When kegs fail, it usually happens at the most in-opportune time. How to determine the cause of a keg post failure or how to determine the cause of a poppet failure, then defining actions to take to correct the problems and prevent from reoccurrence should follow an organized approach.
These first few posts are a little scattered, as I am going back and writing on ales I have made last year, then bottled or kegged, and consumed. I have some follow-on to the posting layouts, future plans, how-to’s, and recipes that are yet TBD. This posting is in reference to a text exchange my wife and I had yesterday. My humor trends on the dry side, and so when I can make myself laugh so hard my coworkers begin to stare, I figure its worth posting about. I have 3 different beers from very recent brew sessions in the fermenters I got with my brewing equipment. My wife is gracious enough to allow them in the kitchen, and they do tend to take up some room. The constant glug and gurgle of fermenting beer is soothing to me, and I like to listen to the activity knowing that I have provided […]
By this time, the hot liquor tank has been sitting over a burner all day, and is now in the 190 degree range. Because I wasn’t paying attention, I went ahead and started to fly-sparge, only realizing once about 5 gallons is in the boil kettle that my sparge temp was too high. I stopped the fly-sparge and drained the mash, deciding to batch sparge instead. Once the 190 degree temp water that had made it into the mashtun was drained through the grain bed, I thought my best option was to add cold water to the liquor tank and allow the temp to settle prior to running it through the grain. While filling the tank with ground temp water from the hose, the boil kettle came to a boil, with about 5 gallons in it. The boil kettle burner was on full blast, because I was expecting to fly […]
I am going to be a pro, I thought to myself Saturday morning as I hauled hot water by the 5 gallon bucket from the bathroom tub faucet out to the garage and poured it into my hot liquor tank. I had gotten up early and was too excited to eat any breakfast. I fired up the burner on the liquor tank, and hauled enough water to fill it (14.5 gallons). I estimated a campdon tablet was good enough for my very soft water with only chloramine in it. The mashtun piping was primed by opening the liquor tank ball valve and allowing the water to flow through all the lines until it started to “underlet” into the mashtun. This is basically a way to let all the air escape out of the lines and pipes through the system. If there was an air bubble it could get pulled into […]
This is a 12 gallon recipe I was inspired to brew after dabbling around with some SMaSH recipes calling for Citra and Simcoe hops. As a warning to the reader, this brew was a nightmare of poor planning, execution, leverage of wisdom, and my time…