Home Brewing

[biometrics]

I have an outside shed too:

View attachment 12589

Do you live by the mill?

 

[scudsucker]

Do you live by the mill?

No, I live in Observatory, but the head miller and I both have an interest in brewing as well as milling.

 

[Papa Smurf]

I bottled 3 fermenters yesterday of Coopers Mexican Cuerveza
That's it, Im done making beer for now
36 cases of 750ml and 1000ml quarts in prep for the 3rd wave
350 litres

 

[Seldom Bucket]

I bottled 3 fermenters yesterday of Coopers Mexican Cuerveza
That's it, Im done making beer for now
36 cases of 750ml and 1000ml quarts in prep for the 3rd wave
350 litres

So enough for one day?

 

[Papa Smurf]

So enough for one day?

I like my 2 litres each day so enough for 5 months in case the 3rd wave lasts that long.
A year ago the 1st wave was 66 days no bottle stores
Then 36 days
Then 36 again
And now the 4 over Easter

 

[bigAl-sa]

I bottled 3 fermenters yesterday of Coopers Mexican Cuerveza
That's it, Im done making beer for now
36 cases of 750ml and 1000ml quarts in prep for the 3rd wave
350 litres

How do you fit a fermenter into a bottle? The bottle must have a huge neck?

 

[biometrics]

Hefe Wheat can is in the keg.

Much better with DME than white sugar I used the first time.

 

[AntiThesis]

Any of you fine folks work with Cider at all? I'd love to play with brewing but truly hate beer

 

[GreGorGy]

Any of you fine folks work with Cider at all? I'd love to play with brewing but truly hate beer

I made a Mangrove cider that I got at brewcraft. I am not a cider fan, to be clear, so I would really know what taste to chase. But that process is pretty straight-forward. My daughter drinks cider so I made it for her and she said the taste was fine. I just followed the recipe guide that comes with the pack. No major issues.

I am all out, by the way. I have about 15L in bottled stout and nothing else. All the kegs are empty and so too are the fermenters. And next weekend is out of the question so the closest I will come to brewing again is in two weeks time. This means that the next time I have anything on tap will be in about a month. Woe is me.

 

[scudsucker]

Any of you fine folks work with Cider at all? I'd love to play with brewing but truly hate beer

Apparently you need sour/tart apples, else it will be sickeningly sweet. I have not tried, beyond putting some apple in a gingerbeer at the start of lockdown - but an experienced brewer who works on an apple farm gave me that advice.

OTOH the only way to learn is to start. I can donate some brewing yeast if you are in CT, all other equipment can be improvised - so could get a cider for the price of a bag of granny smith apples.

 

[AntiThesis]

Nah, I'm more than happy to go and buy the stuff if I can find somewhere that has the kit actually in stock. It's more of a hobby/interesting thing to do really. I have already been donated bottles, bottler and caps so need to organise all the other things. Maybe I must go adventuring on Brewcraft and so on.

 

[scudsucker]

Free to a good home: I have about 100 of these, donated to me by a guy who was making beer back when dumpies were dumpies. Cape Town only.

 

[scudsucker]

Else they are going to recycling

 

[biometrics]

Else they are going to recycling

A bit small. My bottles are 440ml.

 

[scudsucker]

My head Miller has just informed me that this batch survived the fire. I'll go try them out when I survey the damage.

 

[[)roi(]]

This was 5 months ago. Are you still in Singapore?

I was until recently; ended up getting stuck in Singapore; which favoured my clients there, but it was a pain in the arse for me and my USA / Europe clients. I ended up setting up a temporary office + took a few weeks off for a scuba diving holiday and some vacationing in Vietnam.

I've been back for a few weeks; had a very large todo list at home to catch up on including on the brewing front (I'll cover that in a separate post -- huge changes on this front).

Glad to see you've kept up with the brewing.

 

[biometrics]

I was until recently; ended up getting stuck in Singapore; which favoured my clients there, but it was a pain in the arse for me and my USA / Europe clients. I ended up setting up a temporary office + took a few weeks off for a scuba diving holiday and some vacationing in Vietnam.

I've been back for a few weeks; had a very large todo list at home to catch up on including on the brewing front (I'll cover that in a separate post -- huge changes on this front).

Glad to see you've kept up with the brewing.

Welcome back.

 

[[)roi(]]

Welcome back.

Thanks...

 

[GreGorGy]

(I'll cover that in a separate post -- huge changes on this front).

I await with baited breath.


Today, I brewed for the first time since early March. All my kegs are empty! FUCK! How did that even happen?
(There may have been a chick involved)

 

[[)roi(]]

On the brewing front.
I trained then handed over the brewing reigns, whilst I was away, to my group of friends; who together with my staff were able to continue to brew good beers and they didn't run dry even once.

With their renewed experience of brewing and the heavy workload -- we ended up concluding that we needed to make our lives far easier by upgrading the kit. Hence we purchased and installed a lot of new stuff in the last 2 weeks to achieve that goal.

Brewing
Added a 200l Speidel Braaumeister (a huge investment, but its split between a bigger group of friends)

200-litre Braumeister-45200

Noch nie war es so einfach, wirklich gutes Bier selbst zu brauen.

shop.speidels-braumeister.de

We also invested in more urns; to bump up our on hand strike water capacity; both for priming the water in 200l Braaumeister (reduce heating time) but also to be used for the 20l, which we kept for small batch brewing (now primarily our test batches and batches for distilling).

Fermenting
For the time being we've decided to not go overboard with expensive fermenters (e.g. stainless steel, etc.)... and instead decided to stick with plastic fermenters -- naturally we needed bigger buckets to cope with our 200l batches. For that we've added 4 new 220l fermenter drums sourced from Distillique.

Fermentation Drum: 220l

Fermentation Drum: 220l Low cost fermentation solution - for start up distilleries on a budget, or larger home distillers. This Fermentation Drum does not come standard with a

distillique.co.za

Other: odds and ends
We've decided to stay with bottles; which although inconvenient to clean/fill are far more convenient to transport and store. e.g. we don't all need to heavily invest in kegging equipment, fridges, etc.

We've also added:

• 3 more bottle fillers and the plumbing to have up to 4 bottle filling points at the same time from a single 200l batch.
• Another 3 manually cappers
• An unused dishwasher was also available; so we now have 2 dedicated dishwashers for the bottles.
• Installed a new cupboard for grains, sugars, nutrients, enzymes, etc
• Increase shelving capacity for storing 750ml bottles; well over 1200 bottle capacity.
• Added a Monster Mill from bevplus to mill the huge grain batches.
  • https://www.beerplus.co.za/product/monster-mill-mm3-incl-base-amp-hopper/1797/163
• Additional electronic scales and large bowls for recipe ingredient measurement.
• Stocked the cupboards with a large order of grains, our preferred 500g yeasts, similarly 1kg hops, and another 10k box of caps.
• An unused oven in the brewing room to roast grains.
• Additional plumbing to move product from Braaumeisters to Fermentation Buckets / Drums and for secondary fermentation.

I'm probably missing a few things, but overall our intention was to minimise our overall workload by brewing a much larger batch on nominated weekends and similarly to bottle a previous fermented batch at the same time.

Other plans
We're also busy discussing our goals on the distillation side (primarily rum, whisky and maybe gin) + we've also got plans to brew our own sherry and alcoholic fruity flavoured seltzers.