As expected, the maiden voyage of my “The Electric Brewery” system pointed out several flaws in the current setup, not to mention, reminds me that no matter how many times I read a set of instructions, I’m going to mess some things up.

Before the brew day really even officially began, I made a big mistake… As I stepped away for lunch, I turned off the HLT recirculation pump but forgot to turn off the heating element. This resulted in the water touching the PID temp probe to cool way down past the setpoint. As you can imagine, the PID thought it needed to catch up, so the element turned on and stayed on. The full 20 gallons in the HLT was nearly boiling by the time I made my way back to the brewery. It takes a really long time for 20G of 200ºF water too cool down to 148ºF…

When the HLT cooled down, we started the mash and discovered that the HLT coil is so tight, that the water inside the coil forms a column which makes it impossible for the wort inside the coil to hit the setpoint. Compounding the effect was the recirc output at the top of the HLT. It was spraying the returned water into the open air (pointed at the side of the inside of the pot). Even with the lid on, this seemed to be causing a fair amount of heat loss. I temporarily, kind of solved both problems by using a hose for the return (instead of the weldless bulkhead input) and pointing it directly at the coil. This quickly improved heat transfer to the wort inside the coil, allowing the mash temp to finally reach the setpoint after having been stuck well below it for around 30 mins.

ABRUPT ENDING! I’ve had this post in progress (minimized and lonely) for exactly 1 month (started 10/13… it is now 11/13) and at this point I’m on the verge of my second brew day, so I’m giving up on this post, since you’ll read more about the improvements I’ve made in my next post.

Cheers!

I’m hoping to move them off of the conventional Agway layer feed pellets and onto a homemade feed mix next spring, but I have a lot more to learn before then. The hardest part is finding a place to buy all the bulk ingredients that make up a healthy balanced feed. For now, they are enjoying supplemental home grown mealworms and scraps from the kitchen.

For more frequent updates on our chickens, follow me on Instagram.

(Read on)

The hops came to me within a day or two of being picked, so they were very fresh and still had a lot of moisture content. This, of course, needs to be removed before storage and use. I did some quick research and learned that they need to be dried in temperatures no greater than 100ºF. This is because some of the volatile hop oils and compounds (which are important for flavor and) will start to vaporize at higher temps.

I had previously ordered a variation of the super popular STC-1000 digital thermostat when it showed up on sale on HomeBrewFinds. This thermostat can be found online for as low as $6 when ordered from Chinese eBay stores. I didn’t want to wait 3 months for that, so when the $13.50 listing showed up on Amazon Prime with fast shipping, I jumped on it. I think that is a great deal when compared to the $60+ digital controls out there. So anyway, I didn’t know what I’d be using it for at the time, but when these hops showed up, I knew I’d use it to whip up a simple hop dehydrator.

With parts I had laying around, I was able to wire up a simple temp controlled relay. All it took was the STC-1000, some wire, a used extension cord with the end cut off, and a spare wall power outlet. The STC came with a “waterproof” thermocouple (temp probe).

With the unit assembled, I plugged in the cheap food dehydrator (for the second time in the long time we’ve owned it) to act as the kiln. Since the dehydrator only had 1 heat setting (on) and was far too hot for my purposes, I programmed for a conservative 90ºF. This is because I was anticipating hotspots, since I was really cramming the hops in there and limiting the air/heat circulation. All 5 layers of the dehydrator were fully loaded. I probably should have just done the drying in two batches, but in the end it worked out.

After running all night long, the hops were nice and dry. Although some hops along the outer edges of each layer were a bit less dry, I was satisfied. I divided them into 1oz batches and bagged them into freezer bags, pressing out as much air as I could and was left with an even 4 ounces total!

Where to go from here? The packages of hops are stored in my freezer while I plan out a recipe to use them in. I’m planning on a SMaSH recipe. SMaSH stands for “single malt and single hop” so I can only use one type of malt and one type of hop. This will really showcase the Nugget hops and help me build the perfect recipe over the years as I continue to receive these hops from grandma!

Stay tuned for the recipe and brew notes!

Brewery Update

So the brewery build is back on track. Since the last post, I ripped up the bamboo laminate flooring and molding in the basement brew room, and rented and used a concrete floor sander from Home Depot to remove the existing paint on the floor. This weekend is Labor Day weekend and I have a lot of work to do. I need to finish cleaning up around the edges where the concrete sanding left behind a bunch of muck. After that I’ll be putting down a coat of garage floor epoxy that I got custom mixed at Lowe’s to match the color scheme I want for the brewery.

I’m going for a super sleek/modern industrial look not unlike the awesome basement brewery designed by Kal, the creator of The Electric Brewery (the instructions I used to build my control panel). I’m also pulling on a lot of inspiration from all the other Electric Brewery setups out there. Even the names of the Valspar paint color swatches are pretty badass: “High Speed Steel” and “Polished Silver”. These colors are going to really make all the stainless steel equipment “pop”. Those toys I mentioned earlier included diamond plating outlet and switch covers, as well as some really nice looking brushed aluminum sheeting that is going to make a kickass backsplash on the wall behind the kettles. More on all that next week so stay tuned.

Portable Brewery

The basement brewery project is a huge undertaking and I really won’t be able to use it until everything is done and in place. At this point, that’s looking like it could still be a few months out. In the meantime, I’ve been actively researching many other areas of homebrewing. I’m playing around with a lot of stuff around automation with Raspberry Pi and Arduino. I also recently learned about PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) which is really interesting to me and I’m sure you’ll be seeing a post about all that soon. Anyway, back on track.

One of my goals that is running parrallel to my goal of the basement brewery is the idea of also having a very portable electric brewery that I could potentially take with me and brew at a friends house or at a local brew day. Obviously the 3 kettle 20G HERMS system isn’t going to be leaving my basement without something short of a U-Haul. The goals of the portable brewery are:

1. Uses 120v electricity to brew a 5G batch (5G in the keg)
2. Completely modular- can be used in more than one way
3. Supports 2 pumps with standard outlets (separate on/off switches)
4. Uses a single temp probe and PID for auto-tuning precise tempurature setpoints
5. Small footprint, portable
6. Keep it simple, stupid!

So there are several pieces to this setup; the control panel (the brain!) and the separate modules. Right now the pico panel is in a non-working state… I have some debugging to do to diagnose what is going on with the solid-state relay which appears to not be working. For point #2, an example of another way to use this would be a sous-vide in the kitchen (this adds to the importance of a small footprint for the panel), which would involve a smaller heating element plugged into the panel, and a very tiny recirculation pump. Modular brewing options would be the RIMS tube or a brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) pot. Another whacky use would even be to apply this to the cold side of brewing. The PID is just as capable of turning a fermentation chamber on and off according to the low set point as it is for turning a heating element on for mashing/boiling! How cool is that?! Another modular piece of the equation is that the support for “pumps” is really just a couple of auxiliary outlets with switches, so you could plug a fan in there if that applies to the task at hand, or whatever you need. I’m currently thinking through how to make one of the auxiliary outlets have 3 modes: on, off, and auto. The “auto” setting would fire along with the heating element, but still let you switch it off if needed. We’ll see though, because it has to align with goal #6!

Here is the Pico Panel build and it being used as a sous-vide controller:

DIY RIMS Tube

RIMS is a type of electric brewing system whereby the wort is heated directly during the mash as it is pumped over a heating element. This eliminates the need for a dedicated hot liquor tank, making it more portable and cheaper than a HERMS. In HERMS, you typically have 3 vessels, a mash tun with no heat applied directly, a hot liquor tank with heating element and a coil which the wort is pumped (circulated) through without contacting the hot water directly (the water is kept at mash temp by the element), and a boil kettle with heating element.

I found an old thread on the HomeBrewTalk forums for a cool design made out of regular stainless steel pipe fittings and opted to go that route rather than buying a pre-made shiny RIMS tube. I like the idea of being able to customize it however I want by unscrewing a fitting or two and maybe adding something in-line or making a change. The fittings are all 1.5” NPT 304 stainless. This thing is super beefy and I’m a little worried that will make it difficult to heat on 120v, but we’ll see. I sprung for a tri-clover to 1.5” NPT fitting so I could use a tri-clover heating element enclosure for easy cleaning. I really need to be able to easily dry the element after a brew because they are known to rust if left damp. The heating element I already had from the souse-vide doesn’t want to fit nicely inside the RIMS tube, so I’ll need to order another one, which is tricky because the product listings on Amazon for these things are notorious for being inaccurate. I really need an Ultra-Low Watt Density element to prevent scorching and to reduce the likelihood of an accidental dry-fire explosions (turning on the element without liquid on it to dissipate the heat) which are guaranteed on the high watt density elements.

Well this blog post took way too long to finish (I started on 8-29 and minimized it until today, 9-5) so I’m going to end it here, but stay tuned for more updates.

Find out which version of Java you are using:

java -version

This is probably 1.6 if you are on Mac OS X. That was my case, and I needed 1.7 for ElasticSearch.

See where your Java lives:

which java

This is probably /usr/bin/java if you haven’t monkied with your native install.

Download JDK 1.7

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html

I restarted at this point but my symlink (which java) didn’t update. It seems like kind of a shitty way to get what you want, but setting your JAVA_HOME environment variable will now point your scripts to the right version:

export JAVA_HOME="`/usr/libexec/java_home -v '1.7*'`"

This sort of stuff seems to come up anytime you mention JDK or JVM being a dependency of anything. Sweet dice…

read on for my reasoning behind this terrible downsizing

After spending a year building an Electric Brewery control panel on my own, and just barely having seen it come to life before moving, I’m already looking to downsize the system. Here are some of my reasons, which I’m writing down partly because I’m still trying to convince myself it is the right choice.

1) Our house is far from my workplace now. So what, right? Well one of my favorite parts about brewing was having friends and coworkers over and having a great brew day. One of the trade-offs of moving this far away for our dream house was that those friends likely won’t be making the trip for brew day anymore. I don’t blame them. It’s over an hour by train and nearly as long in weekend traffic when driving.

2) Since I take that hour+ long train ride to work now, I won’t be off-loading kegs of homebrew for the office keggerator any time soon. That leaves me with 3 kegs of beer after every brew day. What am I supposed to do with all that?

3) Trying to get through 15 gallons of beer after each brew session would require me to only brew once in a blue moon. My favorite part of brewing is the experimentation and exploration involved – trying creating new recipes. But sometimes, experiments fail. In fact many of my homebrew experiments have failed. Hell, I think I have 30 gallons of (probably) ruined/gross/meh homebrew in various states around my house (in the keggerator, in the breezeway sitting in carboys since the move, in kegs in the closet, in old bottles somewhere in the moving boxes) and I know I’ve dumped that much down the drain early on. With the 20 gallon system, my minimum brew size would have been around 10 gallons, but more likely 15 gallons would be the average batch size. That is a lot of beer to mess up.. there is more on the line with the large system. I got cocky and made my system too big for my level of experience (although I planned to grow into it).

4) By selling just one of my kettles, I’ll be able to get three new ones of a more reasonable size. Good news is, stainless steel doesn’t really lose value in the homebrew world. I really like the MegaPot 1.2s, so I’m planning on going with those again, but in the 8 gallon size. The remaining two pots I’ll still sell, and hopefully with a piece of that I can afford a decent fermenter. Like a small conical or a couple of the new stainless steel “bucket” style fermenters which have a slight cone at the bottom. I really think not fermenting in stainless is the last major problem with my brewing (causing minor off flavors).

So there you have it. I’ll be downsizing to an 8 gallon electric HERMs brewery. Yes, of course I’ll still use my amazing control panel. Seriously, it took over a year to build.

Cheers!

In just three days I’ve organized our garage (it was a disaster), built a solid workbench, got my hydroponics experiment working, started a new colony of Black Soldier Flies, and built a really nice door for the chicken coop. Keep reading for quick summary of each of these projects along with pictures.

Chicken Coop Door

Up until now, the coop run (the open area outside the “cabin”) has been fully enclosed with hardware cloth, including the spot where a door should be, making it impossible for me to get in there without removing staples and getting cut by the sharp edges of the mesh. So after a couple weeks of planning, I acquired the tools I needed to make a good door.

Having just moved to this, our first house, from a series of apartments, my tool collection was lacking some woodworking essentials. Having a lot of difficulty with squaring up joints in previous projects, this time I picked up a variety of different clamps to get the job done right. My two new 48” pipe clamps might be my new favorite tools. These things are super handy and strong.

As you can see in the photos, I squared everything up and clamped it all down tight. I decided it would be too difficult to try to toe screw the 1”x4” pine boards at the corners, so I ended up relying on small pieces of 1”x4” cut with 45° ends for a good connection. I screwed those to the frame and it turned out to be really sturdy and, best of all, square.

After that, the frame was ready for a layer of hardware cloth, which was stapled down liberally for a tight and flat bond. I added more of the diagonal pieces of 1”x4” on top of the hardware cloth, sandwiching it between the two layers of the frame. This gave the door a ton of rigidity and a classic barn style.

To attach the door to the coop I had to add a few new studs for support and to put the hinge on the correct plane so the door would be flush when closed. I used a heavy duty Stanely spring-loaded hinge, the same as the one on the back door of the coop’s cabin. The hinge is spring-loaded so it will close (at an adjustable speed/force) if accidentally left open.

Overall, the door turned out way better than I expected. I outdid myself on this one. All that is left is adding a latch and a few coats of paint!

Workbench

My favorite aspect of home-ownership, after years of renting apartments, is having the space for doing all these projects. A solid, rugged workbench is a must for somebody who stays as busy as I do. Previously I had been doing all my projects (like building an Electric Brewery control panel) on an IKEA table covered with a layer of cardboard… not exactly ideal for banging on things and just generally making a mess of things. After a lengthy garage clean-out, there was a lot of space to fill, and a workbench fit the bill.

I expected to spend a lot of time planning, but I came across a great design with complete plans almost immediately with some quick Googling. The plans turned out to be extremely well thought-out, as they produced close to zero waste. Luckily, I had all of the building materials I needed which were leftover from the coop build. I highly recommend the plans for this workbench if you’re looking to build one yourself.

The materials and the cost breakdown:

16 x 2”x4”x8’ stud (about $3 ea.) ($50) 1 x 4’x8’ plywood board ($15) 1 x 4’x8’ peg board ($17) 1 x 1lb of 3” deck screws ($10) 1 x 1/2lb of 1.5” deck screws ($5) 1 x Hanging shop light enclosure ($30) 2 x T8 shop light bulb ($5) 1 x Metal housing power strip ($23) Misc peg-board accessories ($20) Total Cost: $175

Hydroponics

I finished a project that had been stalled after finding an item in my house while unpacking some moving boxes that would work perfectly as a media guard. Previous attempts at making a media guard that would keep the HydroCorn from getting sucked into the bell siphon had failed, but this new two-stage design seems to work well.

I wrapped some mesh-like fabric around the PVC media guard from the last attempt and secured it with rubber bands. The fabric is longer than the guard and that is on purpose; it kind of folds in toward the bell siphon, creating a barrier along the bottom (as opposed to just the sides). The new piece of the equation came in the form of a cheap pencil holder from IKEA. It already had holes in it and, best of all, had a bottom unlike the PVC. I cut a whole to fit the drain through and placed it between the seal of the growbed, making a water tight seal that would also hold the media guard in place. Part of the fault of the PVC filter alone was that it would be pulled up when the HydroCorn would float as the water rose. This design keeps it pressed firmly to the bottom of the bed.

I’ll do more hydroponics updates in the future, as I’m hoping to integrate a tank with many goldfish to make it a true small-scale auquaponics ecosystem. My first attempt failed, resulting in the loss of 14 goldfish.

Upcoming posts

In the next post, I’ll give a tour of my Black Soldier Fly harvesting strategy, which is more of an experiment right now.

I added a couple simple supports to mount the roost to. There are two roosts (and the smaller one from their old brooder) made from a branch of the tree I had to cut down while building the roof of the coop. I think it is better to use a natural roost instead of the other option of making them out of 2’ x 4’ lumber.

I also set up a new hanging feeder since they outgrew their chick feeder weeks ago. This one hangs from the ceiling to just a few inches off the floor of the cabin and helps prevent the feeder from being filled up with bedding and waste.

I finished enclosing the entire run with hardware cloth (better than chicken wire), but I didn’t tackle making the main door so I just temporarily stapled hardware cloth right over the opening. Unfortunately this means I can’t get in to the run until I’m ready to install the door.

There is definitely still a lot to do. Primarily the front door, but also the nest box needs to be finished and the area around the coop will need some landscaping. I’m contemplating which kinds of shrubs and mulch to use. The area gets mostly shade during the day. I also plan to build a removable sandbox for the girls to take their dust baths in.

Stay tuned for more updates!

This weekend was mostly spent on the cabin part of the coop (as opposed to the larger, open “run”). This is where the chickens will roost at night. I decided to line the floor of the coop with linoleum flooring, to protect the wood from absorbing any of the nasty smells/fluids from the chicken waste. It should also make it much easier to clean out periodically.

The front of the coop has a window to let in some natural sunlight and allow for needed ventilation in the summer. I covered the window with hardware cloth (strong chicken wire) from the inside, but will add a sheet of clear plexy-glass before the fall/winter season for weather proofing.

The entire back side of the coop is a swinging door with a really beefy hinge (spring-loaded to prevent the door from remaining open) and latch. This door is essential for cleaning out the cabin and is the only way a person can get into the coop.

The siding is all tongue & groove boards which makes for a very time-consuming build. I’m not complaining though, my father-in-law Chuck had it left over from his house build and gave it to me for free! Similar boards at Lowe’s run about $10 each. Each! I would have just left it at plywood if that was my only option, but I had so many of these boards left over that I figured this would be well worth the extra effort. I love how the siding looks, with its nice horizontal grooves, it really adds to the desired “barn” look. Of course the “barn door red” paint with white trim really paid off too!

Stay tuned for more updates on the coop.

Going a little deeper, you’ll find that the partial! method will pass any data you give it along to the view (the unrecognized hash keys will be available to the view as local variables of the same name). In the following example, I simply pass a custom variable, exclude, into the call to partial! and use it as a condition in the photo partial view. Obviously this will grow cumbersome if you are nesting partials more than a couple layers deep, but for my use, it works quite well.

# In `users/_user.json.jbuilder`:
json.(user, :id, :name)
json.photo do
  json.partial! 'photos/photo', photo: user.photo, exclude: [:user]
end

…

# In `photos/_photo.json.jbuilder`:
json.(photo, :url, :caption)
unless exclude.include?(:user)
  json.user do
    json.partial! 'users/user', user: photo.user
  end
end