Tag: Project Update

This is project has been on the drawing board for a _very_ long time. When I spotted a post by a peer from my homebrew club offering a set of components to build one last spring I jumped at the opportunity. The kit was all the required electronics, including circuit board, heat sink, even the thermal compound. I only needed to find a Neodymium magnet, pc fan, power supply, and a project box. The required tools are pretty simple too, just a soldering iron. The only thing I needed to buy was a project box, the rest I was able to scrounge from an old pc, old hard drive, and old cell phone charger. Sounds pretty simple eh?

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.

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.

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.

When I think of beer garden, this isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. However, as a farmer brewer this is the first thing I hope to be able to product myself to include in my own beer.

What you see below is the fruits of a few hrs of manual labor, some unused and reused items from around the farm, and a few gifted hop plants. A kind soul, Lyn from Brew Free or Die (more about this later) was very generous and shared some plants with me, a cascade and Hallertau. Along side those two, I planted 3 other pairs of rhizomes Cascade, Glacier, and Columbus. The other pairs were purchased last spring, and due to poor planning on my part, never made it to pots or the ground. I do not know if they will sprout after such a long dormancy, so I have also purchased some additional plants (Perle, Centennial, Galena) that just arrived. After they harden a bit, I’ll look for sprouting bines, and make the call on which to keep / or pot for next season.