fermentation of two cans of goop. You can refresh your memories by reading about it here. Anyhow since then the wort has played host to fornicating microorganisms which eat sugar and piss out ethanol. Then the 'green' unconditioned beer was racked of the primary yeast cake into a cube for cold conditioning. I should note that I added a packet of SAFlager 34/70 for microbiological reasons. This brought the gravity down ever so slightly and cleaned up the small amount of esters that had been produced in primary fermentation. It also added a little bit of diacetyl to round out the flavour profile. After two weeks of cold conditioning I decided that I would be packaging this beer by polypin and serving through one of my beer engines on Xmas eve. To give it a unique hop character I added 150g of whole hop flowers which I grew in my hop garden. They are Columbus hops, but tend to have more of an EKG taste to them. Hop flavour is not only varietal but environmental and as such flavours are influenced by the soil, light and other conditions weigh in on flavour - hence these hops have a marmalade flavour similar to EKG rather than a harsh pine like flavour of US grown Columbus. Anyhow I forgot about the beer at that stage and left it for a few weeks. On Wednesday evening I poured off a few schooners of this wonderful dark ruby red beer and it's the shit. I plan to transfer to a polypin tomorrow although I can't guarantee that there will be much left on Xmas eve!
I am also slowly rebuilding my all grain system. I have a new millmaster grain mill which I will post about next week and I have ordered 2kg of hops from a grower in China and 40kg of malt from Joe White malting's. Bring on a new batch in a couple of weeks when the consumables turn up.
Tonight I am off to the Nag's Head hotel for a few pints of cask conditioned Braidwood ESB. Life is good (well until I start house hunting again tomorrow!).

Back into the Arts

As promised while a while ago, I have started to venture back into the brewing arts. It has been over 4 years since I last did brewing of any kind and as such my equipment is scattered across various parts of NSW and I had to make do with what I could find at my parents place. The fermenter you see here was covered in dust and mould but cleaned up pretty well with plenty of love from sodium percarbonate. I couldn't find a lid so I used the old cling film and elastic band trick which I believe is superior to an airlock anyhow.
As it had been a while I wanted to keep it simple and stuck to cans of goop. These things can be pretty ordinary if made up with adjuncts (or following the instructions) but passable if you use all malt extract. I used two cans in conjunction - A Coopers Pale Ale and a Coopers Dark Ale. This should afford me a robust porter, and should be balanced to style. After plenty of aeration I pitched only the yeast that came with the Pale Ale. This yeast sachet contains both a lager and a neutral ale strain so I should get a pretty clean tasting product. I didn't bother taking any gravity measurements as I couldn't find a hydrometer, but with 3.4kg of malt extract it should be about 1.045 which will leave me with a finished beer of about 4.3%. I'll leave it to ferment for two weeks and then rack it to a cube and cold condition it for a further two weeks. This specimen is going to be bottled in 375mL VB stubbies for consumption sometime in November. Luckily I have plenty of piss sitting in my phat flat to tide me over till then.