The project that started this whole new home brewery was the modified "brewhouse".When I started brewing I used a cajun burner with one pot. Since I am not a welder by any means I needed to have someone do the fabrication when I stepped to a single tier all grain system. Brad, is a friend of a friend who last year helped me construct this...
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It wasn't pretty but... What did you expect from a beer that has been "conditioned" for 4+ years.If you have tried this beer post your comments about your experience.... That is if your still alive to talk about it.Checkout the video revi...
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We made a blackberry lambic recipe in the summer of 2004. We followed the recipe to the letter and like some other things in life my gut did not feel right following the recipe exactly. However, I thought "we have never have made a recipe like this maybe I should just do it". So we did. We added a second yeast addition, just like the recipe said and that is where I believe we went wrong.So fast forward to four years later, and...
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We (Adam, Ira, Tobias, and Matt) did a fair amount of work on the brewery components tonight. Pictures will follow here in a few days.We have most of the cold box completed we only need to caulk a few seams, paint the outside of the box and put on casters and affix the heat exchanger to the inside of the box.We also started the cart that the glycol chiller will sit on. This will be somewhat complex in order for the glycol reservoir...
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Rain is great for the growth of our hops but we cannot work on the brewery then...what a dilemma.Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBe...
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Here are a few pics to update the Glycol Chilled Conical. We are improving the straps to hold the coil against the bottom of the cone. We were torn on where to put the coil for two reasons. One the Blichmann Conicals do not allow you to place coils around the top part because of how the legs are attached, and Two because we will not always...
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This is the physcial construction part of the cold box. Ira is doing a great job of the automation and control side. I included some basic pictures of the framing and will add more as we go along. The frame uses 1/2" plywood and 2x4's to create the backbone of the structure. Essentially it will be a box within a box. The inner box consists...
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I wanted to include some pics of the first year hops. We purchased rhizomes back in March but they were not mailed to us until the 2nd week in April so we were rushed to get them in dirt. It is obvious which of the rhizomes was the largest. One of the roots is already creating a 12" bine.The new hop rhizomes for 2009 include Nugget, Glacier,...
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Last Saturday, May 9th, I went to check on the hops we are growing. There is both first and second year plants that we are growing at a local nursery. The first year plants are still in the greenhouse and the second year plants are on a trellis that we put together outside. The seond year plants went from 12 inches to up to 7 feet in those...
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I feel as though an insane amount of planning has gone in to putting our ultra home brewery together. Each person that is contributing to the brewery has their own specialty. Today I met with Brad, who is fabricating and welding the core of the brewery. I plan on bringing him in as a part of this blog in the future. I wonder how many other homebrewers have felt this way as they plan an exciting project like this. You feel...
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A few of the other guys have tackled the task of construction of the brewery and i have concentrated on the automation of the fermenation process. So far i have created the logic which will be used for both the cold box and the Conical Fermenter controlling the heating and cooling process.The idea is to make the system as flexible and easy...
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So it's been a few weeks sense the planes where posted and we have made some progress and i have just been slow to post it. The Cooling Coils have been placed on to the Conical or as i like to call it 27 Gallons of goodness. For this 50' of flexible copper tubing was used to form around the base of the conical.We chose to coil the base of the conical rather then the top so we could make a smaller batch and still cool the system....
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My fist adventure in radio! I started off by building a Hartley oscillator with one transistor and then amplitude modulated a signal with a second transistor. I then built an AM receiver schematic I found and calculated the tank circuit for the 50 MHz band.Understand that this transmitter is extremely simple and haphazardly thrown together,...
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A while back I put my email in for a chance to be a beta tester for Quake Live. Long since forgotten I got an email today asking me to try it...Quake Live is a free (ad-supported) browser based first person shooter in development by id Software. It only supports Windows right now (IE and Firefox) but will eventually support Linux and Mac.No...
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You should always be careful when connecting to a public WiFi connection, you don't want to end up like these poor saps at the Defcon convention. I'm sure you have found yourself in a situation where you had an overzealous network filter block websites on a public connection (like at a library, work, or school). Or perhaps you don't quite...
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Well, today is the day that the small brewery, in a small town, in an even smaller garage started... to get a bit bigger (yea we had a smaller brewery before). To make the brewery bigger plans had to be made. We needed a new brew process capable of brewing higher volumes of beer and a new fermentation process capable of creating more consistence...
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This tutorial assumes you are using Debian based linux, such as ubuntu, and you have a server set up with root privileges on a home connection.Update: Your router might already have Dynamic DNS functionality built it, specifically for the DynDNS service. If you can use that instead it will save yourself a lot of trouble! If not, read on and...
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"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." Andrew S. Tanenbaum, computer science professor When Benjamin Franklin made his conjecture regarding the direction of charge flow (from the smooth wax to the rough wool), he set a precedent for electrical notation that exists to this day, despite the fact...
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Because it takes energy to force electrons to flow against the opposition of a resistance, there will be voltage manifested (or "dropped") between any points in a circuit with resistance between them. It is important to note that although the amount of current (the quantity of electrons moving past a given point every second) is uniform...
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The circuit in the previous section is not a very practical one. In fact, it can be quite dangerous to build (directly connecting the poles of a voltage source together with a single piece of wire). The reason it is dangerous is because the magnitude of electric current may be very large in such a short circuit, and the release of energy...
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As was previously mentioned, we need more than just a continuous path (circuit) before a continuous flow of electrons will occur: we also need some means to push these electrons around the circuit. Just like marbles in a tube or water in a pipe, it takes some kind of influencing force to initiate flow. With electrons, this force is...
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