Basic Brewing Radio
The Jamil Show
Brew Strong
And, I continue to listen and learn from the great people at my local homebrew club:
Ohio Valley Homebrewers' Association
What I've learned is, while I've been making pretty good beer, I'm ready to take the next few steps to improve what I'm doing.
The first improvement was Yeast Washing. I won't explain that here, because Don Osborn has explained that pretty well on his site.
The second improvement is the move to yeast starters. Jamil Z says it's the most important thing you can do to improve your beer. I rely on the Wyeast pages:
Wyeast Pitch Rate Calculator
Wyeast Pitch Rate chart
Wyeast Making a Starter
But most importantly, I listened to Jamil Z, especially the Yeast Starter episode on Brew Strong. And used his Pitching Rate Calculator.
The third improvement is going to be a refrigerator. My mom is moving to my hometown and buying a new fridge. So, she's donating her older fridge to us, which we'll put in our kitchen, then we'll move our much older fridge out to the garage for fermentation temp control. Yeah!
Finally (for now), the fourth improvement will be wort cooling. I built an immersion chiller out of 50 ft. of 3/8" copper tubing, and it has worked okay. But, in the spring/summer/fall, I just can't get the wort cooled down below 76-80F. In the winter it's better; our municipal water drops more than 10F; I think they switch to a different source. That's much warmer than I want to pitch even my ales.
So, my plan was to use the immersion chiller on tap water down to around 80-90F. Then, I changed the water source to a bucket of ice water, pumped with a small pond pump through the immersion chiller, and recycled back into the ice bucket.
I bought a small pond pump at Lowes.
That has a 1/2" ID outlet, so I bought some braided 1/2" ID hose, a 1/2"barb to 1/2"pipe adapter, and a 1/2"pipe to garden hose adapter, attaching these with teflon and a hose clamp. That allows me to connect to my immersion chiller easily, which has garden hose connections. Lowes didn't have those connections, so I got them at Ace Hardware, which didn't have the pump.
The tap water temp was down as of this week, so it's running at about 62.5F. I used the immersion chiller with the garden hose water and chilled down to about 65F pretty quickly. I used a sanitized spoon to create a whirlpool, so I had the whole thing chilled from boiling to 65F in under 10 minutes!!!!
I put about 10 lbs of ice in a cooler (my mash tun, actually, after cleaning it out). Then covered the ice with tap water, threw in the pump, connected the pump to the inlet side of my chiller, and dropped the outlet hose back into the cooler to recirculate. Turned it on, and got from about 65F down to below 60F in just about five minutes. The water was just trickling, it's not a strong pump, but it worked just fine.
Here's a pic of my setup. It's pretty simple. I wouldn't mind a stronger pump.
