BrewDay 2012

BrewDay 2012 has come and gone.

As Grant shows, above, there's always time to take your eye off your HLT and pour a cold one.


Grant's mashing BIAB Honey Brown lager.  Greg went with Three Hearted Ale, also BIAB.  Jed, a RyePA, all grain batch sparge and I did a kind of a pliny thing, batch sparge.

I demonstrated, conclusively (again!), no matter what you do, 9 ounces of hops in the boil does not go well with a plate chiller.  Hopblocker, whirlpool, whatever....9 ounces of pellets and a plate chiller are not going to get along.

We sampled the Dragon Milk (all three styles), Summer Ale, Bitter Bastards, a Choco-Porter, a breakfast stout, a Golden Nugget, a Pumpkin Ale, 3 different Ciders, a Strawberry wine and a Maple Nut Brown.

The carnivores attending had pulled pork, they seemed to like it and that's probably enough said about that.

Good times.

Hop Spider

my newest device.

not my idea...I stole the entire thing from John Brooke's article in the December Brew Your Own magazine.

Thats a regular grain bag / hop bag attached to it...full of hop pellets.

Notice how the heads of the carriage bolts hang over the lip of the pot so the thing doesn't fall in.

Note...I had to trim the hop bag.  I was afraid that, if it's too big, as the pot comes to a boil, it would inhibit that great roiling boil you need to make sure to drive off all the DMS stuff.

Worked great.

Between this thing and the hop blocker...I punched in six ounces of hops and had very little in the primary and the chiller didn't get clogged.

The whole thing cost me less than $10.

Kettle Mod - hopblocker

I had a great 8g pot, but no valve and found siphoning with the plate chiller awkward (and that's the nice way of phrasing it...in use, siphoning to the chiller involved obscenities...)

I bought a hopblocker from the finest, most friendly homebrew shop in Indiana, Kennywood, in Crown Point, and contacted the folks at Bargain Fittings to fab the fittings for the pot.

I didn't really know what I needed, but they took great care of me via an email exchange and fabbed an all stainless ball valve and related fittings to modify the pot for the hopblocker.

I used a step bit and really didn't have any trouble at all drilling the pot...kept it cool with a soaking wet paper towel.

Figuring that baby bottle nipples must be food safe and have to stand up to, at least, boiling temperatures, I cut the nipple part off, kept the "flat" part that goes into the bottle and had three food safe, high temp gaskets for less than a buck.

Works perfectly