Dialing in your process

When you first start brewing it's all guesswork.

There's a lot of numbers involved in brewing. Efficiency, volume, gravity, boiloff, time, and many many more. You need to know these things when you brew, but you'll only know them when you start brewing, so you guess. You use rules of thumb, estimates, and calculations to achieve approximate numbers that you can use to estimate your results. And then you brew with those numbers. If you're lucky, they're close enough to true values that you end up with decent beer. When you're just starting, "decent beer" is great, and you get convinced it's the best beer you've ever tasted. So that's fine.

As you grow more proficient as a brewer, though, you start noticing certain things. The OG is consistently a little low, the color is a little off, the attenuation is not what you were looking for, the beer is decent but it's not great, etc. At first you attribute this to mistakes in the particular batch, then you start blaming inconsistencies in the process. But after you improve the process, and repeat it consistently, it becomes a nagging feeling that you're missing something else. Eventually, you start looking at the underlying assumptions that you base your process on, and try to modify those assumptions to fit the factors of your particular system. This is called "Dialing in" your process.

For me the trigger was realizing that my OG is consistently two points lower than the recipe expected. This mean that the water to sugar ratio in my wort was slightly off. IE, I either had too much water, which meant my boiloff wasn't as much as I thought, or I didn't have as much sugar, which meant that the mash efficiency wasn't quite what I thought. Of the two, boiloff is the easier to measure, and is relatively constant. So lets start there.

There's two ways (that I can think of) to measure boiloff:
The first involves simply measuring how much liquid you had at the beginning of the boil, versus how much you have at the end. The difference is the stuff that boiled off. Simple in theory, but can have unforeseen problems. For example: If you use an immersion chiller, like I do, you need to put it into your wort 10-15 minutes before the end of the boil in order to sanitize it. Since you have to measure at the end of the boil you will either have to allow for the volume of the chiller (bigger than it looks) or take the chiller out (which negates the point of putting it in to sanitize in the first place. ) You can measure after you chill, of course, so long as you account for the shrinkage due to temperature drop. In my case, since I measure with a ruler stuck in the wort, this was not an option. I simply wasn't going to stick an un-sanitized, sugar coated metal rod into my wort.

The second method to measure the volume is calculating posthumously. That is, using the numbers you get to calculate what the boiloff was. This works as following: Lets say after I finished my sparge with 32Liters of 1.042 wort. After I boiled and cooled I sampled my wort and came up with an OG of 1.050. The amount of sugar did not change during the boil, only the amount of water. Therefore I can say this (Ov*Pg)/Og = Fv Where Ov is Original volume, Pg is preboil gravity, Og is Original gravity (at end of boil) and Fv is final volume. In this case: (32*42)/50=26.88 Given that my original volume was 32, I lost 5.22L of liquid during the boil, or roughly 16%.

The beauty of this method is that you can apply it retroactively. I take notes every time I brew, and I know my start volume, start gravity, and final gravity for each batch. By taking the last few batches, running them through this simple calculation, and averaging the result, I can get a pretty accurate measure of my boiloff. One I know that, I can go back to my calculations and figure out if I had too much water, or not enough sugar. Adjust, brew, test, adjust again, and so on until the numbers are consistent.

The sad part about this is that I'm going to go through all the trouble of dialing in my process, and then I'm going to change it again when I go HERMS this summer. But then again: I'll still be using the same kettle once I go HERMS, so doing this calibration now will make it much easier to isolate problems with the new setup down the road. So I guess it's worth it.

Being more "hands-on"

In the past few months I have been working staidly towards building a HERMS system. It took a while, but I finally got together all the components I needed, and I was finally going to assemble it over the next couple of weeks when SWMBO and the Junior Brewmistress are away visiting relatives in the States. So naturally, now that I'm all ready, I'm re-thinking the whole idea of building a new system.

See, I decided to build a HERMS system after I saw one on a fellow-brewer's rig. At the time I was brewing BIAB with a bag that really was not suited for the part. I had all kinds of problems with efficiency, mash temperature, and recipe balance, and I thought that a system where you set it to the right settings and forget about it sounded fantastic. My decision came to fruition when I switched from BIAB to a cooler-mashtun, and had to deal with mash temperatures being all wrong without being able to add heat as needed (a major benefit of BIAB).

Since those days, two things have happened that cause me to rethink the HERMS idea:
1. I found out that HERMS isn't all that -. You still have to futz with it to get things to work right. You're dependent on more equipment that can fail on you, and it's generally more complicated. In beer, as in life, K.I.S.S.
2. I've become a much better brewer. - I've gained experience. I've learned my current system. I know what to do in certain situations. A dough-in that ends up too low or high doesn't freak me out anymore. I know what to do in that case. I've successfully dealt with a stuck sparge, calculated water volumes, and had consistent efficiency rates. A lot of those problems that I wanted to use HERMS to solve I ended up solving without.

One might ask: I've already spent all the money to get the components. Wouldn't it be a terrible waste not to build the HERMS now? Well.. Yes and no. In reviewing the various things I got for the system, I think the only thing I will end up not using is the temperature controller. Everything else: The pump, the tubing, the spigots, the electric heating element, I have use for all of it (in fact, with the exception of the pump, I already use all of it in my current system.) Heck, when I set the pump up to do fly-sparge, I might even install the controller inline somewhere to see what the spage water temperature is. Waste not want not. :)

Don't get me wrong, I still think HERMS is massively cool. I like gadgets, and I like fine-tune control, so chances are I will probably build it eventually. But I think that I have not come close to using the full capacities of my current system yet, so rushing to upgrade it seems a little ridiculous. Plus, I think that if I do the build in a year or two, I will have a much better feel for what I'm doing, and a much better understanding of the process, which will lead me to build a better system and, ultimately, make better beer.

Decisions Decisions

I've mentioned about a dozen times already that I'm in the midst of re-designing my brew system and turning it into a full HERMS system. I already have most of the major parts: THe HLT, the silicon tubing, the heating element (one of, at least) the controller and the SSR probe. But I've been going back and forth in my mind about the pump.

On the one hand, I could do just fine on a laundry machine pump. I have one already and it works well. Granted, the one I have only ever pumps cold water, and this one will need to pump hot wort, but that's ok. It'll last for a while. And when it falls apart well.. They're cheap enough to just get another one.

On the other hand, a laundry pump is a second-best solution. For the best in home brewing, there really is only on king: The March 809 brewing pump. Actually, that king had been dethroned by the 815, which is the same pump, but with better performance. If you're going to get a brewing pump to transfer hot liquid, this is the one to get.
It is a thing of beauty.

Except that the March pump is quite expensive. For the price of one March pump I could get about four or five laundry pumps.

One the other hand, a March pump will easily outlast four or five laundry pumps. And is made of food grade material. If I'm going to be pumping hot wort, not just cooling water, that's something to think about.

And so on and so on.

My wife set me on the right track at the end. She said "If you're going into all the work and expense to re-do your system, it should be a system you're really happy with"

So I decided to order the March Pump. To paraphrase Crosby Steels and Nash. "If you can't be with the one you love, look online for it" (Doesn't scan as well, but it's better advice)

So that's it. Pump's on its way. With my father bringing it in a suitcase it would hopefully not be as expensive as having it shipped. Estimated due date: Mid November

Also this week: Avi and I brew a Belgium to inaugurate his new fridge, and I get up in the morning and decide to brew beer from leftovers. But that's a different post.

The 73rd volume

In the first masechta (portion) of Baba Metzia, one of the books of the Jewish Talmud, there's a long and complicated discussion about what to do in the situation when two men are holding on Talit (article of cloth), each claiming ownership of the whole garment. The discussion goes on and on about the different ways to handle this situation, bringing in opinions from several distinguished rabbis, and dissecting the issue in detail. Then it goes on to the next topic of discussion: Two men are holding the same Talit, one claims the whole thing, one claims half of the thing. What do you do then? Then the next topic: Two man are holding the same Talit, each claiming the whole thing, and there's a door between them. What do you do then? Then the next: Two men are holding the same Talit. Each claims all of the thing, and one of them is standing on a boat. What do you do then?

The Talmud is the compendium of Jewish law. But that's actually not true. There are 72 volumes to the Talmud. The amount of actual law in there is probably only about one book's worth. The rest is commentary, and more important, arguments. Lots and lots of them.

I mention all of this because sometimes when I read brewing books, I get the same feeling I got when I use to study the Talmud. Rabbi Palmer says thus shall not use hops for longer than 60 minutes, for they will not contribute any more acids. Rabbi Mosher, on the other hand, gives recipes using hops for 90 minutes, and claims that yeast should rehydrate at warm (41C water). But rabbie Papazian disagrees.

And to make matters worse, you have the local commentaries: The guy who claims that mashout is unnecessary when using HERMS. The dealer that says "I don't have 80L. Take some 60L and 120L and mix them together, it'll work". The guy who cites the Australian brewing rabbinate and claims that the best way to brew is with a bag and a plastic cube, and the guy who disagrees. Seriously. If we take about a dozen active threads on any beer forum, translate them to Aramaic, and put "rabbi" in front of the user names, it would read just like the 73rd of the Talmud. Masechet Mivshulim.

Why am I mentioning all this? Because I have decided to re-vamp my system. In fact, I'm rebuilding it completely to be a full-pledged HERMS system. At least that's the theory. In practice, there is so much information out there, and so many contradictory opinions that one can be stuck in an "information paralysis" - where you're so afraid of doing something wrong that you end up doing nothing at all.

And to that too, Jewish tradition gives an answer. In Pirkai Avot Rabbi Yhosua says "Make yourself a Rabbi" - Pick someone to follow and learn from. So often in Brewing (and Halacha) there are so many contradictory opinions involved that you just have to pick someone who looks like they know what they're doing, and seek their advice. As an interesting side note to that idea, the Rambam adds a commentary to that verse saying "Learning is good, but learning from from his fellow will be more successful and better understood. Even if his fellow is of the same wisdom as he, or below him" IE, every person, no matter how knowledgeable should find a "rabbi" - a person to learn from and learn with, even if he believes that person to be less knowledgeable than himself. Or in other words, no one person knows everything, and you can always learn new things.