Time

I can't believe it's almost been 3 months since I last posted, or should I say I can't believe the brewery hasn't moved on! New items for the brewery are a Crankenstein 3D malt mill with stainless rollers, motor, pulleys, belt, and also another March 809 pump to replace the Totton.


Time is really restrictive at the moment so I've no idea when the next brew will take place, but at a guess sometime next year :-(

Almost there

It's been a long time coming but the V1 Brewery is almost ready to brew again, at 6 months it's taken a lot longer than expected!! The new FV cupboard is finished.

The 3 new conical fv's are almost finished

And everything is looking good


More to follow!

New FV cupboard

When I've had spare time, which seems to be rarely, I've been making a new fv cupboard to house my 2 new and unused HDPE conicals. One is 110ltr, the other 40ltr, and another 40ltr will soon be acquired. Each conical cupboard will have a 60 watt tubular heater to heat the ferment when required, and each conical fv will have a cooling coil inside them to cool the ferment when required. The 110ltr conical cooling coil will be 'fed' by the recirculating python line of my beer chiller. The 2 40ltr conicals will be 'fed' by pumping a glycol solution through the 2 product coils of the beer chiller. To do this I will make a reservoir for the glycol solution and will possibly use 2 submersible pumps to recirculate the solution, though I haven't decided for definite on this. The cupboard is still to be finished though hopefully this will happen in the next 2 weeks.

The Spring Thing 13-15 May

As mentioned in my previous 2 brew day posts, I was brewing the beers for entry into The Spring Thing competition. Unfortunately due to time constraints I didn't have time to get the beers ready for entry which was a great shame, next time hopefully I will.
The Spring Thing was a huge success and a great time was had by all. I really enjoyed meeting people from the forum and it was good to put faces to 'names'.
I'm really looking forward to next year, I'm sure we'll make it bigger, though better will be hard....lol.

19/03/2011

Today I brewed 50ltrs of 1.056 American Pale Ale with hops and pellets I've never used before. The day went smoothly apart from the pellet and cold break combo constantly clogging my copper filter on run off!...very annoying. Constantly scraping the break/pellet material off the filter finally let me run the beer to fv. The yeast was a little slow to get stuck into this one, almost 24 hours lag, but it went off like a train after that. This is another brew which will be entered into the Spring Thing competition, if suitable.

Pics, the grist, the mash tun, recirculating HLT sparge liquor to get even temps



Runnings meet pellets, rolling boil, break and pellet/hop combo



Next Brew Day 26th March, possibly a double brew day, not decided yet.

12/03/2011 IPA Brew Day

On the 12th of March the Brewery finally went back into action, and I brewed 50ltrs of 1.060 IPA. The brew day went very smoothly, I really enjoyed using the new stainless camlock fittings, just wish I'd have got them years ago. This beer was racked to secondary on the 19th and will be racked to corny and bottles next week. The bottles are destined for entry into a beer competition (The Spring Thing (see www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk)) if suitable. Next brew up, an American Pale Ale next Saturday.

17/02/2011

The Wherry is still conditioning, it will be tapped tomorrow.
Updates on the brewery:-
The new 40ltr conical has arrived, along with the fittings for both it, and the 120ltr conical. I will also be changing all the cpc disconnects on the brewery to stainless cam locks, they're soaking in cleaning solution as I type. I hope to get the brewery ship shape for a brew day on Sunday (touches wood). The conicals won't be Christened until the new temp controlled cupboard is built which may take a few weeks.

It's all go...at long last and there is light at the end of the tunnel :-)