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Written by Evan
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Monday, 10 December 2007 |
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 I've got to say, I really like foam control drops. The stuff I got is called Fermcap-S, from Northern Brewer . One drop in a starter and it all but eliminates boilovers. It can still spill a bit due to vigorous boiling but it does not foam up with hot break as you normally see. I had no trouble boiling 900mL of wort in my 1L flask - a small amount boiled over, but so little that all I needed to do was wipe with a wet paper towel afterward. I think with slightly less (like 800mL) and/or a less vigorous boil, it'd boil without any spillage whatsoever.
This stuff is also excellent during fermentation, especially for starters. I never see more than a faint ring of bubbles in the flask when it's on my stir plate. It's also nice during fermentation of a batch, although I find I need to use more than the 2 drops per gallon they recommend. For example, I am currently fermenting 5.5 gallons of IPA with an OG around 1.060, using Pacman yeast (which is notoriously vigorous) in a 6-gallon better bottle carboy. I started with 11 drops of Fermcap, the krausen rose up to the neck within a day, I put in 3 more drops and the krausen fell to around an inch or so and it's stayed that way ever since. I started with a blowoff tube, but the krausen never made it that high. I'm extremely impressed. I can't wait for this batch to be finished and drinkable in several weeks. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 10 December 2007 )
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Written by Evan
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Thursday, 15 November 2007 |
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 So, though today was a busy and hectic day for me, it turned out to be a great day as far as brewing goes. Finally got a chance to get together with a friend of mine and cut the tops out of these two kegs with a plasma cutter (putting me dangerously close to having a usable keggle). FYI, plasma cutters are awesome - the actual cutting process took less than a minute a keg, it was like a hot knife through butter. It took a half hour start to finish to do both kegs, most of the time was spent filling them with water (to catch slag) and dumping afterward. Now they just need some quick grinding to clean up the cut edges and they're golden.
Also, my sack of Maris Otter malt showed up, which is good since I ran out of base grain a few days ago. My stock of yeast is growing - I've got a pitchable quantity of belgian yeast ready to roll, irish ale yeast in a 100ml starter (ready to step up to 1L), and a slant and 1L starter of 'Pacman' yeast cultured from a couple bottles of Rogue beer, which I can't wait to try out. Lastly, I've started filling bottles from my kegged beer, using a nice cheap DIY counter-pressure filler of sorts, dreamed up by BierMuncher over at the homebrewtalk.com forums. It's really easy, a few days ago I filled a 12-pack in just a few minutes. I recorded a short video of the process, to demonstrate how simple and effective it is. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 16 November 2007 )
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Written by Evan
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Thursday, 11 October 2007 |
 Datalogger Board Prototype I've also been (slowly) working on one of my more long-term projects, a temperature datalogger board. It monitors three temperature sensors and logs data to an SD card, allowing huge storage, uses a real-time clock for timekeeping, has an on-board LCD for a direct interface, and connects via USB to a PC to download and view data. I've got more work to do on the user interface side of things (LCD menu system, software, etc), but it currently logs data just fine and the software can retrieve the data and plot it versus time. There's also a couple of outputs, which will allow it to become a temperature controller and not just a datalogger. More pics after the jump... |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 11 October 2007 )
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