Home Brew Beer

A heap of free recipes right here:

Is one of these Brewzillas complete overkill for somebody looking to try brewing at home?

It really depends on what you are trying to achieve in my opinion. If you are just going for Malt Extract brewing, yes it is overkill. If it is full grain, it’s a cheaper way to get into that rather than a 3 vessel set up.

Robobrew has been put on hold. Need to sort out my temperature control for fermentation before I go for the big dog brewing machine. The current batch has been sitting in there with temperatures ranging from 18-24. I would like to have it sitting on a solid 19.

Will try and find a bar fridge this weekend, I ordered one of these today:

https://www.ink-bird.com/products-temp-controller-itc308wifi.html

There are a stack of bar fridges for sale on FB Marketplace at the moment. May be worth a look.

The ‘problem’ with bar fridges is that the compressor usually takes a big chunk of space where your fermenter should sit. You can get a wine fridge, but if it’s anything like mine it’s more of an insulated box rather than something you can control temperature with. You may be able to find a bar fridge that can fit your fermenter, or you’ll need to go up a size.

Yeah, I have a spare full size fridge that I am going to use. The only issue is that it has the freezer as well which I feel is a waste of electricity given I am only needing it for the fridge compartment. We will see how it goes when the thermostat arrives.

Just buy your hops in bulk and freeze them :beer:

No Bueno.

The freezer will be turning on and off alongside the fridge which will be controlled by the thermostat.

So I have had my fermenter in the fridge for a week sitting at 19.5C. The thermostat has worked really well in maintaining that temperature and I have had a visual on my phone the whole time.

I am aiming to bottle on Sunday, so I should start cold crashing now? Is there any benefit to Cold crashing if I am going to pick up the fermenter and put it on another surface (perhaps taking it from the garage to inside the house 20m away) to feed into another fermenter and bulk priming? I am just thinking that the moving from the garage to inside is going to slosh the liquid around in the fermenter and kick up all the bits that have floated to the bottom in the cold crash stage.

EDIT: Yeast was pitched on the 15th of June

Can you do your bulk priming in the garage?

If not, I don’t think it would matter too much - once the yeast are bloated at the bottom of the fermenter it takes a fair bit of agitation to get them swimming again. I mean, don’t roll it into your house or anything, but it should be OK.

What was your OG/FG?

I don’t really have any clean surfaces / areas in the garage to prop the fermenter on at the moment. Stuff is everywhere!

Original Gangster was 1.060
Flaming Galah was 1.020

Good one Ezy. Still worth cold crashing I reckon. I have to lift mine out of my fermentation fridge and up onto a bench to get enough clearance to fill a keg - it gets disturbed a little but still comes out pretty clear. If you’re bottling then it should only be the last few bottles that start to pick up some crap.

Bonza. I will turn my fridge on now from the comfort of my desk.

Hand me my reaching broom boy.

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Beer bottled and is nearly at the two week mark – I had a sneaky taste last night (no refrigeration needed as the shed is so cold) and I am pretty happy. It’s a basic beer… very light on the carbonation though which may be because its been so cold and only been 1.8 weeks in the bottle.

In other news. I am going to pick up a brand new brewtech brewbucket this weekend to up the fermentation game. One brew in this using the left over malt extract and grain and then I am heading over to full grain with the robobrew I am pretty sure.

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Nice Ezy, please save me a bottle to try!

Oooh…nice…

Winner. Keen to hear how the robobrew goes, I can sense one of those in my future.

Yeah, hopefully it will go well. Better ingredients etc. You can’t go wrong (I hope).

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