March 2, 2008

Yeast Pitching Calculator

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 10:11 am

http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html

February 29, 2008

Beer/Wine Blending calculator

Category: FSS Bitter,General Brewing — Josh @ 7:44 pm

I found the following calculator and used it to figure out what the ABV of my FSS is(or should be) after bottling

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/blending.asp

The adjusted ABV should be 4.2 % based on the SG of the beer before I added the priming solution. The SG measurement of the primed beer seems to have been off by quite a lot.

February 11, 2008

Random Beer Name Generator

Category: FSS Bitter,General Brewing — Josh @ 8:17 pm

Looking for a few things today I ran across the Random Beer Name Generator on www.strangebrew.ca I decided to name my latest brew Flying Squirrel Special Bitter. I hope the name is not already being used somewhere.

February 10, 2008

Strong Bad

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 3:54 pm

While I was brewing yesterday, I was listening to random mp3’s through jinzora. The song Full Throttle by Prodigy came on. It so reminded me of the following Strong Bad e-mail clip.

February 7, 2008

New Grain Mill

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 10:12 pm

I got tired of dealing with the local HBS. They have a nice selection at their store, but the proprietors have the personality of a rotting lump of hamburger. I got tired of being treated like shit when I spend my money. Sooo…I purchased a Barley Crusher grain mill. This thing runs sweet. I filled the hopper with Maris Otter and started cranking.. after about a minute I hooked up the drill.

I crushed 8 lbs of MO in less than 2 minutes. It would have been faster if I had hooked up the drill to begin with. I did not make any adjustments to the gap setting on the crusher. the roller gap is still set to .039 in/1mm. The crush came out much better than I have ever used before. I can’t wait to brew on Saturday.

November 10, 2007

Beer Beer Beer

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 11:50 am

I always loved the videos that they make over at rathergood.com. Check this one out.
Beer Beer Beer

September 18, 2007

Bottle priming references

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 7:47 pm

byo.com priming chart
A Primer on Priming

May 16, 2007

Ingredients Guides

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 5:55 am

Ingredients Guides from www.homebrewtalk.com

May 14, 2007

No Rise Sanitizing

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 5:12 pm

Idophor – http://www.bayareamashers.org/content/maindocs/iodophor.htm

May 12, 2007

Calculating Mashing efficiency

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 10:24 am

I realized that when I posted about calculating extract yield, that I forgot to explain how I calculated brewhouse effieiency. I use the same formula

S.G. = ((((DBCG – Mousture Content – 0.002) * Brewhouse Efficiency * 46.214) * 0.001) +1)

Except that I remove the variable for brewhouse efficiency. The forumla will then assume that the mashing efficiency is at 100%

S.G. = ((((DBCG – MC – 0.002) * 46.214) * 0.001) +1)

This will give us the theoretical maximum ppg of 1 lb of grain in 1 gallon of water. For example, Maris Otter Pale Malt.

S.G. = ((((0.805 – 0.03 – 0.002) * 46.214) * 0.001) +1)
S.G. = 1.035723422 or 35.7ppg

In my bitter 2 recipe I mashed 3 lbs. of Maris Otter Pale Malt, and 1 lb of Briess 10 L crystal malt collecting a final 2.5 gallons of wort at a S.G of 1.043 .

The theoretical maximum ppg of 10 L crystal malt is

S.G. = ((((0.75 – 0.07 – 0.002) * 46.214) * 0.001) +1)
S.G = 1.031333092 or 31.3 ppg

Now, using the formula from John Palmer’s How To Brew, we calculate the maximum theoretical points for our brew using the following formula

((ppg Malt1 x lbs Malt1) / gallons of wort) + ((ppg Malt2 x lbs Malt2) / gallons of wort) = Total Points

((35.7 x 3)/2.5) + ((31.3 x 1)/2.5) = 55.36

This is our theoretical maximum number of points per gallon.

In the wort for the Bitter 2 recipe the S.G was 1.043 or 43 ppg. If we divide our real ppg by the theoretical ppg this will yeild our percentage yeild.

43/55 x 100 = 77.75%