FOOLCiRCLE

So on Sunday (10.19.08) my buddy Garrett and I got together to brew another 20 gallon batch of beer, this time it was an Imperial Amber Ale for lack of anything else to call it.

We got started a little after 10AM mashing in over 50lbs and grain into one of his gigantic 26 gallon stainless steel kettles (he has three). Besides a metric-ass-ton of grain, this brew also had a choking amount of homegrown hops, 2lbs of whole hops. The brew day went rather well, no major catastrophes. The biggest problem we ran into was with trying something new. Garrett had been designing, prototyping, working on, blogging about, and test-driving part of his master control system for his future brew sculpture. The part that he’s been working on the most is the box that will control the grant and the pump that makes the grant work. Since we were not going to use the grant, but wanted to play with it anyway we decided to try and use it to help automate moving the wort from the mash tun to the brew kettle. Moving 25ish gallons of 160ish degree wort is no simple task. Normally we fill his 15 gallon kettle up twice and pump it over. This time we were going to try and use his grant as an automated smaller version of this. Basically the way that his grant is set up is that the wort comes in the top and goes out the bottom, but there is also a float valve at the top and bottom. So essentially when the grant gets too full it hits the top float switch and it tells the fancy-thinking-box that Garrett made to turn the pump on and send the wort over, but then when it pumps over enough it hits the bottom float switch and it tells the box to turn the pump off. The grant is a gallon or two so it would do this several times, but really it is kind of a set-it-and-forget-it type of thing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working right. Of course it had worked great every time in a controlled environment run with water, but the first time we try it with wort – no bones. According to Garrett’s website it looks like he has it figured out and it was something relatively simple, so next time Gadget, next time. Other than that, like I said, pretty painless. I have 10 gallons of dark Imperial Amber Ale chugging away in the basement, 5 gallons on WLP001, 5 gallons on US56.

^ Fancy-Thinking-Box ^

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Homebrew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.