just finished placing an order for some new gear:

• fermenator leg extensions
• therminator
• thrumometer
• 1/2" and 3/8" silicone tubing
• quick disconnects (mcmaster-carr: 6739k59, 6739k64, 6739k68)
  

i've also been working on assembling a venturi pump. the local petco was blowing out their aquarium pumps for $1.99 (normally $9.99). the only downside is that the water output end was not fitted for a garden hose so i made a small modification by using some 3/4" tubing, couple worm clamps and a 3/4" barb x ght. a ght x 3/8 barb will be added to hose section as well.



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woke up this morning to a nice and shiny blichmann conical fermenator from nicole. i'm still in awe. kris and myself will definitely put this baby to good use.



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brewed up our java maker this afternoon. it was a fairly long brew session due to a minor mishap. after the hour mash we went to drain the mash tun into the kettle but nothing came out. turns out, the false bottom on the mash tun lifted up while we were mashing, which resulted in about 1 lb of grain to get stuck under the back side of the false bottom, causing a brutal stuck sparge. we quicky macgyver'd our way out of it by pouring our sparge water back into the kettle, and then pouring the mash into our sparge water cooler. little did we know, we'd have to do that a second time and clear the valve of all the grains that were sucked up in it. after about 30 mins we were back on schedule.

for christmas this year, kris hooked us up with a false bottom for the 15 gallon kettle. fuckin sweet! the batch of beer we made today only had 2 oz of pellet hops in it, but it was awesome to see how much work it did.

we overshot the original gravity of 1.044 and ended up at 1.060. oops. i guess our efficiency is just that stellar. while boiling we racked our esb (1.066 - 1.019) to secondary and ended up pitching our java maker right onto the esb's yeast cake. hopefully the fermenters don't blow up.





false bottom ftw






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brewed an esb today and we are planning to pitch a coffee porter on the left over yeast cake next week. the brew session went pretty good but we were either over efficient or condensed the wort too much. we were shooting for an og around 1.056 but ended up at 1.066. the last couple batches we've had pretty high fg's which is either related to mash temps or lack of yeast. usually when we brew we have some other beer project going on at the same time, today we were strictly focused on hitting our mash temp of 152 dead on, and we nailed it. and kris made a couple starters to make sure we had plenty of healthy yeast. we did hit one potential problem, when filling the fermentation buckets a hot pad fell into one of the buckets but with any luck it will still turn out.

esb / coffee porter


checking grain temp


checking mash temp






4oz willamette, 4oz goldings




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