Thanks for the reply as alway PF.

i could be your copycat on this, with the exception that you have brewed loads of beers whilst i’ve brewed none! I have just spent months faffing around with kit. I’m going to have another go at the BYO wort chiller soon, but i’m not sure on the dims of the 19l pot (I copied you again and bought the same 19l pot off ebay :)) I assume it’s only a few mm’s taller+wider than the 11l pot as you said they looked really similar so if i work to that it shouldn’t be an issue. do you happen to know height of the 19l pot? If possible i’d like to have the tails of the wort chiller well clear of the side of the pan to avoid any leakage scenarios contaminating the wort. Thats assuming i ever actually brew a batch instead of constantly buying/making equipment and wasting money 🙂

so, having never brewed with my 11 l Massive Brewery style stock pot I got on ebay, i’ve taken the plunge and got a 19l pot to remove the need to sparge 🙂

i have had a seamstress run me up a bag for the 11l pot which was a pretty neat fit, so i think i’ll just buy a bag as in the scheme of things its a lot less hassle. Anyone had any experience with this?

Mr Burns: “Why you’re the fattest thing i’ve ever seen and I’ve been on Safari”

to be fair njee i thought i was sending them a message as Ebay directed me through those channels. I take your point though.

i’d second that about keeping the dispute open. I get really peeved with folk who do things like this via ebay and then when you open a dispute they get all offended as if it was never their intention. I had a similar issue with a user sending a set of pedals. Basically they were not marked as dispatched and 10 days later they hadn’t turned up, so i opened a dispute saying they hadn’t arrived. then i got a huffy email saying i should just have contacted them as they were “just about to be posted”, to which i replied that perhaps had they sent them within a reasonable time frame and marked them as despatched i would have had no need to raise a dispute 🙂

in your case thats significantly not as described so see the dispute through.

Try brewing on an Aga! Even worse!

i can imagine – my folks have one and it varies from screaming hot to almost out overnight (old school coke fuelled one)

I have actually been looking at 5 burner hobs with the wok burner element before i’ve even brewed a batch 🙂

Hey, thanks for the quick reply. That looks like the people i got the 11 litre pot from, I wonder if they’d accept returns after 3 months 🙂

By doing away with the dunk sparge are you doing away with sparging altogether then and just relying on the grain giving up its goodness in a slightly larger volume of water?

Cheers

hi all, long time off the thread and great to see its still going strong!

I’m still assembling kit to brew using the MB style – I have a stock pot and a very well fitted bag and have some copper to make a wort chiller, but after my last effort i’m scared to try it!

I did notice your comment though PF – where did you get the pot?

Bought a 20 litre pot so I can dispense with the dunk sparge and to allow me to brew 10-12 litre batches. First brew in the new pot, with no sparge, gave me 70% efficiency and much less faff/mess. No boil over with this pot either! It was only £20.

EDIT – i was also going to ask how your stove handles heatin a bigger volume of water, did it cope ok?

Cheers

David

The stand by Stephen king. I found it gripping

Life is precarious and precious. Make the most of it.

very well said mate.

yeah zilog, just a wee “set as default profile” button would have solved a lot of issues. All credit to the guy though, its a better app than i could design 🙂

Thanks for the advice J_D. Reviewing the thread i note peterfile put an SNPA recipe on the first page – oops 🙂

I’ve seen references to a SMASH recipe (I think Trout used the term) so i’ll go on the hunt for something simple. I didn’t buy the MB kit so i’ll have to source the ingredients anyway, so i’ll scour the BS recipe cloud for something simple and tasty like an IPA. Any suggestions welcome!

I should have been a bit clearer above Albino, i could import PF’s equipment profile just fine, i just couldn’t find a way to set it as my default, even by placing it within the XML for the application. I have got a manual profile set up now using the figures and it scaled ok, but only if you hit the “scale” button – it doesn’t rescale if you just thange the profile. Its all the wee tweaks that i’m learning that make it fun 🙂

Cheers

hey guys,

I’ve started monkeying about with beersmith and got PF’s equipment profile up and running on it. Its not the most intuitive software – i couldn’t see how to import or hack the quipment profiles, so just ended up copying the values into one.

I was looking for a first recipe and think someone mentioned the SNPA recipe as a reasonably easy recipe. Firstly, do you think it would be a decent brew for a first BIAB attempt? Secondly, does anyone have a foolproof recipe anywhere? There are 5 or 6 efforts in the beersmith cloud, all with different variables, so a pointer would be great. I’m still a fair bit off doing my first brew, just trying to get things sorted.

Cheers

great price – good find. I agree that feathers are superior (they are my only blade now), but at 4x the price of these for 100 this is a great buy!

I’ve got a bench capper from BrewUK, brilliant bit of kit and happy that i made the right choice to spend a bit more first time round. Makes bottling a 1 man job and i could cap 40 bottles in a few minutes no probs.

Hey, i flew to Dublin a couple of weeks ago and the cabin was rammed with bags, a lot more than 90. I did 2 journeys under the new system and neither time did they hint at putting stuff in the hold.

Its hardly representative but it is real world experience 🙂 I have flown to dubling a fair bit on Cryingair and to be fair i think the irish and scottish folk aren’t hugely stict about things like baggage size unless a flight is really busy or you are taking the piss with a huge bag thats clearly oversize. Spain, however, seem to delight in screwing you if the bag is 1mm oversize..

I expect its a pita all round if bags have to go in the hold, so they dont bother unless the flight is totally rammed. I’d suggest just getting in the queue reasonably early, belt to the back of the plane and up the stairs, then jam the bag in the hold towards the middle of the plane. You’ll find all the people going up the front stairs are all squabbling about getting that arbitrary seat 12A that they must have.

EDIT – actually, i think they have allocated seating now, so check your boarding pass and get on the plane early!

It’s all quite overwhelming when you start out, so it’s nice to focus on the threads that are following the same process as you

you got that right 🙂

Its incredible the equipment, process and sometimes chemistry / art / alchemy thats employed in complex brewing. The good thing is its as complex as you want it to be and once you figure that out as a beginner, its great fun 🙂

I’ve also used the brewuk forum (www.brewuk.co.uk), although its attached to a store its quite good as a resource.

Thanks PF, that will prove really useful indeed.

truncated cone BIAB bag template successfully carved out of paper this lunchtime, thanks to an empty floor space, some maths and a fibre patch cord and zip ties as a stringline 🙂

need to check it fits my brewpot now, procure the voile and hand over to our tame seamstress for finishing.

an ass-load of cascade, done.

is that a beersmith recognised measure? 😆

having failed to learn my lesson with chillers i’m now bawdeep in measuring voile fabric to make a truncated cone BIAB bag, bring on the pain! Luckily i know an excellent seamstress so i can blame her if the seams fail 🙂

Bob, a full FV is a tricky thing to manouvere at the best of times, getting mine into the brew fridge was a chore and thats not much lifting. Getting it into / out of a chest freezer would be an undertaking. How about 🙂

Just thinking though if the freezer hardware gubbins isn’t running through the front wall you could very neatly cut a portion of the freezer out and put hinges on it to make it walk in? You wouldn’t lose much efficiency in the insulation and it would be a lot easier to get in and out. This is all based on you never actually needing the freezer again though 🙂

Would you be interested in a Stainless Steel wound 10mm pipe to cool your wort? They are approx 12ft long once unwound and are from the insides of box chillers tht pubs use to flash cool Lager, Cider and Guiness.

Singletrackmind is it 12″ diameter on the coil? My pot is 26cm diameter (10″) in old money so it sounds a bit too big i’m afraid. Would have been ideal too probably. i’m going to build something 6-7 inches in diameter and will post up pics of either the completed chiller or the carnage i cause during hulk rage when i screw it up again… Thanks very much for the offer though Singletrackmind.

Hi zilog,

the 23l syphon is designated like that because of the length of it i.e. its long enough to get to the bottom of a standard FV. the 4.5l syphone is much smaller and used for demijohns I think. For your needs a 23l syphon would be needed. Som might say they are overkill but its just one less thing to worry about on bottling day.

As for the fastrack i think its really handy, although i haven’t used a bottling tree. As i say you can’t get 20 x 500ml bottles in one rack because of the diameter of them, so you have to stagger them across the holes, but i have got enough bottles (c.40) on 3 racks without too many issues. if you have the space these are really stable and easy to use i.e. rinse / sanitise your bottles, rack them here to dry off, get the rest of your bottling gear ready and then pluck them from here when you are ready to bottle. The bottling tree wins if you are really tight for space, but i dont know how stable they are.

Cheers

another bit of kit which is really good is the Fastrack system. Its not perfect for 500ml bottles, but i find them really handy for bottling day.

Fastrack bottle holders

I’ve got the youngs 23l autosyphon and the little bottler – fantastic pieces of kit that save lots of time too.

+1 for Starsan – DFTF (Dont Fear The Foam!)

PF – that black IPA does sound intriguing!

Black IPA

do tell, that sounds intriguing!

Hey all, great thread and as always its surprising how many common interests span STW and the depth of knowledge that exists here 🙂

First time Brewer, Woodfordes Wherry, Bottled up last Sunday, Looking forward to results in 9 days and counting!

tacopowell, welcome to the world of home brewing! As a complete novice myself (brewed my first wherry last June) I can suggest the most important skill to master (IMO) is patience! I bottled a festival IPA in July and it was fully 4 months before I felt it was at its best. It’s like a punch in the face from a grapefruit, not unlike Punk IPA but a lot less refined than that. Still my best kit brew to date although I would definitely recommend the Festival beer kits range over any others I’ve tried (albeit the only others I’ve tried are Woodfordes kits)
Luckily my garage store is a mile from my house (sister’s garage) so the immediate urge to drink beer is tempered by a 15 minute round trip to get it… I find with almost every kit brew I’ve done they taste a lot better after 3 months, but I’ve still noticed the homebrew “twang” which is why I’m thinking about dabbling with BIAB 🙂

In terms of the brewfridge there is a great guide on building a temp controller based on the STC1000 mentioned by Trout on the previous page. Even a mildly competent DIY’er and a few bits scavenged here and there can make something that looks pretty good and works really well. I managed to pick up an old fridge from freecycle, reinforced the bottom shelf and jammed the temp controller probe and a 60w greenhouse heater in there and it will keep my brew within 0.5 degrees for the life of the fermentation. One tip – make sure the probe is well insulated on the side not touching the FV otherwise the controller will start hunting i.e. fridge cools below threshold it so immediately starts heating, heat rises quickly above threshold so it turns the fridge on to cool etc. As some have said it might not be top of the list for a novice brewer but I really liked putting the project together and I think maintaining a steady temp can only be good for the brew.

Link to the thread on BrewUK here, which is an excellent source of info and people on there are helpful too.

Sadly last weekend’s project didn’t go quite to plan 🙁 I decided to have a go at building a wort chiller out of copper. I’d managed to procure the copper coil at a reasonable price from a local plumbers’ merchant and found a paint can approx. the diameter that I needed, but it wasn’t tall enough to wrap the copper all the way up. In the usual style of “if in doubt, flat out” I set about it on the kitchen floor and actually got on quite well until a momentary lapse in concentration produced a slight (note slight) kink in the tubing. Cursing myself I carried on to about 95% completion, but the kink was bugging me already. I’m sure more than a few of you are aware of the gnawing, nagging sensation that it’s just not 100% right and once you acknowledge this debilitation condition all rational thought goes out of the window 🙂

The reality was the kink was so slight I could have left it, or just squeezed it gently with pliers to sort it but no, I had to do something about it. After confirming the external pipe bender I had would never get to it in a million years (it was about 1/3 way up the coils) I foolishly decided to unroll the coil and start again. BIG MISTAKE. The project rapidly unrolled in front of my eyes, figuratively and literally. The coil began kinking at every turn, probably because I’d moved out of the relative warmth of the kitchen into the cold garden and the copper did not take kindly to being bent a second time. Cue lots of huffing and puffing, muttered swearing and a few slaps for the shed, then the whole 10m coil of copper was consigned to the recycle bin. Needless to say I was raging at myself for a: attempting it without having everything I needed to get the job done properly and b: letting a pretty insignificant event derail the whole thing and cost me £16.

Needless to say I’ve learnt my lesson and have a couple or revisions to make before I attempt it again.
We’ve all been there when the screwdriver is good enough to do the job, then it slips and gouges the frame…..

Anyway, that’s my painful weekend experience laid bare so I feel at peace now and ready to move on. Keep the great tips, advice and recipes coming.

PS peterfile that RIS sounds magic and Trout that death cocktail you posted sounds scary awesome! 🙂

Cheers

I’d just like to thank peterfile publicly as i’ve been one of the email lurkers and his advice has been great so far. I haven’t brewed any BIAB so far, but i’m really looking forward to it and some of the recipes up there, particularly the SNPA, look awesome!

Second vote for BrewUK here, used them lots and always delivered well. Likewise i think the forum is great over there, haven’t been able to identify the “big hitters” yet 😉

thats a proven tool too enigmas. 105 obliteration ftw

Do American helicopters fly on the right? That must make fighting foreign countries awkward.

not if you shoot everything regardless 🙂

dannybgoode +1

although i believe thats a yank apache Longbow, i’ll stick with a brit one as the controls are on the right side.

just need to find 3 ground crew who can survive long enough to refuel / rearm you.

the absolute daddy of combat.

The other item I would recommend is Proraso pre shave cream. It’s excellent stuff and really reduces irritation

this man speaks the truth! fantastic product.

I’ve just shaved with a feather blade and wouldn’t go back to anything else tbh. The feather has a reputation but honestly I think they are leagues ahead of other blades. They really aren’t that scary!

ymmv of course. I hated shark blades and gilette yellows for example. The only blade j binned mid shave was the treet platinum though. Awful!

as others said a sample pack is a good shout. I got 100 feathers for about 18 quid on ebay from thailamps I think , best price around. Email me your address and I’ll pop a couple your way if you want.

cheers

its like a wizards sleeve.

Hmm FoI could be a good route. Is there a preferred way of asking or do you just list the facts you want?

point of nerd – I dont think you have to dress it up as an FOI, any request for info from a public body should be treated as an FOI. There is no protocol to follow.

this pic was quite telling from a CNET article[/url]. It shows the new mini retina vs the air and the colour vibrance issues on the mini. People can draw their own conclusions but i’ve seen them side by side and the display on the mini was poor enough for me to reconsider which tablet to get. Yeah i know, first world problems…

Ann Summers (possibly NSFW!)

not suitable for wife?

haven’t seen any great deals, although Flying Fox in Alva have 30% of all bikes which is pretty good, inc 2013 models.

you plan ahead.

2nd Demon tweeks – i ordered mine for £112 and they came next day couriered.

Cheers

i found the kenco millicano better than nescafe azera by some margin, but thats not saying much. i knew even a half price offer wouldn’t make anything by nescafe taste any good.