Tag: Diy

Milling Table build.

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When Mike told me about his mill table, I thought it was neat but I dismissed the idea of making one myself. While visiting another brewer friend I saw his mill, and asked if he would mind sharing some details of the project. As I’ve found with most home brewers he was very willing to share details and helpful links. At both times it didn’t seem necessary at that time. Then I used mike’s mill at the bow bog brewing party and really liked how it worked. It was very nice to be able to just dump in the grain and crank it up. Not that hand cranking is difficult, but it would save me a little time and manual labor.  Once I took inventory of the required parts, I realized that I could build this with minimal investment. I had the mill, a motor and I had a shelving unit I could use as the stand. It appeared all I was going to need to buy would be some sheaves (pulleys), a belt, a shim, and some miscellaneous hardware and lumber.

DIY reculating keggerator line cleaner

This is a simple project, the idea is to connect the beer lines to a small pump and themselves in such a fashion to recirculate beer line cleaner. After a short while you have clean beer lines. It’s also cheap to assemble, I’ve got less than $10 invested in this, but if you had to buy a pump, I would recommend a utility pump. It would add a bit more to the cost, but a utility pump is useful to have.

Some tips for homebrewing on the cheap.

Home brewing is a hobby you can start with a small investment in equipment ($150 or less) and make beer. At that point the biggest investment is the per batch cost. When brewing extract patches the fixed costs cost to brew are low, but the per batch cost is much higher.

Stirplate Finalle?

You may remember my prior update about the stir plate saga, if not ‘Stir Plate update, or how I let the smoke out of two sets of components’ is where I elaborated on my attempts to create a stir plate. You may want to review that before you read this, so you can understand my state of mind approaching this project. This project has been hanging over my head for nearly a year now when I first received the parts. There is a lot of motivation to get this completed so I can move on to other things. Topping that list, making a heady topper clone, will require a large yeast pitch to fully attenuate.

Working out the kinks – rebuilding my immersion chiller

One of the first DIY home brewing projects I undertook was building a immersion chiller. This is one of the easiest project you can do. My first attempt was a fairly sloppy mess. Because I wasn’t patient, and I didn’t have a good form to use to keep the coils organized. Also, I was trying to fit the cooler into a much smaller kettle, so I squashed it to fit. This past brew session while cleaning up, I decided to fix it up.

Keggerator project update

This past weekend I made some additional progress on the keggerator, while I’d like to think it’s nearly complete there is quite a bit of detail work left to finish.

This past weekend I made some additional progress on the keggerator, while I’d like to think it’s nearly complete there is quite a bit of detail work left to finish.

However I could have been pouring beer last night with a few more minutes work. But the perfectionist in me said, finish it up right, don’t just jump to the fun part. This is the short list of what I plan to do in the near term.

Project update: Keggerator, Hops, Mashtun

By now the new page is up. It is still a work in progress. I want to re-theme the blog, and add some details like a logo and favicon. I also need to fix some posts for style, broken links, and insert the missing photos. However, the content should all be there. It’s just one of the projects I’ve been working on here at the bottle farm.