For everyone involved and/or curious: I took a regular hydrometer reading last evening, which gave me ~1.011/1.010. So while not too far off, that is still significantly lower than what the Pill sees. Also, when taking some more time to observe, I realized that there is indeed still airlock activity going on. Now that I was sure there was still CO2 being produced, I then peeked under the lid and saw that the Pill had collected quite some dried trub on its waterline. After seriously sanitizing everything, I took it out, cleaned it and pitched it back, though that didn't result in more realistic measurements. So I guess it's down to a calibration issue.
What a stupid situation: The only at least halfway reliable measuring instrument after fermentation start remains the saccharometer, which requires a sample of 100 - 200 ml for each measurement, so you can't do this every day for an elongated period of time without losing significant amounts of product for a batch if this size. Only alternative would be a transparent fermenter like the FermZilla and leave the saccharometer afloat the whole time. Not sure if I like that idea.
At least I got a taste sample this way and I'm happy to report that there is nothing weird going on. It's not the biggest beer in the world, but summer is coming anyway, so that's only a half bad thing. I'll report back with pictures in a few weeks after conditioning. Cheers!
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The temperature fluctuated from 20.2 to 17.7° C in 10 hours. I don't know, is that much? Doesn't look too bad for me, but I'm not yeast. :D
I'll try agitating the beer a little to see if that sets anything free. It will sit in the bucket for at at least two more days anyway, so I'm not afraid of trub. If that doesn't help, I'll also take a look at the hydrometer, thanks for the suggestion.
I've got a BrewZilla Gen 4 35L. I don't know what you'd consider low efficiency, but the unit's default profile in Brewfather is ~76%, whereas the software calculated roughly 65% efficiency for the batch in question. I've got no idea though how that compares to the Braumeister 20L other than the values in Brewfather are rather similar.
What was a first was crushing the grains myself, but mashing on itself went fine. Looking back, I might have wanted to check for starch with iodine, which I even had available. Might do next time. I also might want to add though that I used 13.5 liters of strike water and did what from my understanding is a batch sparge (raising & draining the mash tun, then adding hot water from a second vessel with a jug) with another 15 liters at 80° C. Not perfect for efficiency, I know, but as described my pre-boil gravity was fine. I must just have been to shy on the heat while boiling.
In the back of my head, I have the number of 10% boiloff being desirable, which would match with your 1 hour boil observation.
My last point is that I'm afraid the beer might be too thin as in too much liquid for too few sugars dissolved in it. I didn't boil off enough water, so I did not concentrate the wort far enough to reach the desired post boil gravity.
Well, that or go to court for a movie collection. I'd phrase my statement differently, but I can see the appeal of the settlement.
No pressure, just a plain plastic bucket. I'd be happy enough to know if my fermentation really stopped, it just seems way too early with just roughly one day of activity.
Airlock activity is so little that it might as well be expanding air (the bucket sits in my garage without extra heating or cooling, subject to the temperature cycles visible in the graph). There is nothing really in the bucket the hydrometer could be stuck against on my opinion, but I‘d have to open it to check - which I’m reluctant to do because of infection risk, obviously.
Taste testing I didn’t think of until now, good thinking. Will do tomorrow. If it’s completely dry, the calculations must be way off. If there is still sugar in it, I assume it's non-fermentable stuff. I always forget if that's maltose or dextrose.
First off: Sorry for the link, apparently I can't upload images at the moment.
This is my first ride with a wireless hydrometer, so maybe this is just me not being used to having access to gravity readings all the time, having become a bit obsessed with the numbers. Looking at Brewfather on the other hand though, my gravity really hasn't changed for like 36 hours now, before reaching its estimated final value. Now I'm afraid that my fermentation has stalled, and as the gravity was never really high to begin with, I fear being stuck with something not only low in low in alcohol but also tasting thin & weak. This is supposed to be a "Klosterbier" (not a real beer style, but closest described as some sort of brown ale), with which I'd have preferred to err on the stronger side rather than on the weaker.
The main reason for the low initial gravity I believe is too little boil off: While pre-boil gravity was OK (Brewfather predicted 1.039, refractometer gave me 1.037, might even be considered to be within measuring tolerance), the post boil reading should have been 1.051 but was only 1.041.
After boiling, I took around half a liter of wort, chilled it down in a mason jar and added dry yeast, agitating it every now and then. The next day, I pitched now very agile yeast into the main bucket and fermentation started out perfectly. The ups and downs in the graph may just be results of krausen and/or condensate dripping back onto the RAPT pill or creating ripples in the wort surface. Now, I'm really asking myself what went wrong. I don't think I caught myself any infection, the bucket was properly sanitized as well as the collection vessel & I was very careful handling all of it. The yeast also very happily ripped through the major parts of the sugars, so I don't think it's a yeast issue either. My grain bill looks as follows:
- 2.25 kg (50%) — BESTMALZ BEST Munich — Grain — 15 EBC
- 2.21 kg (49.1%) — The Swaen Swaen Vienna — Grain — 10 EBC
- 40 g (0.9%) — Weyermann Carafa Special II — Grain — 1100 EBC
The performed mashing steps:
- Mash In — 38 °C
- Protein Rest — 50 °C — 40 min
- Beta Rest — 63 °C — 30 min
- Alpha Rest — 72 °C — 30 min
- Mash Out — 78 °C
I'm not sure what to do, or if I should do anything at all. I can live with the beer having 3.5% ABV like it has now probably. My storage is dark and reasonably hygienic, so I don't think I have to elongate the beer's shelf life that way. The alcohol might then even overpower the taste of the grains if I added table sugar or anything for another percent of alcohol. What I'm slightly concerned with though is overwhelming hop aroma because there apparently is not that much dissolved sugar to counteract the bitterness. Any suggestions?
Just to give an update on this: I bought the expensive posts as well as new lids from Ali Express. Now the kegs were way more expensive, but still a good deal I suppose.
I was reading GitLab's documentation (see link) on how to write to a repository from within the CI pipeline and noticed something: The described Docker executor is able to authenticate e.g. against the Git repository with only a private SSH key, being told absolutely nothing about the user's name it is associated with. If I'm correct, that would mean that technically, I could authenticate to an SSH server without supplying my name if I use a private key?
I know that when I don't supply a user explicitly like ssh user@server or via .ssh/config, the active environment's user is used automatically, that's not what I'm asking.
The public key contains a user name/email address string, I'm aware, is the same information also encoded into the private key as well? If yes, I don't see the need to hand that info to an SSH call. If no, how does the SSH server know which public key it's supposed to use to challenge my private key ownership? It would have to iterate over all saved keys, which sounds rather inefficient to me and potentially unsafe (timing attacks etc.).
I hope I'm somewhat clear, for some reason I find it really hard to phrase this question.
Will come back with a picture once there's something I can show off with ;)
I left the bottles alone, zero blasts so far. I already had to try one out of curiosity just recently, and it was mildly carbonated but went stale pretty quickly and had very little head retention. So it seems to me that letting them sit for another week or so is the way to go.
If you're using chlorine based bleach and don't rinse seriously, you risk introducing a serious off taste. Not saying you're doing it wrong, and obviously, it works for you. I just wanted to leave this here for people who come by and feel compelled to do the same.
Yeah I know. I ever only broke one bottle or so, and rarely - if ever - undercabonated, so I'd say that with ales, I'm pretty OK. :)
Doesn't alcohol lower the density of the liquid, so that a hydrometer reading should have to be corrected as well to some degree? You sure now better than I do, but that was my impression.
Other than that, do you have a source for the numbers you mentioned? Something were I can go look stuff up myself, e.g. when I'm about to brew something very different?
Being a total newbie in kegging, I recently bought some used soda kegs for cheap. Not knowing what to look for, these kegs later turned out to be of the CC variety. While this is not a bad thing per se, most accessories like the cheap Kegland spunding valves etc. only come with NC fittings, leaving me with the question of whether I should convert my kegs to Jolly kegs (from what I've read, that's basically a CC keg retrofitted with NC style gas & liquid posts).
Apparently, you can't just buy the cheap posts from Ali Express, as they have slightly different threads and/or shaft lengths, so I have to go with more expensive ones. These particular ones were recommended in a forum elsewhere and are reported to work. I'm willing to pay that price if need be, even though the cost for the modification is now about 50% of what I payed for the kegs.
One thing still bothers me though: On a CC keg, the PRV is integrated into the gas post, so it doesn't have one in the lid. Do I have to buy new lids (with PRVs) now as well? That would make the whole conversion completely uneconomical. Also, I'm rather unwilling to test my luck by pressurizing one of the kegs so much that the PRV should be triggered.
Happy to hear if anybody ever did something similar.
I'm not convinced the particular yeast strains make that much of a difference here. How did you measure your gravity though, what tool did you use & did you correct for alcohol? 4.5° is somewhere between my corrected and uncorrected readings. For the last three days, I read 5,9°Bx / 1.024 g with a refractometer, which Brewfather converted to 2.3° Bx / 1.009 final gravity when taking the fermentation into account. Your way, I'd have had to start secondary fermentation way earlier to leave some sugar behind. Doesn't sound like a bad idea though, saves just another bit of work and only needs me to get the timing right (and have reliable measurements of course).
Late to the party, but you are/were most probably looking at Kahm. tldr; mostly harmless.
In the past, I only ever did top fermenting styles. I had to depressurise my bottles sometimes even more than once (using swing top bottles, luckily, this is not too awful). Now I made a Vienna Lager and even though I can‘t even really cold crash the bottles (I have them sit outside at maybe 10°C instead due to a lack in fridge space), my secondary fermentation is way slower than I’m used to. Is that to be expected?
With ales, I opened the bottles the day after starting secondary, and it sometimes was a deafening bang already. Now, I waited maybe even two days and haven‘t got more than a shy little pop.
I used powdered sugar (mixed with sterile water 1:1) to feed the yeast in secondary fermentation because I didn‘t have anything else in the house when I found the time to bottle. Is that maybe an issue?
A friend of mine dumped me a bag of malts he had lying around for like five years. It’s a kit for a Klosterbier which was stored in a plastic bag sealed with a clip, sitting on a shelf in a typical household storage room, so neither totally dark nor in bright sunlight, and slightly below average room temperature.
I’m hesitant now to heat up water and waste energy, time, hop and maybe yeast on these malts because I’m skeptic about how many enzymes are left in there. Have you ever used grains that old? Maybe I should mix them with fresh stuff?
To save money and flavour, I got myself a grain mill. I thought this would be simple, but setting the grind/crush size seems to be even more difficult than in the world of coffee 🙈
So far I’ve learned that AIOs like my Brewzilla (Gen 4) like the crush a little coarser because the grain basket and overall construction restrict the flow of the wort already. Can anyone here confirm or refute that? Does anybody have that exact same system and care to share their preferred setting (or settings/tendencies, as different malts can be milled to different sizes)?
Last time I brewed at home, I had my fermentation bucket in my flat, where the heating pretty much took care about all thermal regulation I needed back then. As I now have kids, I don't feel comfortable doing that anymore for various reasons.
I have freed up some space in my garage now for brewing & fermenting, but I have no heating there. I'm OK though to go with the seasons, brewing beer styles where the yeast's preferred temperature roughly matches the weather. But now, my mind is occupied with the question of how to keep the temperature as constant as possible for fermentation: While a weather forecast of e.g. 15°C doesn't sound too bad for lager beers, it may easily get as cold as 5° at night, giving the yeast probably a rather bad time. As I also don't want to spend a fortune on a temperature regulated fermenter, I'd like to even out those mins & maxes passively. My thoughts so far circle around insulation (obviously) and thermal mass. Insulating the bucket itself seems like a nobrainer. But I think it also might work to build some cheap wooden enclosure, insulate that with Styrofoam, make everything somewhat airtight and add water bottles, rocks & bricks to fill up as much space as possible. That will of course do little should the weather change drastically, but so far, I think I'd stay way below max and above min temperature in there at all times. This way, I believe I could get a decent fermentation when the average outside temperature of night & day is right for a couple of days.
Is anybody here doing something like that or has experiences worth sharing otherwise?
P.S.: Addressing the elephant in the room: For now, fermenting under pressure is no road I want to go down. Buying a new fermenter, kegs, valves, fittings, hoses, CO2 bottles and either a counter pressure bottling system or even switching to drafting entirely is just too much right now.
My significant other doesn’t care nearly as much about coffee as I do, so we always have pre-ground supermarket coffee at home. Tastewise, it’s usually rather dull and bitter because apparently, that‘s what people expect coffee to taste like around here.
I wonder if there is a method/recipe that can compensate for those flaws. The Aeropress is pretty versatile, so going for lower temperatures and/or shorter extraction times comes to me as a natural first step in this investigation. Doing a pour over with this stuff feels like I‘m wasting precious V60 filter papers though tbh 😄
Any further suggestions? I own a V60, an Aeropress, a cheap drip coffee machine and the (in-) famous IKEA french press. My kettle only allows for adjustments in 10°C steps, but features a temperature display, so I can go reasonably precise on that end.
Cheers! ✌️
My grinder (Timemore Chestnut) isn’t of the super fancy kind that won’t ever produce any fines. So after some initial skepticism about the video’s topic, I was intrigued and gave it a try. And oh boy, does it make for a change in the result: Where I would normally set the grinder to 14 clicks, now I’m at 9 (where lesser is finer) and the coffee is still more on the sour side.
With the Aeropress, I’m experimenting with longer brew times, no big deal. Overall, I think I’m getting a more even, more efficient extraction with more strength per gram of coffee without the harshness you get when grinding too fine. But for pour over, I’m unsure if I should really go any finer. The bed already was sort of muddy the last time. Do you have any experience on the topic you’d like to share? Have you tried slow feeding, and if yes, are you still doing it, and are you doing it for everything or only certain brew methods?
I've got a reoccurring issue with all of the home servers I've ever had and because it happened again just today, now the pain is big enough to ask publicly about it.
As of now, I'm running some Intel NUC ripoff with a JBOD attatched via USB 3, spinning a ZFS sort of-RAID. It's nothing that special tbh. In the past I had several other configurations with external drives, wired via fstab to Raspberry Pis and the like. All of those shared a similar issue: I can't recall exactly when, but I figure most of the time after updates to the kernel or docker, the computer(s) become stuck at boot. I had to unplug the external drives just to get the respective machine up, after which varying issues occurred with drives not being recognized anymore and such.
With my current setup, I run several docker containers which have their volumes on subdirectories/datasets on the /tank mountpoint, and when booting the machine without the drives, some of the containers create new directories at that destination, which now lives on my main drive /dev/sda.
It's not only painful to go through the manual process with the drives, I only have access the machine when I'm home, which I'm not all the time. Also, it's kind of time consuming as I'm backup up data that I fear might become inconsistent along the way. Every time I see a big kernel update, I fear that the computer will get stuck in such a situation once again and I'm reluctant to do a proper reboot.
I know that external drives are not best practice when it comes to handling "critical" data, but I don't want to run another machine just in order to provide access to the disks via network. Any ideas where these issues stem from and how to avoid them in the future?
Hi!
Recently, I came across both EmuDeck and retroachievements.org. Playing a little Silent Hill and checking my achievements for the game at the website, I saw they only counted as "softcore", and reading up on the topic, I learned about something called "Hardcore Mode". In this mode, an emulator won't give you additional features of e.g. saving state etc., basically emulating the original experience as close as possible. I'm by no means a completionist, but I wonder how this would feel like. I haven't found any related setting in EmuDeck so far though and my googling skills fail me here. Does any of you folks have a hint where to enable that?
Hi!
I know that there is SPC x to open the scratch buffer, but is there also a similar shortcut to quickly close/hide it again? Of course I can always CTRL x 0, but that feels clunky.
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