Ha!
It's only been like three years! :D

What happened?

Well, not a lot. I only brewed two times. Both times disgusting beer like always. :)

But I'm still not giving up. You remember me telling about a smokey rubber taste in my beer?
I always suspected the hot trub being responsible for that. But a lot of people are saying nowadays, that one can even let the trub go in to the fermenter and it doesn't do anything bad. So maybe it really is the rubber in the machine. No more filtering, no more burnt fingers!
At the bottom of the machine, there's a huge piece of good old black rubber which connects the basin with the pump. So there's wort in it all the time. And it's quite easy to replace. I'm gonna post some pics. You'll laugh...
And even tough it's definitively independent of the beer quality, I'm about to replace all the electronics. Yep, I pull out the arduino and replace it with a raspberry pi B+. I found such a great software, I had to do it.
Have a look at this:
http://craftbeerpi.com/

So, I'm back on it, I'll be back soon!

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!

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!