Homebrewing

Ultimate Yeast Harvester. It attaches to the bottom of the fermenter. After you do a quick trub dump (see video on page 3), you attach this guy - minus the pressure valve. Then open up the dump valve. Beer fills. As time passes, yeast drops out displacing the beer, and after a few days the whole thing is filled with delicious yeast sludge that can be saved for future batches. Remove from fermenter. Reattach pressure valve and store in fridge.




Golding hops in the background.

Wow that is pretty cool. How many times can yeast be reused? I never knew it could.

Side note - $80 for wheels? damn!

The wheels were a little pricey but they are pretty freaking nice for wheels. Casters, they are not. Also the wheels raised the fermenter 3.5-4 inches. That helps. From the racking port, it was a little difficult to get tubing to properly flow into my kegs without crimping/kinking. Now the flow should be much smoother.

I think I remember reading that some breweries reuse their yeast between 12 to 16 times. Somewhere in there, the yeast starts to mutate as you are multi-generations away from what you started with. So If i stick with brewing batches that utilize the same yeast strain, then I will recover the cost of the harvester relatively quickly. Cali Common is probably the best option for this -at least in regards to leaving it in the harvester in the fridge between batches. Otherwise I will have to transfer the slurry to other sterile containment vessels.

The harvester sight glass has a pretty good capacity too. Looks like it could physically fit about 3-4 White Labs tubes in it.

Looking for a good summer recipe. Anyone got one?

Was thinking of some sort of Hefe with honey and a slight fruit flavor. I'm still new at coming up with recipes, and I partial mash.

Ray Daniel's Designing Great Beers is what I use when I want to get creative.

A hefe would be a good choice. Or possible just a plain jane American Wheat. I suggest that because it is a pretty good base for virtually any fruit additions, which is sounded like you were interested. I've tried raspberry and it worked well, but in the future, I would probably use one of the homebrew extracts rather than fresh/frozen fruit. The raspberries made my wort turn a cough syrup red color (see the img embedded). Over time and conditioning, the color diminished back to a more golden color, but still slightly off. I would guess honey would be good in it as well.

I'm at work currently, so I don't have access to my brew log, but for AmWheat beers, usually I go 50% light wheat and 50% American 2 row (Great Western is my Maltster of choice, but Briess will work). Cali Common yeast will work, but I have also tried the "wheat" specific strains provided by Wyeast and White labs with good results as well.

Very lawnmower beer, until you make your additions. Just an idea.



EDIT: Shoot, forgot you're partial mash. There should be calculators on how to convert all grain to extract/partial mash recipes. I think the Ray Daniel's book above demonstrates the math on how to do that as well.

I can usually convert most all grain recipes to partial mash. I just replace some of the base grain (usually about 4.5 lbs of it) with DME and steep the rest of the grains. For grains that need to be mashed (like Vienna), I usually add the same amount of base grain to the mash.

I am restricted by equipment right now, but as soon as I build a mash tun and get a larger boil kettle, I'll be good to go!

Getting that done now, all I need to do is cut slits or drill holes in the manifold. Any suggestions as to what is better?

This is made out of a 5 gallon water cooler, and the manifold connects to a quick disconnect so I can use the water cooler for other things... like attaching a wort chiller to the quick disconnect!

Picked up ingredients today for brew this weekend that hopefully dds115 and I can double-team.

4 lbs 2-row
4 lbs wheat malt

Mash at 153 for 45 minutes

Sparge with 170 water to come to ~5.5 Gallons

Bring to boil, add 1lb Breiss Wheat DME

.5 oz Hallertau (60 Minutes)
1 Tbs Orange Marmalade (15 minutes)
1 Tsp Irish Moss (15 minutes)
1 lb Orange Blossom Honey (5 minutes)

White Labs WLP300 Hefewiezen Ale

Soak zest of 2 oranges in 1 oz of vodka for 2 weeks, strain out oranges and add with priming sugar in keg.

If you are gonna keg, why are you priming? One of the major advantages of kegging is force carbing. You end up with less yeast precip, and more consistent results.

Eh, the guy that taught me how just told me to do that. I only have one CO2 connection and one beer line in my kegerator and three kegs can sit in there, so until I get a larger tank and more lines, doing this is a little more convenient because the other two kegs outside the kegerator can carb for a few weeks.

Just as a suggestion, Check out this faq on quick force carbing. (look at the "5 minute force carb" trick, with no bleeder valve)

Using the quick carb technique, you can have your beer carbed up quickly (as in overnight), and you can rehook your one line to your currently serving keg.

I can't see anything more convenient than having another keg ready to go overnight, with a consistent, reasonably expected carb level, with less yeast sediment.

I usually do the "slow method", which just consists of setting the regulator and then connecting the gas to the OUT barb and letting it sit for 5 days.

Someday, I wouldn't mind having one of these. Having the carb stone on there increases the speed of diffusion, meaning faster carb.

maybe I should talk my wife into getting me one... hehe... my birthday is next month!!

I just spent four hours filtering my ocktoberfest, but it is finally done and carbing. I went through 6 filter pads (2 per level). One round of rough, one round of polish, and one round of sterile. This is only the second time I have filtered and the first I went all the way to sterile.
Each level was slower than the other, with the sterile run taking FOREVER. But I am hopeful for the results. I could see all the way to the bottom of my keg when it was halfway full.

Probably wont ever do this with a hoppy beer as it strips out hop aroma, but for this batch, I think it will help a lot since prior to filtration, it looked like Chichas.

Never even thought about filtering. Let us know how the final product is!

I plan on posting JPEGs. Keg #1 is carbing now. Gonna bottle this weekend and take pictures shortly after that.

necro-ing this thread.

that ocktoberfest sucked. dumped it. Not sure what went wrong. I didn't taste infected, but it sure as hell didnt taste good either.

going back to simple. Brewing at 5 gallon Nut Brown this weekend, assuming no rapture.

That is very sad Very very sad.

Totally agree with this. If you keg, force carbonation is the fastest, easiest and cleanest way to go. Plus, you can completely control the amount of carbonation, and adjust as necessary.

in hindsight, i think i figured out what happened. I'm pretty sure I dried it out too much by mashing too low for that style. I need to check and make sure my thermometers are reading right.

Dry Ocktoberfest sucks. Definitely not infected. I did end up saving a few bottles just to see what happens overtime, but I'm betting "not a lot" since i filtered to sterility.