Read on Twitter
I’m going to write about my friend who built this brewery in his barn. He’s my sort of person. Has his own little value system he lives by. He also built something really amazing. Not just the system, but the network of people who run it.
First off a Warning: I don’t know that much about beer stuff, so I apologize to people who rly know what they’re doing.
Anyway, the goal of this operation is to brew as much beer as possible as easily as possible so that we can hangout and have fun and not have to work.
Anyway, the goal of this operation is to brew as much beer as possible as easily as possible so that we can hangout and have fun and not have to work.
What I know about beer:
You take hot water, add to grains, cook for a while, move it all to a different pot, boil it, add hops. Move to another big container and ferment it. Then you keg it, add CO2 and there you go. You got some beer.
ALL OF THIS IS SUPER HARD AND ANNOYING
You take hot water, add to grains, cook for a while, move it all to a different pot, boil it, add hops. Move to another big container and ferment it. Then you keg it, add CO2 and there you go. You got some beer.
ALL OF THIS IS SUPER HARD AND ANNOYING
There’s all these steps where you can screw the whole thing up by forgetting to sanitize things. So you are constantly cleaning stuff and washing stuff and lugging it around all of this nonsense.
So you wanna make more at once. But that just means you have to clean more stuff.
So you wanna make more at once. But that just means you have to clean more stuff.
Now you also have to do all of this math on timing and grain mixes. You cant just kinda half-ass it, you have to know what’s going on and pay attention to things.
This is a big problem if you just wanna have a chill time with your friends.
So you wanna A U T O M A T E
This is a big problem if you just wanna have a chill time with your friends.
So you wanna A U T O M A T E
First problem we have is getting hot water out to the barn. Used to use propane tanks to heat everything, but that gets HOT in the summer and even in the winter. Also means you can’t automate, cuz it’s $ to automate things like gas valves.
So welcome our friend electricity.
So welcome our friend electricity.
We can use a hot water heater element to heat a big tank. To do that efficiently you need a PID controller to vary the voltage to an outlet. So you just go on the ol youtube and watch Goerge’s videos. This guy is the best, his style of teaching is great.
So you do a bunch of wiring work and then you get a cool looking box like this when your’e done that you can use to automatically mess with electric stuff based on temperatures.
Looks like the thread broke, so I’ll save it for some other writing another time!
So if you had some smaller pots you could just dump then into each other. But we don’t want small pots, we want big pots so we make more beer.
Enter first discipline: Moving water around. Pumps, valves, tubes. real satisfying stuff.
Enter first discipline: Moving water around. Pumps, valves, tubes. real satisfying stuff.
Basic system now:
HLT (Hot liquor tank): this is hot water, heated by PID controller. We set temp on controller to 170. It feathers the voltage to keep it dialed in. Top of pic.
Leads to Mash tun: You put grains in here + water to get sugar. Far left in pic.
HLT (Hot liquor tank): this is hot water, heated by PID controller. We set temp on controller to 170. It feathers the voltage to keep it dialed in. Top of pic.
Leads to Mash tun: You put grains in here + water to get sugar. Far left in pic.
