Not yet...

Hey fellows!

So I measured the density of the last batch and although it was good I wasn't happy at all: that damn smokey taste was back again...
Somewhere between desperation and frustration I registered myself on a german homebrew forum and asked for help. When I described the taste they told me about autolysis and other stuff.
I obviously underestimated trub filtering for example. In almost every homebrew tutorial they say to make a whirlpool to get the hop out of the juice, which I solved by putting the hop in some kind of sock. For me, the hot trub was just the rest of the hop pellets and I didn't pay attention to filtering after boiling. Well, seems pretty wrong, theres all kind of stuff in that trub, gotta filter that...
Another thing is temperature control. Everywhere they speak of my temperature sensor as a self correcting precise piece of equipment. Yesterday I compared it with the digital thermometer of my cooler and was shocked: up to 8°C of difference!
To prevent autolysis further, they told me to aerate my wort when putting the yeast in it to support its growing, that's why I ordered an aquarium sterile air pump.
And one guy bets on letting the machines cover open to let bad aromas go away.
They also said it may be due to my hoses and joints and all the stuff not made for what I do with so I made a test run, boiled water in my machine and tasted it before and after pumping it trough my circuit. That's not the problem.
After all that mess I tweaked a lot on my process. I changed the recipe to get closer to the temperatures, I will try a filter, I'll let open the cover, I'll aerate and I'll hope one more time...
Wish me luck!

Third time!

Good morning!

After a long time I brewed again last Friday.
Why it has taken so long?
Well, first I had some military service to do in between. And second I wanted to finally find a way to eliminate the smokey taste in my beer.
I live in a wine country and know a lot of people who are making wine (but no beer brewer unfortunately). And there's a lot of common in the fabrication of wine and beer. I didn't knew that they also often add yeast to their juice to control the fermentation. And in professional wine cellars they always regulate the fermentation temperature. In the small private wineries they often don't have temperature problems because first the temperature in the cave is naturally deep and second they only ferment once a year, in autumn, where it is cold enough. So, after hours of talking and online research it seems that depending on the fermentation temperature, the yeast develops very different alcohol derivates and aromas. The different alcohols are called fusel alcohols and are responsible for the bad feelings and the headache and the aromas can go from banana to, well, smoke. Or sulfur. Or whatever bad taste you can imagine... ;)

I of course had a look on my yeasts packaging and it says 18°C-22°C and I never exceeded that - on the outside - which led me to the conclusion that I had to find a way to cool my worth down, in the core. According to the different homebrew forums there are a few favorable methods of doing so, like icepacks around the keg or putting the ket in a water basin but I definitively am to lazy to control the temperature every few hours by hand.
So I first thought about some kind of ring with small holes on the keg and an electro valve letting flow cold water trough it and the water flowing down the sides of the keg refrigerate it. But that would need another basin around it to collect the water and seemed a bit complicated after some reflections. Plus it would not provide an optimal heat exchange since it would not be in the wort.
I then found a copper serpentine cooler somewhere on a site. But its diameter was to large to fit in my keg.
And that finally brought me to the decision to handcraft something myself. Again... :)
I bought ten meters of copper tube in a DIY store and wrapped it around a carton tube:

Then I got some hoses and an old electro valve from a friend and ordered a digital thermostat with a built in relay on ebay:

And after some drilling and glueing I had my brand new keg cap cooling coil ready:

To be sure that everything worked how I expected I made some tests and opened and closed the valve by holding the sensor in my hand and under cold water and like everything seemed to be ok I assembled it and let it hold 30 liters of water on 18°C-19°C for two days. And last friday I brewed and now it looks like this:

In the keg the young beer, the grey hose comes from the faucet and brings the water to the valve, the transparent hose in the background evacuates it to the sink. The grey cable connects the valve to the thermostat on the right side and on the end of the small black cable is the sensor, in the core of the juice. All ca 50 minutes it reaches 19°C and the valve opens and cools it down to 18°C in about two minutes. Like you can see on the photo above, the temperature was a bit low in the beginning which made me worry about the yeast, I was not sure if it would start. But it did and everything looks fine now! :) It of course doesn't bubble with the frequency of last time but it does, and I can also see foam on top of it, the so called Kräusen.

So, everything seems to work great for now and I will soon be back and let you know how it develops.

For the first time I tasted a bit of the wort after every brewing step and I didn't have the smokey taste in it yet which makes me confident to be on a good way... ;)

Cya soon in a few days!

Final assembly

Hey guys,

I finally got a new missile switch since the old one grilled itself and the cooler doesn't leak anymore, so the final assembly has eventually been done.

Some pics for you:

This is the lower right corner of the machine with the cooler in its final place. The lower big hose is the arrival from the pump, the upper big hose the outlet. The lower small hose is the water outlet and the free port is the water entry.

Here I did some final work on the electric side. I fitted the power supply of the relay board, the black box on top left, in the housing and pulled some wires for the main missile switch.

 Once the electric stuff was back in place I mounted the housing...

And the rear cover and done! Still almost looks like a normal washing machine, doesn't it?

Since march it didn't look like this, and honestly, in the beginning I often doubted if it would ever look like this again and if it was going to work, I'm pretty proud of myself.
There are still some things to do though, like a system to control the fermentation temperature.
And since I still suffer from this USB-crashes I may go wireless some day, there are Arduinos with bluetooth out there. How cool would that be? Control the machine via bluetooth?! :D
And I'd love to give the machine another paint design, but I don't know yet what I want to do there. Any ideas?
The next goal is to get a stable good beer quality. I'll then start serial production.

So, the end of this blog is still far away, come back and see what happens next.

Have a nice day!

Tastier!

Hello fellas!

Like you guys, I had to wait a month for news...
I found a nice way to pass time:

I'm a big and long time AC/DC fan and as I found these in a local supermarket I had to try them. I thought 24 pints may be a good start... :)

To say it with AC/DC's own Brian Johnson's wise words: "Have a drink on me"
And for the fans, a bit of history

Ok, now back to ArduinoBeer! ;)
The only thing I did on the machine was building in the cooler. I made a little test last week and it leaked a bit of water, but that's only a question of tightening some joints. I'll share some pics later.

But most important: I finally tested the second beer!
It is already much better than the first one, still a bit smokey but at least I dare sharing and drinking all of them... ;)
And I share with you too, here's the video:

Have a good time, see you soon!

Second try

I just had my birthday some days ago, seems like my friends heard something about my new hobby... ;)

Well, like my first beer was just drinkable, I had to start a second try. I invited some friends and we brewed together. This time I had no problems with the heating, I improved the handling of the yeast and used the new cooler for the first time, everything went well. It's just that before I bottled it, it already had that smokey smell again, it must come from the yeast. I hope that this will change these days in the bottle, we'll see. I didn't document the whole process again, but some impressions for you guys:

Putting the malt and the hop in their bags and closing them. My sister is a tailor and she made new malt and hop bags with a finer tissue, I don't have to filter the beer like this.

 The malt bag in the 45°C water, brewing starts!

 

After the brewing I cooled it down to 20°C and was able to directly pour the yeast in. The morning after it was already working:

Since then I already bottled it and it is going in the fridge in some days, in about a month it will be ready to test. You'll hear from me!

Cool!

The first time I brewed I had to wait almost 24 hours before I could add the yeast, the sauce was still to hot, it has to be at around 20 degrees. Thats why I ordered a cooler:

I tested it yesterday, it cooled 20 liters from 95 degrees to 18 degrees in about 30 minutes. A huge improvement!

On Sunday I'll brew again and hope to make a tastier one this time... :)

I'll publish some pictures next week, stay tuned!

First taste!

It's actually not even that bad, after the first mouthful I got used to it... :)

And no bad side effects in the morning, no headache, no diarrhea - I feel good! :D

I've no idea where the smokey taste comes from. I had some trouble with the heating when I brewed it, may come from there. But that has been solved. 

I'll brew again pretty soon and still hope to make some improvements to the machine, like a filter system and a cooling system and so on.

So stay tuned, cheers!

First try!

Good morning, dear friends!

It's been a long time since my last post, I know and I'm sorry.
Mainly because I was busy but also because of some weird problems I had with my machine.
Some devices in it make crash my USB when I switch them on and off, which makes the whole system unreliable, or better unstable. And I was not sure whether it was dangerous, for man or material and didn't dare to make a whole test run for long time. I stood in contact with a lot of different people, whom I wish to thank here, but nobody could explain what happens there. I pulled apart everything, again, to find the source of the problem, which I was pretty sure to find in my wiring or my software, but no.
I than decided to give it a try,just with water, heating to and holding the different temperatures,spinning, pumping, everything.
And guess what...
It worked like a charm! Well, almost at least... :) I still had some crashes when I filled the barrel or used the pump, but once the brewing started I had no issue at all!
So the time for a first try had come, and like one picture says more than thousand words, I'll let them speak:

Even when I had pulled everything apart again, my USB crashed. I stood even in contact with one of the developers of the relay board who tried everything to help me:

Thanks again, Terry King! I found that the following helped a bit:

I isolated the metallic outer part of the USB plug. (compare the upper and the lower)

One of the first runs in my bathroom, the barrel is full, hot and spinning. I found that the rubber hose which brought the detergent and softener into the barrel was not that ideal to be left in its place, it always filled with water, tipped and lost some water. But I could not just remove it, there's a big hole behind:

So I had to find something to jam it. Thinking about it, eating some spaghetti and voilà:

One of the funnier parts... :D

I even had a friend of mine, a real electronics engineer, examining my machine. Didn't really help. But had some beers and a nice day, thanks David!

So this is the final setup, in my kitchen and here we go:

My brewing assistant Ingemar and me brewing the first batch! The first time we had to drink foreign beer, I hope that changes the next time... ;)

At 45°C we brought in the malt, in the bag you see here floating. At the next step we had some problems, the thermal bi-metal fuse of the heating suddenly reacted at 53°C and by the time we had a workaround, bridging a security, always a good idea ;) , the liquid lost temperature and stood to long in the wrong phase and I've absolutely no idea if and how this influences the beer. We'll see, if it's not drinkable I know what to blame... ;)
Once the final temperature was reached and hold long enough, the time for the iodine test had come:

And it was good:

Then, after boiling it with the hop, the liquid came in the keg and the following day I measured the sugar and added the yeast.

Eight days later, I filtered it:

And filled it in bottles:

And there it is, the first ArduinoBeer! 
It now has to wait some days, I'll then put it in the fridge and in some weeks I'll share the drinking experience!

See you guys!