Hah! Barely up and a new message already. Who said anything about procrastination?
Oh. Wait.
That was me.
Getting ready to brew, with nearly all my stuff(*) in place. Most of said "stuff" can be purchased online these days; the days when home brewing was strictly limited to the well-connected are over. Well, no, you still need a connection but...whatever. Stuff.
(*) "stuff" is an ancient brewing term for "materials and ingredients".
Since I wanted to at least do some tinkering of my own, I decided to cobble up my own filter tun.
For the layman and -woman, here's quick-and-dirty run-down of the brewing process (to illustrate my level of savvy-ness as well as the importance of the filter tun -see step 4)
The filtering tun then. Being the simplest of filters, and the easiest to assemble yourself (myself, I should say, mustn't generalise my ineptness at DIY projects), it consists of two buckets, one inserted into the other. The inner bucket has holes in the bottom, allowing the wort to seem through the collecting solids into the outer bucket. The wort is drained via a conveniently installed tap.
So I purchased two 30l buckets (metrics only here, sorry 'bout that), one with a tap already installed. The other is just a plain bucket:
With the right tools in hand, I drew a grid on the bottom, with the intersections being the targets for my trusty hand drill.
I used a 2mm drill bit, which of course won't fit in the drill itself. After some swearing from my part, and some pitiful whining and moping, I fitted the drill bit with a wad of paper, which seemed adequate. Another reason why I didn't use a stainless steel bucket (hah! on purpose, I tells ya!).
After getting rid of the whiteboard marker lines and the swirly bits of drilled-out plastic, I ended up with...
...this! A 161-mesh, home made filter bed!
Insert into the outer bucket and you get something like this:
Some clever calculations reveal that about 5l of "foot space" exists between the two buckets. I'll probably need to fill that with hot water during the mashing (that's step 3 in the condensed outline above).
Whoohoo exciting! Next stop: the wort cooler. Some minor DIY required there, combined with clever trading skills I levelled up during the time I spent playing online RPGs.
Until next time!
Greetz
Jo
Oh. Wait.
That was me.
Getting ready to brew, with nearly all my stuff(*) in place. Most of said "stuff" can be purchased online these days; the days when home brewing was strictly limited to the well-connected are over. Well, no, you still need a connection but...whatever. Stuff.
(*) "stuff" is an ancient brewing term for "materials and ingredients".
Since I wanted to at least do some tinkering of my own, I decided to cobble up my own filter tun.
For the layman and -woman, here's quick-and-dirty run-down of the brewing process (to illustrate my level of savvy-ness as well as the importance of the filter tun -see step 4)
- acquire stuff (important!)
- mill malt (more on malt later, look here if you can't be bothered to wait.)
- steep milled malt in "hot" water to breakdown starch into sugar
- filter the infusion (called wort), discarding the leftover solids.
- boil the wort, together with hops
- cool
- add yeast, which will eat the sugar and convert it into alcohol and bubbles
- lager
- bottle
- drink (the main reason we're going through all this trouble in the first place)
The filtering tun then. Being the simplest of filters, and the easiest to assemble yourself (myself, I should say, mustn't generalise my ineptness at DIY projects), it consists of two buckets, one inserted into the other. The inner bucket has holes in the bottom, allowing the wort to seem through the collecting solids into the outer bucket. The wort is drained via a conveniently installed tap.
So I purchased two 30l buckets (metrics only here, sorry 'bout that), one with a tap already installed. The other is just a plain bucket:
With the right tools in hand, I drew a grid on the bottom, with the intersections being the targets for my trusty hand drill.
I used a 2mm drill bit, which of course won't fit in the drill itself. After some swearing from my part, and some pitiful whining and moping, I fitted the drill bit with a wad of paper, which seemed adequate. Another reason why I didn't use a stainless steel bucket (hah! on purpose, I tells ya!).
After getting rid of the whiteboard marker lines and the swirly bits of drilled-out plastic, I ended up with...
...this! A 161-mesh, home made filter bed!
Insert into the outer bucket and you get something like this:
Some clever calculations reveal that about 5l of "foot space" exists between the two buckets. I'll probably need to fill that with hot water during the mashing (that's step 3 in the condensed outline above).
Whoohoo exciting! Next stop: the wort cooler. Some minor DIY required there, combined with clever trading skills I levelled up during the time I spent playing online RPGs.
Until next time!
Greetz
Jo
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