Saturday, August 24, 2013

Slowly getting back to it

Been away from brewing anything since that killer stout last winter. A bit chastened by a failed dopplebock, I have spent a few months going through all my recipes and converting them to 5 gallon recipes and fine tuning the hops and grain bill calculations.

I also just built a yeast stir plate and replumbed my mash tun cooler. I only bought one part for the stir plate - a potentiometer to slow the fan down.  The parts used were a wooden cigar box from a friend, an old PC provided a fan, hard drive magnets, and an old cell phone..the power cord with transformer. Throw in some gorilla glue, a few wire nuts and odd screws and slap it all together.  Here it is with the fan mounted to the lid before I added the potentiometer to slow it down.



For the mash run I had been using plastic hose clamped onto the existing cooler spigot but it wasn't sturdy enough. Tore that spigot out and replaced it with a nipple, two washers and two bushings and reattached the valve to the outside bushing.



I also cut a piece of half inch tubing and pushed it onto the special tube fitting and clamped it on the braid I had before from the hose I had taken apart.



Next I want to pick up an aquarium aerator and a submersible pump to use in an ice bath to feed my wort chiller. The hose water here is too warm to chill the wort quickly or low enough.

1 comment:

  1. Ended up getting an aquarium aerator, tubing and stones at WalMart...my least favorite place to shop. Didn't need to be submersible, just drop the stones in on the end of the tubing. Works like a champ. Between that and the yeast stirplate, fermentations have really been taking off well.

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