Finally good beer!

Hello my friends!

It's been a long time again, I know...
But I've got a lot to tell you!

The last time I brewed was mid march. A friend from the good old army days came to help me... :)

Every brew day starts with the preparation of the machine. I've to pull it in the kitchen, connect the hoses and cables and then I disinfect it with "Halades":

I put 1% of Halades in 20 liters of water and heat it from around 16°C up to 40°C. By spinning the drum the solution builds foam and gets everywhere.

While the machine is heating, I prepare the hop and the malt. I now have more bags to get more essence out of the malt:

Once again, the comparison between the amount of malt on the left (4.5kg) and the hop (45g) in my hand:

Once the temperature is 40°C, I also pump the solution through all hoses and accessories to clean that stuff to and finally pump it in the keg:

The now disinfected material has then to be rinsed very well, to get all the foam out of it.
Finally, the brewing can begin!
I start by letting 25 liters of fresh water in the machine and heat it to 45°C. Thats the point where the mashing begins, I put the malt bags in the machine:

Here they are:

From now on, it's the machine and the software which do the job by heating to and holding the different temperatures. Time to drink a beer:

Once the iodine test is good, I can start lautering.
The lautering is done by simply getting the malt bags out of the wort. Well, simply, it's about 78°C hot... To give the beer its taste, I then have to boil the wort with the hop for 90 minutes.

Then I get the hop bag out, cool and filter the wort and pump it in the keg. Down on 20°C I add the yeast and let it ferment, I spoke about these parts in earlier posts.

I never spoke much about the bottling yet. Every bottle I open gets directly rinsed with hot water. I have one of these for that, I have a blast... ;) And they also all pass the dishwasher.

On bottling day, about a week after brewing, I first disinfect the bottles by rinsing them with boiling water:

I fill the bottles with a filling pistol which automatically stops when the bottle is full. This way I have the same quantity in every bottle.

With the little white thing up in the right corner of above picture, I add some sugar to every bottle. Finally, every bottle gets rinsed with cold water, turned heads down and stored in the case:

Et voilà, 40 bottles of beer. For one week they stay in the kitchen in ambient temperature and than they go in the fridge for some more weeks. And then:

Cheers! :)

One more thing...
These last days I got a little tiny thingy:

This my friends, is a HC-05 bluetooth module! I had to program a new driver, it's now a server/client based solution and was hard work, but it works! I don't have to stay besides the machine the whole time now, I got it wireless, baby... :D

I've only 15 bottles left, this time it was really good. The first time actually...
So I guess I'll be brewing pretty soon again...

See ya!

Filter

Hey friends!

It's been a while again and I brewed twice since then.

The first time I adjusted the temperature sensor, filtered the hot wort with a filter cloth in a spaghetti strainer and aerated the wort before fermentation.

The filter thing was a well, not to repeat experience... The strainer filled up and the cloth was jammed. I had to wash it seven times and to force the hot wort through it...

But the beer was better, some bottles even pretty good, with a nice bit of banana flavor.

So the filtering seemed to be a huge step forward and I made a lot of research. The problem is, that my wort is close to 100°C when I want to filter it. You easily find water filters and stuff out there but not with the temperature range I need. In the end I took some piece of plastic garden pump pre filter and hoped for the best.

It is officially not for alimentary use, but for my surprise, it says "per alimenti" on the bottom. So far so good, but I was still worried about the temperature. Well, I had no choice than test it and it didn't complain after being flushed several times with boiling water, everything was okay, no change in color, everything cool.

I then decided to mount it and replaced all the hoses with metal hoses:

The only bad thing no is, that the diameter of the hoses is much smaller and the pump has not much pressure which mades that it take forever to empty the machine. But I brewed once with this new setup and there's one big problem now: the filter clogs pretty fast. I had to stop the pump and clean the filter three times which is not that is with hot hoses... That definitively needs improvement. maybe a bigger filter or a stronger pump, we'll see.

The beer is now bottled and in the fridge, I'll first taste it and see if the filter principle works...

See you soon, cheers!