The Good, the Bad and the What?

[KopyKat]

I have just opened up my brewery at my newly remodeled house. It has been since last October since I brewed and that's way too long. It did give me a lot of time to dream up new concepts of brewing and try them today.

The Good! I had this idea of putting a medium-fine screen, large kitchen strainer in the boil for the last couple of minutes and catch the trub and remove it before chilling. It worked just great. Now, I didn't strain it out, I just gently moved it in a circle near the bottom of the kettle and then brought it out edgewise so as to not have wort splashing. The strainer came out with a layer of hops and proteins on it which I then tapped out and repeated until I came up with very little. I can see that even a flat screen would do the same thing. I had almost no trub in the bottom of the kettle when I drained into the fermenter. Anyone see a down side to this?

The Bad! During my time the brewery was closed, I got a 18" section of 3/8" Stainless tubing and had one end welded shut and ground smooth to make a thermowell. I used a two spout carboy cap with the side spout for a blowoff tube and ran the stainless thermowell down the middle one to the center of the wort. The wort was 63° and I set the Johnson digital control for 60°. A few hours later I checked it and was shocked to find that my wort temp was 53°!! What I failed to take into account is that the yeast had not yet begun to be active which would have generated both heat and circulation in the wort. So my deep freeze kept cooling until it reached the center of the wort and by then some of the wort was probably in the 40° range.

The What? Solution to the Bad? Me thinks I need to bend my tubing gently so that the end of the thermowell is parallel and against the inside of the fermenter so that the reading of temp is close to the edge. Anyone else run into this problem? Or did the rest of you have sense enough to not make this error in the first place.

 

[WBC]

When you have a large thermal mass to cool and you put the sensor in the middle of the uncirculated liquid it takes a lot of time to get the center down to the set temperature so what I do is to use a smaller mass to sense the internal temperature like a bottle of beer. Just tape the sensor to the smaller bottle which will cool faster and not let the refrigerator/freezer keep going as long as the larger thermal mass. Once the temperature is stabilized in the larger mass you could put the sensor in the thermal well to maintain it's temperature more exactly. The first 3 to 4 days is when you get the exothermic heat fron fermentation and the thermal well will control it better because the yeast is churning the liquid which acts to stir the beer and make temperature in the fermenter more uniform.