Summit Brewing Co. IRA

Today I had the opportunity to drink the India Style Rye Ale from Summit Brewing Co's Unchained Series. Lets say I was more than impressed. It was a medium color spicy pale ale that was not overwhelming. The rye came through tremendously, but not too much to make it undrinkable. The cup of beer (served at Sea Salt Eatery) went very nicely with the fried fish sandwich, and was gone before I knew it. Not an especially bitter beer, which made it easy to pass the time with and not get shocked upon every sip. The Citra hops are very nice, and I may try them someday in my homebrew (if I can find them).

Brewtroller Ordered

Yes, the Brewtroller has been ordered. I have big expectations for it.. but, in the beginning I will just use it for monitoring and simple boil and heating stages. I have some ASCO valves in-house, but I will not use until much later.

I am curious to see if I can get my pressure transducer to work with the Brewtroller. I am sure I can, it is just a question of what will I NEED to do to get it to work reliably. Seems like most people are concerned with air leakage in the system. I will try to alleviate that by glueing everything up tight.

Thing to note about last "Perfect" batch of weissbier

The last 10gallon (40L) batch of weissbier turned out perfect. When I say perfect, I mean very little banana, and all clove.

Things to note.
1. Fermentation in the lows 60's (62F or less)
2. Half vial of WLP380 per 5 gallon fermenter, with no starter.
3. Fermentation took >24 hours to kick off (there must have been yeast stress involved)
4. The carboy that had more cold break in it started off a little faster and ended earlier than the carboy with less break inside. One carboy had more cold break than the other because the 10 gallon runoff took place after the wort had a chance to settle from the whirlpool. Normally, I run the wort from the kettle to the carboy immediately after the pump turns off.

Interesting Brewing Observations

So, 10 gallon batches are now being brewed. I chilled my weissbier wort to 64 degrees in the whirlpool chiller within the kettle. Something I dont normally do is turn the whirlpool pump off long before I transfer the wort to the carboys. This time I let the cold water run for about 10 minutes after I stopped the recirculation . This allowed the break matter to settle towards the bottom.

I transferred the wort to the first carboy, then the second. The first carboy had a particularly large amount of break in it, while the second didnt seem to have so much.

I put equal amounts of liquid yeast into both fermenters, and shook both for over a minute (standard routine).

In general, things were cold (the wort, the room, everything) so fermentation got off to a slow start. But, the interesting factoid is that the carboy with the break material started faster than the other carboy. Also, it ended sooner.

Not only that, the final gravity was lower on the beer with the precipitate in it. As for flavor, they both taste about the same (preliminary findings). The final gravity point difference was about .004.

Next time I will let the recirculation pump run right up until I transfer the wort out, to allow for a more homogenous wort solution.

Pressure Sensor

I received my free samples from Freescale. The pressure sensor is
MPXV5010DP, and I will be testing it soon enough. I am not sure how I am going to attach it to the top of my sight glass yet, we will see.

Sight Glass Installation

Ok, so I finally installed a sight glass onto my stainless steel megapot. Here I will show what things looked like in the process. Below is the cold water running over the location where I drilled the 7/8" hole. I used a step bit, with cold running water only, no oil. This worked out perfectly, with no problems.

The step bit I used is below. It goes to 7/8". I picked up two of them on ebay for about $14. Worked like a champ.

Below is a picture of the weldless T sightglass fitting I received from http://www.bargainfittings.com/. Inserted into it is a 1/2" MNPT Machined Through Compression Fitting that I received from http://www.brewershardware.com/ along with a 6" temperature probe end to go inside it. The temperature sensor being used is a ds1820, which fits perfectly into the probe end.