SNB Brewhouse v3.5

Brewhouse v3.5

I’m so far behind on posts that this one is going to really cover three topics.  The main topic will be the construction and testing of my flat brewing surface currently known as SNB Brewhouse v3.5.  The other topics that will be lightly touched on are BSS aka Bitter Sweet Symphony Remixed and 35ish my annual “birthday” brew based on Kate the Great.  Grouping all these together actually makes sense as they are really all part of figuring out how to brew on a flat surface.

It had been almost 6 months since I’ve brewed a beer at my own house.  This was mostly caused by me stripping my previous system for parts for a new system while waiting for a flat brutus style stand to be built for me.  Almost a month ago I got tired of not being able to brew at my house so I jerry-rigged together a brewing setup (dubbed Brewhouse 3.5) using my old headboard and pieces from my various set ups.

Helping to pull valves

It was pretty fun building a new manual flat surface brewhouse. I’d been playing with pumps before to move water and wort to different places but always had the ability to use gravity for certain steps. Going to a flat surface meant learning how to move liquid exclusively with pumps.  To do this I needed to upgrade my hoses and connections to make moving wort more efficient.  On the connection side I looked into the one handed quick disconnects and triclamps but decided to go with cam & groove fittings similar to the ones Shawn uses. The side benefit is when I brew with him I don’t have to worry about modifying either setup to get them to work together! For this setup I relied heavily on Brewers Hardware for a great selection of fitting, included the wide bore 1/2" Cam and Groove Coupler X High Flow 1/2" Hose Barb.

The other thing moving to a flat brewing setup meant that I would need to finally transition from batch sparging to fly sparging.  I’ve been batch sparging as long as I’ve been all-grain brewing mostly because I didn’t have a HLT, well I had one (which will make its debut as a mashtun in Brewhouse 3.75) cut and drilled I just didn’t have it setup with the hardware.

Part of both learning to use pumps more efficiently in brewing and fly sparging meant valves valves and valves.  Whereas before I only had 2 I now have valves of all shapes and sizes. Using them all really gives the feel of working in a larger scale brewery.  It was also fun to get my daughter to help open and close valves.  Part of learning to use valves was learning where to put them in reference to pumps. Basically you never want to restrict the flow of liquid into the pump which means only placing valves after the outflow.

34th while brewing 35ish

The one disappointment about moving to new hardware was that the chill plate Bonnie got me for my birthday the previous year won’t work anymore.  It was designed to work with a hose barbs and a garden hose neither of which I could really adapt in my new system as you’ll see from the pictures.  I ended up selling it and a pump I only used for cooling water to my mom and stepfather.  I used the proceeds to buy a new larger 40 plate heat exchanger straight from Duda Diesel with 1/2" Male NPT to attach new fittings and a ball valve directly to it.

I still have some work to do in calibrating the new equipment and entering the values into BeerSmith for more accurate brewing.  I have been coming up a little short on my preboil gravity but making up for it in my boil at the cost of being under my post boil volume.  It would also help to brew some session level beers to help determine my new efficiency instead of the large beers I’ve been brewing.  I don’t want to spend too much time right now as my new brew (probably Westbennetteren 12 b3) will be on Brewhouse 3.75 (stand without automation) and I have a pretty good feel for how it is preforming in its 3.5 configuration

Before I jet, let me briefly talk about the two “calibration” beers BSS and 35ish.  BSS is the codename for Bitter Sweet Symphony Remixed which is a rebrew and retool of Bitter Sweet Symphony from last year.  I wasn’t happy with how it turned out as a lager so I switched it to WLP007 and changed the rice to brewer’s sugar. Currently it’s on a strange journey that I right now don’t know how it will end up.  35ish is my annual birthday brew based on the Kate the Great recipe.  It gains the “ish” this year as even though everything was set and ready to go on my birthday I wasn’t “physically able” to brew that day getting around to it a few days later on the 1st of January.  It’s currently in a keg for a long cold secondary.

Cheers

-SNB

Bitter Sweet Symphony

I created a Bitter Sweet Symphony
iTunes Genius playlist to listen to
It needed A LOT of editing

Every couple is suppose to have a "song" and I assume most of the time it's probably some happy-sappy love song.  That's not the case for Bonnie and I.  We first started dating in December of '97 while going to University of Puget Sound in Tacoma Washington. This happened to be right around the time when a little song called Bitter Sweet Symphony started getting airtime on the main alternative station I listened to. There was something about that song that we both really identified with which lead to it getting some pretty heavy playtime on my computers playlist.  It soon became apparent that it was our song, which was fortunate as given the time and young love it was something that could have gone very wrong.    Bonnie notes: "I have a lot of memories associated with that song and time in our lives; eating your special sandwich from the sub (the student union building), snuggling in the worlds smallest bed, hanging out in your dorm room etc."

So what does any of that have to do with beer?  Here's the story, I'd been thinking of retooling the BIG IPL recipe for a while, really spinning the concept of a Single/Double IPL into a new beer, but had not really been inspired by anything. Well, one day I was in the car listening to an old CD and rockin out to Bitter Sweet Symphony (which I often do) when it hit to me.  Bitter Sweet Symphony would be an incredible name for a beer, especially a hop heavy one like an IPL.

As soon as I had the name recipe ideas started flying through my head; would it be a IPA or IPL? Double of Single? What about an American Double Stout? For a while I had narrowed it down as a single IPL with the hop schedule of Sydnie IPA with the grist of BIG IPL scaled down.  That idea pretty much hit a brick wall one evening while I was enjoying a pint of Surly Abrasive.  The massive Citra flavor and aroma hit me like a freight train - Bitter Sweet Symphony needed to be a Citra forward IPL.  I knew that I had tons of Citra stockpiled so I hit the internet to see if I could any reasonable Abrasive clone recipes to use as a foundation to build Bitter Sweet Symphony from.

Cracked my last on hand can of
Abrasive to drink during cool-down

I found what looked like a pretty successful attempt on the Northern Brewer forum and with the notes on Abrasive on Surly's website I started to nail down what I wanted to do. I also reviewed the Surly Furious Pro Series Recipe to gain insight on Surly beers.  For base grain I would use the 2-Row I had on hand with a generous helping of Golden Promise.  I'd also included a couple pounds of oat to give it a smooths mouthfeel. To pull a little of my personality and brewing style into the beer I decided that instead of including Crystal malts, which would have been in the form of Crystal 20L, I would use a dash of Carared and in place of the brewers sugar I would use Rice to bump the ABV while keeping it light.  

Days before brewing I came across an interesting discussion on late hopping and the concept behind whirlpooling. The basic premise is to add hops at flame-out whirlpool and let sit for 80 minutes.  I wasn't fully on board with adding 80 minutes to my brewday but figured I would give it a shot with 30 and slowly creep up from there depending on if I'm pleased with the results.

If you saw the horrible chill plate setup that I jerry-rigged together for the 34 brewday you'll be pleased to know that I have gone back and made a few adjustments.  I'm still not fully where I want to be and will soon be picking up a router speed control to slow the flow of fluid through the pumps.  Shawn uses one on his chill plate setup.  Once in place I should be able to have more control over the temperature of the wort. 

I will now leave you with a little entertainment that helped inspire this post.  Recipe and pictures after the break as always.

 

Cheers

-SNB