Glycol Chiller Build

Finished Glycol Chiller made from an Air Conditioner

After getting fed up with constantly adding ice to my cooler, I decided that my next homebrewing upgrade would be to glycol. I didnt want to spend $1000 on it though. So I went with a much cheaper option, I built my own. The concept is pretty straight forward. Use the condenser from the AC unit to chill a bath of Glycol.

 

The Build.

I bought a brand new 5,000 BTU AC unit from WalMart for $97.

You can find them on Craigslist for cheaper, but I didn’t want to have to go through that hassle. So after you get your AC, take it apart. The outer housing unscrews and pops off pretty easily.

Remove the upper styrofoam and unclip the Thermometer from the Condenser. Next I unscrewed the control box to get it out of the way.

Now Comes the fun part. I moved the condenser away from the inner fan. I just gently and slowly pulled the copper tubing to allow enough working room.

Use a hacksaw and trim the fan spindle, you dont want to have a fast spinning axle just hanging out there, and it takes up room.

Move on to the the control box.

We need to bypass the Thermostat, It’s the one with the thermometer attached to it. Make sure it is set to max cold. Take the two wires running to the thermostat control and splice them together. Close back up the control box.

Back to the Condenser, Figure out how you want it positioned and how it will fit into your cooler. I’m using a 52qt tall cooler. Start pulling and moving the condenser into position. Just be slow and watch how moving one piece affects another piece of copper further down the line. As long as you go slow and carefull you will have no problems. Also, Be gentle with the condenser fins, they bend very easily. It’s not a big deal but you want to maximize surface area.

 

 

 

Use your hacksaw again and cut a notch out for your coil. You’re essentially done with the basic build. I suggest you at least mount the whole thing on a piece of plywood so it’s easier to move around. I wanted to enclose mine so it looks cleaner in the brewery.

Once your happy with the placement of the condenser, Fill the gap with expanding foam. Let it dry and clean it up so the lid will close on the cooler.

 

 

 

I built a simple box for mine using plywood. I cut out some vents for airflow for the A/C with a Jigsaw, attached some casters so I could wheel it around the brewery easily, and to make it look super cool, some LED lights (they change color too)

Use an external temp controller like and Inkbird or Ranco, route it’s temp probe to the cooler to run your chiller.  I set my controller to 36 degrees, but it can go much colder.

 

Drill some holes in the top of the cooler for the glycol hoses for your fermenter  Wrap them in pipe foam insulation to prevent sweating

 

Glycol

I bought two gallons of Glycol on Amazon. The cheapest I found was $25 a gallon.

I mixed 2 gallons of glycol with 6 gallons of water.

 

Here’s a quick dumb video of the Chiller.

 

Parts and Prices

Air Conditioner       $97 Wal Mart

Cooler                       $40  Home Depot

Plywood, Paint, Casters, Foam       $50

Glycol                $50 Amazon

LED’s                $20 Amazon

$260 Total

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask any questions about the build.

 

 

 

 

Maxing It Out

I have always brewed 6 gallon batches. I’ve wanted to do more but my need to control my fermentation has kept me limited. But with some new temperature control toys I am now able to do larger batch sizes. So with this I set out to do my biggest batch ever.

I doubled my Pale Ale Recipe and a couple of red flags came up when I started to crunch the numbers. My mash tun is a 10 gallon igloo water cooler and I was concerned about the amount of grain I could fit in it. After a little consultation with the BNArmy I found a great website that has a calculator for just this function. http://www.rackers.org/calcs.shtml

I had to adjust my water to grain ratio a bit but I was able to max out my tun with 26 lbs. of grain. It was very very full!

One of the problems with brewing a batch this large is the increased time needed to bring it to boil. This seemed to take forever and the weather was not helping much either. The morning had started off calm and nice but during my sparge the black clouds rolled in and the wind picked up too. My Blichmann burners are usually pretty good in a light breeze but it was downright blustery and they were trying to flame out, so I don’t think I was getting maximum BTU’s. If anything is going to make this beer special it’s going to be the Hail additions.

One thing I wanted to try with a batch this big is to split up the wort into two different beers. One fermenter will be my normal dry hop additions of Citra and Amarillo the other will have Nelson Sauvin.

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Matt’s Pale Ale

Grain

22 lbs 12.2 oz Pale Malt
1 lbs 6.6 oz Munich Malt
1 lbs 6.6 oz Victory Malt
1 lbs 0.1 oz Wheat Malt

Hops Used

1.28 oz Columbus (Tomahawk) [14.00 %] – Boil 60.0 min Hop 5 30.3 IBUs
0.97 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] – Boil 10.0 min Hop 7 2.8 IBUs
0.97 oz Cascade [5.50 %] – Boil 10.0 min Hop 8 1.8 IBUs
1.00 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] – Aroma Steep 20.0 min Hop 9 0.0 IBUs
1.00 oz Cascade [5.50 %] – Aroma Steep 20.0 min Hop 10 0.0 IBUs
2.00 oz Amarillo Gold [8.50 %] – Dry Hop 3.0 Days Hop 12 0.0 IBUs
2.00 oz Citra [12.00 %] – Dry Hop 3.0 Days Hop 13 0.0 IBUs

Yeast WLP001 or Wyeast1056

Mash at 150 ferment at 67

IPA Comp Update

While I’m still waiting for my score sheets. I can say that Hobbit Sauce IPA got Second Place in the English IPA category and advanced to the best of show round. I’m pretty sure I can make this good beer even better by increasing the hop aroma.

Hobbit Sauce takes Second Place. It’s E6 on the bracket.

Beer Judging, It’s a tough job but someone has to do it

                                                                  The Bracket                                 Photo by Dan Stillwell

Some weekends are just bigger than others. This past weekend was my Homebrew Clubs IPA Bracket Challenge. It’s our yearly IPA comp where this year we had over 160 entries in 4 different IPA styles from across the northwest and the country. It was also my first time as a judge in a competition. The comp was set up just like a final four playoff. In the morning we judged the entries and the top 16 from each category is seeded and then go head to head in a taste-off until you reach the final 4 and the Elite 8 go to the best of show round. It’s a very fun comp to be a part of and to watch.

Being part of the judging for the first time was eye-opening. I had done mini unofficial judging at club meetings before but doing the real thing was a real learning experience. Taking another Homebrewers beer and giving some real honest feedback is a big responsibility. It’s one thing to taste a beer and internally think how good or bad it is. Putting those thoughts into coherent sentences and using descriptive words to illustrate a smell, taste or overall concept is a real art that I have a long way to go to master. I was very fortunate to be paired with an experienced judge. She did a great job pulling me through the process and helping me judge some great IPAs. It’s now my goal to take the BJCP test this year and become a certified judge.

                                             Very serious Judging going on.                 Photo by Dan Stillwell

                                                        Best Of Show Table                             Photo by Dan Stillwell

Oh and how did my beers do in the comp? Well I’ll talk about that in my next post so stay tuned. Let’s just say one of my beers is on the bracket somewhere…

Home Bottling Line

 

Thuggin it with my Beer Gun, Wurd!

Today was bottling day. I had three kegs that needed to be emptied out to make way for future batches and beer that needed to be bottled for the upcoming comp season. Bottling from kegs is a relatively easy process if you have done your prep work.

The first thing is to make sure your beer is properly carbonated. If it’s overly or under carbonated, forget about it. This may mean you’ll have to try a few pints first but that’s just part of the job.

Work Station with everything I need close by

Second get all your supplies together. Make a work station for yourself with everything in arms reach. Have all your sanitizers, caps, capper, chilled bottles <Trick-Chill your bottles; the beer wont foam up as much if the container they are being transferred to is the same temperature as the beer /endtrick>, beer lines, and a bottling tub ready. I also like to have a sharpie so I can label the beer once I’m done <Confession– I’m kinda dumb so I have forgotten what beer is in what bottle so labeling right away helps me a lot! /endconfession>

I use a Blichmann Beer Gun to bottle my beer. It really is the easiest way to bottle. I used to just connect a piece of keg line from the tap but I was having really inconsistent results with carbonation levels in the bottle. They were usually undercarbonated due to so much foaming and underfilling. The Beer Gun alleviates all this and I have been getting great consistent perfect fills.

Now it’s go time, bottle those suckers up.

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In the end, I bottled up 12 Mjolnirs, 12 Hobbit Sauces, and 3 Seattle Depression Chocolate Coffee Stout before I blew out the kegs.  Now I’m ready for comps and sharing with friends. And with the Oatmeal Stout I made last week almost done, it’s time to figure out what to brew next. Any ideas?

Toasted Oatmeal Stout

Sensing that I was running perilously low on my Chocolate Coffee Stout in the keezer I had no other choice but to spend my day off brewing up an Oatmeal Stout. I consider it a heinous beer crime to not have a steady supply of stout on hand during the winter months. Having a dark glass of smoothness is comforting on a cold winters day and to go without is a thought that I just can’t bear.

So I got to work, with a freezing fog layering my valley and a slippery deck beneath my feet, I lit my strike water and hurried back inside for the long wait of 40 degree water slowly heating to 168. In this time I pulled out the main star of my Stout, the Flaked Oats. Now a trick I learned some time ago is to toast your oats in the oven before going in the mash. I put mine in at 300 degrees and let them roast for about 30 to 40 minutes until they are golden brown and smelling awesome. I have found that by doing this it makes your Oatmeal Stout a little more Oatmeal Cookie like in aroma and flavor. Perfection in my book.

The rest of the brew day went with off without a hitch. One bit of advice though…When brewing outside in sub-freezing tempatures, Don’t neglect your hose!!!! Every half hour or so I will run fresh water to purge the line to avoid ice build up. Before I knew this trick I went to run my imersion chiller and I got nothing due to a frozen hose. Nobody wants a frozen hose.

Get the Recipe

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Pairs Well With Lembas Bread, A Hobbit Sauce IPA Tasting

Hobbit Sauce IPA using all New Zealand Hops.

Yay! It’s done and it’s pretty good. The aroma came out a little lighter than I had hoped but it still smells nice. It has a yummy fruity mellony Honeydew aroma. On the malt side it has a toasty carmel light maltyness and finishes out super dry and make you thirsty for another one. The London Ale yeast really brings out the malt character and gives it a smooth flavor.  This is probably one of the best balanced beers I’ve made and I’m excited to enter it in the IPA Hop Madness Comp next week.

Link To Recipe

Kegging Under Pressure

Kegging my beer is the best thing I have ever done. It’s just one container to clean and sanitize versus 54 bottles.

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It’s super quick and easy but I still stress out over kegging. In fact I put it off as long as I can. It’s nerve racking to put my beer through the potentially devastating process of kegging. I have spent so much time lovingly nurturing my beer to this point. It’s sat happily in it’s temperature controlled environment, free from oxygen and light. The yeast cake sits undisturbed and the beer is crystal clear. As soon as I move it I have to trust that all the steps I took a month prior have been enough to ensure the best quality beer. ( I have issues, I know)

 I’m up against the clock, so last night I had to keg Hobbit Sauce. The beer comp is a couple of weeks away and if its going to be ready I was going to have to do it. My paranoia of course was unnecessary. Everything was just fine. Kegging is super simple but I was still nervous about the first taste of the new recipe

Well… Great Success!

The final gravity came out at 1.009 It’s nice and dry, the aroma is fantastic and it’s well balanced. I’ll have more detailed tasting notes after its been carbonated. But I think we have a winner here folks. I’m going to rebrew it for NHC.

 

Hobbit Sauce IPA

It’s time to start writing again, it’s been too long. I will be writing about my brewing, my beer travels and any other whim that pops into my head.

There’s a beer competition my Homebrew club puts on every year called the IPA Bracket Challenge where each beer by category goes head to head until there’s a best of show winner. I’ll have a couple of beers brewed up for this, but the one I brewed up last weekend is the one I’m most excited about. I call it Hobbit Sauce. I wrote a recipe to showcase the best of the hops of Middle Earth. The rich floral, fruity aromas of hops like Motueka, Nelson Sauvin, and Pacific Gem will hopefully make for an interesting and good beer. I can just imagine sitting in the Green Dragon sipping on a pint with some friends and reminiscing on adventures past.

I’m all about sharing so here’s a link to my recipe. Hobbit Sauce

It’s happily chugging along in the fermenter and it tasted pretty good coming out of he boil kettle. I’ll do a couple of more dry hop additions to really layer on the hop aroma.

I also just kegged my house IPA Mjolnir. This IPA uses copious amounts of my favorite hops, Citra, Amarillo, and Cascade. Here’s the base recipe Mjolnir I always make a few tweaks with the hops but the grain bill is the same.

Well, there’s my first post. Thanks for reading and cheers

I made hop tea before brewing to figure out how to best use these new hops