FuzzyBrew

The Commercial Appeal had a nice story over the weekend — “Growing the Ghost: Memphis craft brewery doubling production capacity” — that looks at the current expansion of Ghost River Brewing.

An excerpt:

Asked about the demand for Ghost River beer, Chuck Skypeck opened a walk-in cooler roughly the size of a U-Haul truck box. It was bright, cold and empty except for a handful of half-kegs lined in a corner. “This is what we have right now. I mean, this is it,” said Skypeck, owner of Ghost River Brewing. “Most of these are paid reservations for our dock sales this weekend. So, right now everything we can possibly make goes right out the door. We’re really working at capacity right now.” But not for long.

Read the full story here.

Also, be sure to check out FuzzyBrew’s story from February on the Ghost River expansion, as well as our 7-part series of video interviews with Skypeck.

When it comes time to bottle the sweet nectar that is your homebrewed beer, the last thing you want to do is ruin it by breaking your bottles.

Well, we at FuzzyBrew have run into this problem. It came in the form of the metal bottle capper below. (You may find it online at places like this or this. Do not buy it.)

One bottling night I managed to break two bottles, while Grant broke at least one. The capper just didn’t have any “give.” Too much pressure when capping the beer snapped the top right off the bottles, forcing us to pour the beer down the sink. This made us sad.

So I was in the market for a new capper when my friend Ian happened to find one at his house that he wasn’t using anymore and kindly left it on my desk at work. (Thanks, Ian!)

She’s called Red Head Emily. She looks kinda like a crab. (See below.)

Emily’s a spring-loaded, high-quality capper made with rigid plastic. She has a magnet to hold the cap in place and has just the right amount of “give.”

Red Head Emily is easy to use, hasn’t broken any of our bottles and gets our recommendation.

The following is a guest post from Bluff City Brewers & Connoisseurs member Jon Korneliussen about his recent experiment using two chillers to bring wort temperature down post-boil for lagering. We’ve never used two chillers before — does anyone have any advice?

I’ve been brewing for about two years and have made eight batches of beer now. I am extract brewing, and steeping specialty grains to make a wider variety of beers. I do a partial boil of two gallons on my stovetop. Lately, I have been looking to add new techniques to my process, but am still not ready to make the leap to all-grain brewing (for a variety of reasons I won’t bore you with).

Last fall, I decided to dabble in true lagers, and wound up making a fairly decent Rauchbier. Things went fairly well for this batch, but I had difficulty cooling the wort to a pitching temperature of 54 degrees. Two hours after the boil, I finally lost patience and pitched the yeast at 59 degrees.

This winter, I set about to make things right. After much research, I decided the method to try was a two-chiller system, where the first chiller is placed in ice, and the second in the wort. Several brewer bloggers had pitched this as a way to quickly drop the temperature below tap water temperatures. I bought one chiller to use for ales, and borrowed a second (thanks, FuzzyBrew crew!) to complete the setup. After an hour of chilling, I made it to 62 degrees. Although this was twice as efficient as before, it was not the 20 minutes I was hoping for!

Days later, I pored over my beer notebook, looking for patterns. Lo and behold, there it was. On a previous batch of ale, I had placed the wort in an ice bath, ran the wort chiller through it, and brought it down to 75 degrees in 20 minutes. Adding 60-degree tap water over-chilled the wort, making it too cool to pitch ale yeast, and I had to let it warm up for a few hours.

Next batch I will try a variation on this technique. Prior to brewing, I’ll place three gallons of boiled water in the refrigerator to chill to 40 degrees. After the boil, I’ll cool the wort to 75 degrees using the ice bath / immersion chiller combination, then add the chilled water to lower it to 55-60 degrees. If I overshoot my target, I can add room-temperature water to bring the temperature back up. I’ll post a comment here to let everyone know if this worked.

Having decided on the best place to house my kegged homebrew, and having completed the handywork — as detailed in Part 1 and Part 2 — now we settle in for some electrical work and put the finishing touches on the keezer.

Here’s where I start to get more paranoid than normal.

With the collar built and decorated, now I need Grant to wire the Love TSS2 temperature controller.  By default, Sir Grantie has become the resident electrician here at the FuzzyBrew family.

It’s one thing to wire a small stir plate, as we have previously written about.  Quite a different animal to be wiring a temperature controller to a large appliance that will run 24/7 in the garage of your home.  I have faith in him, though.

Instead of buying the same controller Grant has on his fermentation fridge, I bought a different one (I wanted the temperature shown in Fahrenheit, not Celsius) which didn’t make things easier for him.  But, he was able to get it wired up rather quickly.  I’m going to leave out the technical details of where every wire went, but if you get in a jam, send an e-mail to grant@fuzzybrew.com.

We thought the hard part was over and started to drink some new beers we had collected. Ommegang Zuur, Ranger IPA, Odell IPA, Upslope IPA and Grant’s Nookie IPA stand out as highlights.

But programming the controller didn’t prove easy.

I had heard the instructions that come with this controller are lacking, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad.  A sample: Mode ONOFF1(On1)with rO=ind–Relay 1 with c1=dir—Temperature of probe 1>=SP1+r1–>relay 1 ON–Temperature of probe 1 <=SP1–relay 1 OFF.

Yup.

This was one of nine operating modes to choose from. Luckily, they all had accompanying graphs. So we had that going for us, which was nice.

Armed with a glass of ice water (acting as the chest freezer) and a lamp (acting as the heater), we headed outside in case it blew up.  The second it was plugged in, a piercing, beeping noise that you could feel in your molars was coming from the controller.

We didn’t even know these things made noise.

So 10 minutes later, we figure out how to mute it, which was just in time because baby Marvin was asleep directly above us.  For the next hour we tried many different strategies, but the night ended with little progress on the programming front.

I will say the directions become easier to decipher when you are sober and have reread them 20 times.  I’ve since figured it out, and I’m working with ClaudiusB over at homebrewtalk.com to figure an even more efficient program that will result in the freezer turning on as little as possible.  Thanks for all the help, ClaudiusB.

Now all I really needed to do was glue the piece of weather stripping to the underside of the collar.  I used silicone for this, which worked OK. I may have to redo this at some point because if I give it a little tug, it does come off.  I don’t open the lid that often, so it should be fine for now.

On our next brew day, I got an early start because I wanted to get the collar mounted to the hinges and actually install the temperature controller in the front face of the collar.

We actually were under the gun a little bit here, because we needed to transfer our 11/11/11 Wee Heavy (post coming soon) into the keezer so it could lager for another month.  Grant had two batches going into his fermentation fridge, and I had one going into my fermentation chest freezer, so we had to get this in the keezer.

So mid-brew day, we attached the collar to the hinges with some machine screws and washers. Next, we mounted the temperature controller to the face of the unit and ran the wire out the back of the collar.

Meanwhile, the temperature probe got put in a glass of water inside the freezer.  We mounted the three-prong outlet that is wired to the controller into a junction box, which was then mounted to the back outside part of the collar.

We did a quick test to make sure that our hot and cold side programming for the controller was correct.  I will admit that I’m a huge believer that happiness is mostly found in appreciating the small things in life, but I’d be lying if I said our reaction to it working correctly wasn’t partly influenced by homebrew:

When the first beer was ready to be kegged (black witbier), I drilled a hole in the back of the collar for the gas line. I decided to keep the tank on the outside of the unit, basically to maximize my space on the inside. 

Mike was nice enough to be our homebrew mule and pick up a used 10lb-CO2 tank (along with a bunch of other random stuff) from Rebel Brewer while in Nashville for work.

Here are some pics of the finished product:

For the most part, this baby is up and running. 

I’ve got a black witbier and a robust porter on tap.  The hump is filled with some beers I’m going to try and keep around for at least a year. 

In the near future I’d like to mount a small computer fan on the inside to help circulate the air. From what I’ve read, when there are four kegs on the floor, the air doesn’t circulate and it is much colder on the floor versus the top of the unit, which could result in the bottom portions of the kegs freezing. 

Also, I might have to hook up some kind of heat source on the off chance that it gets insanely cold in the garage and dips below freezing. But I’m hoping I can make it through the winter and put that off a year.

The total cost for the project, minus the kegs, CO2 tank and regulator, was roughly $375, which is definitely a big initial cost for kegging your beer.  But, not having to scrape labels off bottles anymore or bottle an entire 5-gallon batch of beer is pretty huge. 

Not to mention the child-like grin I have on my face every time I step up to the tap.