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!