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Zapp
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so guys, i`d like to update you on the beers i`ve been producing.

 

first, i thought i`d mullerd a batch of beer, it was using s05 and was an experiment, a kit brew stout with 1kg of dark spraymalt added. s05 is a real workhorse. OMG i thought the fermenter was going to take off ! bottle conditioned, s05 drops like a rock. as for the taste, after 3-4 weeks, kinda rubbish, i thought i was stuck with it. then i left it for a good while, while i "look" at some norfolk NOG i previously bottled.

 

then after alot of time, got the courage to try it again, turned out to be a very crispy dry beer. not unpleasent, very soft palate, doesnt really tick all the beer boxes, but its crisp, unusually clean.

 

my brewing friend tried a few them, he was quite positive.

 

i`ve started a wilko 2 can kit, with some nottingham. went off like a rocket. bottle soon.

 

next projects. brewbag.

 

 

Here's another link for you to have a look at if you're thinking of going BIAB.

 

http://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=9899

 

If you get hold of one of the large heavy duty 60L fermenters you can build a boiler for around £40 - £50, something like this as a starting point http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/acatalog/60_ltr_Fermenting_Bin_Lid.html it's a rubbish photo but this is one I bought a while ago, it works fine.

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Guest cookoff013

i`m going to have to go throught the gasbottle and boiler route, and i`d have to treat all my water by boiling and treating, i may nead a priest to exorcise the deamons in my water. (its that bad)

a friend checked out my water profile. and it is evil. too much of everything. so i`ll have to plan alittle better.

 

i`m just thinking about making an insulated mash tun, gubbins and doo-daahs. i`ll be up and running by the end of the year.

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If your water is really bad mate, you can always buy the 5l 'value' minearal water bottles from any supermarket for less than a quid each - whilst perfecting a new method of brewing, it just takes one more complication out of the process, then once you've mastered that you can get your head round water profiles/treatment etc.

 

Building your own kit is really straightforward, and enjoyable too if you have a go sing out if you've any questions and I reckon there's enough folks on here to set you right.

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i`m going to have to go throught the gasbottle and boiler route, and i`d have to treat all my water by boiling and treating, i may nead a priest to exorcise the deamons in my water. (its that bad)

a friend checked out my water profile. and it is evil. too much of everything. so i`ll have to plan alittle better.

 

i`m just thinking about making an insulated mash tun, gubbins and doo-daahs. i`ll be up and running by the end of the year.

 

I'm a water treatment geek. Our water is horrific, but we make everything apart from lager with it without any issues.

 

Can you access your water profile online? If so, pm a link to me and I'll have a look at it for you.

 

EDIT: Wow, going by your location and assuming you are on Anglian Water that is pretty awful. I'll do some number crunching and see what I can come up with.

 

EDIT 2: Yep, I reckon boiling or dilution is going to be the way to go. You could just about make pale ale with it, but it will be very hop biased if you used CRS to reduce alkalinity.

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Guest cookoff013

I'm a water treatment geek. Our water is horrific, but we make everything apart from lager with it without any issues.

 

Can you access your water profile online? If so, pm a link to me and I'll have a look at it for you.

 

EDIT: Wow, going by your location and assuming you are on Anglian Water that is pretty awful. I'll do some number crunching and see what I can come up with.

 

EDIT 2: Yep, I reckon boiling or dilution is going to be the way to go. You could just about make pale ale with it, but it will be very hop biased if you used CRS to reduce alkalinity.

 

cheers zapp,

an all grain brewey friend looked at it, as i was slightly confused by the numbers, but iwasnt that confused my water profile is awful, needs some serious thought,

as an aside, i need to make a brew in bag mashtun with a bucket. but i`ll get there....

 

@zapp, PM inbound

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Zapp - I've checked meself out today and my water is coming in at 107mg/L as calcium which seems to equate to the harder end of hard (Essex and Suffolk Water with an SS17 post code)?

 

Worth me buying bottled? I'm currently making bitter, lager, red wine, mead and fruit wine (I may have got a little carried away!!). Everything i've made so far has come out pretty well, but just wondering whether i could improve really.

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Zapp - I've checked meself out today and my water is coming in at 107mg/L as calcium which seems to equate to the harder end of hard (Essex and Suffolk Water with an SS17 post code)?

 

Worth me buying bottled? I'm currently making bitter, lager, red wine, mead and fruit wine (I may have got a little carried away!!). Everything i've made so far has come out pretty well, but just wondering whether i could improve really.

 

The water round here is hard aswell but I tried a test to use bottled and not much if any difference

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Guest cookoff013

ah, the issues i was thinking about are to do with all grain mashing, not general brewing liquer.

even i use tap water for kits and actually make beer.

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Zapp - I've checked meself out today and my water is coming in at 107mg/L as calcium which seems to equate to the harder end of hard (Essex and Suffolk Water with an SS17 post code)?

 

Worth me buying bottled? I'm currently making bitter, lager, red wine, mead and fruit wine (I may have got a little carried away!!). Everything i've made so far has come out pretty well, but just wondering whether i could improve really.

 

With kits you will be fine as cookoff said. It is more when you want to go all grain that the alkalinity, calcium, magnesium, sodium, sulphate and chloride levels all become important.

 

107mg/l calcium is fine, a little low even. My water is 108mg/l Ca, which I boost to 200-205 with Gypsum and Calcium Chloride additions.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Right, I've finally got round to uploading some pics of the kit at the micro. Bear in mind that these were all taken on our first brew day which is why the place is a bit of a mess!

 

Sorry for the long post, but hopefully it will be of interest.

 

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The copper (boiler)

 

Mashtun_zpsbc9fb8e0.jpg

The mashtun

 

falsebottom_zps05be6bb4.jpg

Mashtun false bottom

 

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Fermenters

 

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Grainstore

 

Underback_zps1a11c555.jpg

Running off after the mash. The modified keg is an underback, which contains a filer to keep crud out of the wort.

 

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Vince being grumpy.

 

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Vince being happy again while I am having a nice cup of tea and failing to hide from the camera

 

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And the reason for doing it - our beer on sale in a pub

 

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One last bit of beer pr0n.

 

:)

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  • 2 weeks later...

There's some cracking pictures there Zapp, thanks for posting them. I must say that's a fine bit of ingenuity on the underback design!!

 

I have a couple of questions if I may..

 

Are the fermenters temp controlled?

 

Do you crash cool the wort after the boil?

 

What sort of time does it take from start to finish on an average brew day?

 

I must say that seeing your own beer sat on the bar in a pub must be amazing!!

 

Cheers

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There's some cracking pictures there Zapp, thanks for posting them. I must say that's a fine bit of ingenuity on the underback design!!

 

I have a couple of questions if I may..

 

Are the fermenters temp controlled?

 

Do you crash cool the wort after the boil?

 

What sort of time does it take from start to finish on an average brew day?

 

I must say that seeing your own beer sat on the bar in a pub must be amazing!!

 

Cheers

 

 

Thanks Jonty, glad you enjoyed them.

 

We do indeed crash cool. Tucked away behind the copper just under the window is a pretty serious plate chiller. It takes the wort from 90+ down to anything from 10 degrees up in a single pass using a feed from a single cold tap.

 

The fermenters arent temperature controlled as such yet, but the thermal density in 400+ litres of liquid plus the cladding allows a fair amount of leeway. At the moment if we need them warmer we put a heater underneath on a timer, and use the line chiller to cool things down as required.

 

On average it takes us 7-8 hours from start to finish. We mash for an hour and boil for 90, and use the spare time to cask up etc. The slowest bit is the run off, as that is dictated by how fast the plate chiller takes the temp down.

 

Seeing your beer on sale in a pub is brilliant, as is people coming up to talk to you about it. It can be a bit nerve wracking though in case you get a cask which wont clear or whatever.

 

you guys must be billionares !

 

This time next year Rodney....

 

Seriously though, we are all ex Army and were funded by the Royal British Legion under a scheme they ran to get ex soldiers set up in business. The money was part grant part loan, so we will have to pay most back, but we could never have done any of this without them.

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on a slightly smaller scale to Zapp, I gave my new setup a test run tonight, just with some water to see what timmes it takes for heating etc

 

Gas heated hot liqor tank

 

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Gravity fed into mash tun

 

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Somewhat rustic sparge 'arm'

 

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Edited by Jonty
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That is a seriously sexy setup for homebrew.

 

If you think your sparge arm is rustic you should see my one on my homebrew setup. It is a single 9 inch length of copper pipe hammered flat at one end, with a length of hose that attaches to my HLT ball valve, with a matrix of holes drilled in it. One end rests on the lip of the mashtun, the other rests on my mashing paddle which is propped across the top of the mashtun.

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I know what you mean, there has to be an element of 'cobbled together' to make it seem fun. I decided with this setup that I wanted it permanatly in place and plumbed in so I wasn't lifting buckets of wayter about or stacking HLT's on top of crates etc soI could just walk into the garage, turn the hlt water suply on and fire up the gas and get brewing. Hopefully it'll be the last home brew setup I ever make.

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Zapp, on the crash chilling.. what sort of filter do yo have from the boiler to the heat exchanger? I have a 40 plate that I've never used and access to a really big one from a dairy farm. But I unnderstand that you need a decent filter to keep the paricles of hops etc from clogging the plates.

 

On my set up, my hop stopper is a piece of 15mm copper with some 1.5mm holes drilled in the underside. I'm a bit concerned that this is too big and maybe I need to use some stainless mesh to make it finer.

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We have two filters. On is an inline one in the outlet from the copper - it is sieve mesh that has been shaped into a cone and then lodged into the pipe. The second is the underback, which is used to run the finished wort through on its way to the chiller.

 

The problem you might have is that the diameter of your pipework might stop you from using an inline as it would soon get clogged. Having said that, your hop filter will probably do the job fine, the finished wort that comes through mine is plenty bright. The previous owner of our plate chiller set it up wrong at some point and pumped a load of hops in and it still works fine. The only way we can tell this happened is that a few seeds always find their way out into the cooling water, which we collect and use for the next brew (the water, not the seeds!).

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Thanks for the info Zapp, I have some stainless mesh, I might make a large 'envelope' cover for the hop strainer. I had the first run a couple of days ago. Very pleased with the ease of use and efficiency. I based efficiency on 75% for starter but it looks like it will be more like 80%-85%, I'll know for sure after a few more brews. Also, I calculated for ending up with 50l of wort and actually ended up with 51 so I'm very happy with that.

 

Gravity feeds water from the HLT into the mash tun and then into the boiler.

 

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The boil - lots of hops

 

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Yeast doing it's job

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

hiya

 

have anyone tried the mangrove jacks range of yeasts from the brewstore , seems to be a wide and comprehensive range of yeasts , i,ve never heard of them myself though , i usually use fermentis safale yeasts which i,m happy with , but would be interested to know if anyone have tried them , how they behave , and more importantly how the yeast settles and how the finished product tastes once brewed and conditioned .

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Ok, a question for the wine experts among you:

 

I have made my first batch of wine (a rioja kit) but have been a bit lazy in the final stages :(

 

It was all finished around a month ago in the demijon, but for one reason or another i have not gotten around to siphoning it off into a clean demijon or bottle it. This means it has been sitting for about a month with the sediment in the bottom, but still unopened or disturbed.

 

Will I be ok to bottle it now or have i left it too late? If were were to open the demijon to drink some how long will the rest of it last? Sorry for the noob questions :(

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Do not on any account make any of this homebrew type beer it is rubbish. The other day is was quaffing my homebrew, just a woodfordes old nog kit, and then i went to bed and fell fast asleep. But not before i started to run a bath !!!!!!!!!. My Mrs got a bit excited when water started running out of the kitchen ceiling light !!!!. Rubbish or what . Lol lol lol

Edited by cocker boy
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