001[Music] hello everybody and welcome to Max basement Brewery I'm your host Gary mck mallister and you all know my good friend here Dave tomasini how you doing Dave you know every once in a while people ask me Gary why do you keep brewing beer and uh there's usually three real reasons I think why I like to uh brew beer the first reason is of course the end product the beer you can make at home is just outstanding it's the freshest beer you're going to find and it just tastes good come on now that's the only reason no no no Dave there's a couple other things that I enjoy about Brewing the second thing is the terminology of Brewing the language the jargon the kinds of words we get to use when we make beer for
002instance we have the hot liquor back we uh we have mash tons we sparge um what else we have high crois when the the fermentation is going on we chill we chill we pitch we pitch we get to uh we measure specific gravity we calculate apparent degrees of fermentation all these terminology I mean it's just great I logger we logger and we taste tasting is obviously the key always now aside from all the terminology the language the jargon I enjoy the equipment that comes with Brewing the uh what we in the trade call technology high technology or some cases low technology either way what um some people would consider to be gadgets so today's show Dave we're going to look at the gadgets of home brewing and there are many there are many so why
003don't we just uh get right to it and and uh see what we have here for the folks at home let's begin from the beginning we'll begin at the beginning the first thing we have to do whether you're Brewing All Grain or extract beer you have to heat water now to heat water you can certainly use your stove in the kitchen but we've expanded beyond that we want to take a look at burners that are available now the first thing first one we're going to take a look at here Dave is also the cheapest what I have here is the burner that uh have taken out of a basic hot water heater gas fired hot water heater what you might not realize is that even though your hot water heater might have uh died a
004horrible death uh the heating element is still good and can be salvaged so don't throw that hot water heater away that's right it's pretty easy to take apart it's just a couple of screws um these parts here that are hanging off are the uh pilot and uh the gas line you don't need those those come right off but before you can use this there's a little orifice here that the gas comes out of and uh this is called the Spud uh I think I can get it out here Dave uh the problem with the Spud with your normal hot water heater is that natural gas requires a larger hole than propane does so what you have to do is pull this out there it goes it's unscrewing now and uh there it goes this is
005the Spud another great terminology we get to use uh that's where your gas comes out and what you have to do is find a uh a local machine shop that can make you another one of these it's just a simple thread and what you need is a smaller hole than what we have on there so you start a little bit small and uh make it a little bit bigger each time until you get a nice blue flame um if you get too big you'll get a yellow flame it's getting too much air so that's how you know um so that's what the burner looks like now to make it really worthwhile Dave you have to mount this somehow and that's what we have here I've mounted this burner inside of a this is a 14in
006wheel Rim uh if you're depending on the size of your Kettle you may have to be bigger or or smaller than that um I've got this brazed in place uh you always want to have a regulator this this is a regulator off of a uh gas barbecue that's what I thought no big deal there now the other thing to be concerned a little bit about with this burner and with any burner is you have to be able to get enough air to it it's got to breathe always use these in places where this adequate ventilation don't try to fire this thing up in in your kitchen that's right always use this outside or in the garage now you need to have some way to get air underneath what I've done at my uh Brewery is
007I've drilled a hole in the table that it sits into that lets some air up you can also put it up on some bricks or some blocks and then what I have here is uh this is just some bar stock not the kind of bar you're used to Dave that the uh that my Kettle can sit on it raises it up just a little bit and provides for some uh some good adequate air flow this is about the cheapest route you can go the only thing you really have to buy would be uh some sort of valve to direct the propan you use this for boiling or do you use this for mashing this type of a burner in my Brewery I'll use uh this particular kind of burn burner for my Mash ton only
008um if you're if you're boiling small amounts of water uh maybe uh four or five gallons even uh it's adequate it's not quite hot enough to really get a good ripping boil with a 10 gallon batch like I normally Brew Dave so I use this for the mash ton where where I just need a little bit of heat to uh get things warming up now we've got that propane burner out of the way another way you can go is to uh purchase uh this is the heating element out of a emerging heater this is uh the Brew heat boiler and this is a 220 volt you'll have to make an extension cord to connect to a 220 outlet it's got a uh a regulator on here with just numbers 1 through 10 so you'll have
009to uh calibrate Cate it that's right ordinarily this thing just comes unscrewed here and when you buy one of these they come in a plastic bucket just like your uh plastic Brew buckets and I urge you to be careful as I learned the hard way most of my lessons have been hard learned here Dave that you have to make sure that you don't let the uh water run completely out of the plastic bucket when you have the heat on that did happen to me Dave and I noticed an odd smell one time and I just couldn't figure out what it was until this came tumbling out of my hot liquor back and made quite a The absentminded Brew that's just about it now if you really want to get burning and boiling large volumes you
010really have to go to a larger burner this here is an outdoor cooker that uh these are readily available at uh Home Depot or some of those other stores also catalogs outdoor catalog in the Brew shops this one is a 135,000 BTU outdoor cooker this comes with its own regulator uh which is also adjustable that's how you adjust your uh your your gas flow it's got an adjustment here on the back which allows you to adjust the air flow to get the per perfect uh flame and then if I tip it up here I can let you see what the burner itself looks like uh this is a small ring shaped burner uh I've had a lot better luck Dave with the ring uh design burners they give a little more even heat over the
011whole bottom of your Kettle or your hot liquor B and uh they do make burners of this type with a single uh a single Jet and it sounds like a a 747 taking off not to mention the fact it doesn't give as even a heat over the bottom of your uh Kettle as this type of AA does that's right I tried one of those Dave once and just turned the my Kettle red hot it was roaring I was in the basement my wife was up on the second floor of the house and came down the stairs and said no that thing is going back it sounded like a freight train going no no meant no that's right so there we have have a few uh samples of burners that are available to you we go
012from the real easy to uh the electric to the real uh Nitro fired rocket burner here that uh gets things cooking for you all right Dave so now we've heated the water next thing we have to do is our Mash in the we have a few samples of some Mash tons here for you we can go from the the simplest to some little more complicated ones just uh you know to fresh your memories for those of you who and for those of you who may not have seen every single addition of Max basement Brewery mashing is nothing uh more than combining the crushed grain with water of a given temperature to release the enzymes necessary to affect fermentation so now that we've reviewed all that let's take a look at the picnic cooler one there
013first Dave okay this being uh technologically the simplest this is a 7 gallon uh cooler it's a g cooler just uh has a lid well uh we've done here is we've mounted a valve um on the outtake and on the inside if you remember when we Mash we need a way to strain the grains and what we have in the bottom of every Mash ton is a louter fork now the louder Fork on this one is pretty simple uh you want things to be relatively easy to take apart relatively you know need a monkey Wren yeah there it goes this here is uh this is the louder Fork this is a copper copper uh tubing here here with uh some hacksaw blade cuts into it spaced at uh about half inch intervals and this lies
014in in the mash ton with the cuts facing down so the grain weights down on it and acts as a nice little strainer for you you always make it so that everything comes apart pretty easy so that you can clean it real well ease of cleaning is absolutely essential to the construction of any Brewing apparatus save save the burners These are nice because they're relatively inexpensive and they really hold heat extremely well the one drawback to the pl cooler as a mashon is that you can't add heat to the bottom of this you wouldn't want to put this on top of your burner if you need to raise the temperature of any Mash in a plastic container you need to add uh boiling water directly you can't use an external heat Source that's right in
015the latest uh Brewing techniques in the September Brewing techniques Journal there's a great article on how you calculate how much boiling water you would add to raise the temperature of your Mash to certain uh desired temperatures and it's a it's a great little article if you get a chance to read it what else we have there for got another Mash ton here this one now we've gone to a stainless steel Mash ton with this one you can apply heat directly to the bottom to uh raise up through your step Mash temperatures and of course with every Mash ton we need to have the louder Fork this one is the same same concept except it's a ring shaped has the hacksaw blades across the bottom of it and uh this one F has a flared fitting
016here on the end you just tighten that up to the the corresponding end on the inside just fingertight and it holds it in shape and uh this all comes apart easily for cleaning as well the benefit of this here again is that you can add heat directly to the bottom okay what else we've got there Dave I think we've got one more here we have the giant economy size there we go this is for some serious mashing uh this is a uh reconditioned beer keg these are available through uh commercial vendors you can get them through your uh Brew shops as well and this has a pretty simple louder Fork on the inside I don't know how well you can see that I why don't you tell tell us about this one Dave well this
017is merely a piece of 38 in U outside diameter carpet tubing attached to an approximately U 8 in length of stainless steel mesh uh closed at one end it's a it's a a tube and that strains all the particulate out of your mesh uh you know as you draw it off so it works pretty effectively yeah great there we go okay one other thing we have to look at that from an equipment standpoint is the grain grinder we obviously have to grind up our grains to uh before we start our Mash got two different green Grinders here this one here is the first one this is the one the old standby it's been around for years this is the Corona Grain Mill which uh pull the uh sides off here real quick for you this
018is basically just two two plates here that uh and there's a little augur on the inside the grain falls down through and by cranking it like this the uh plates rub against each other and that grinds your grain now you're able to um adjust the distance between those plates with the screw here this moves them closer or or farther apart this uh fits on here to help keep some of the Dust down and what I've always done when I use one of these is if you take a a a piece of plastic bag tighten it up nice and tight around there and then let this fall down into a bucket that will allow your grain to fall right down in you keep the dust down in your room which is really important this comes with
019a couple different uh tops here this is the uh High Hopper which holds about three pounds of grain you can it usually comes with a smaller one as well it's a fairly inexpensive grinder works pretty well main drawback is that it tends to uh crush the husks of the grain maybe just a little bit too much um which is why we use this Roller Mill here this is the jack schmidling Roller Mill if you look the inside here this is our Hopper I'll turn it around so you can really see what's going on underneath what we have is two rollers here with got grooves cut in them and as you crank it little rubber gasket here allows one to go against the other one and uh this one is kind of neat because it also
020has an adjustment on the side that you can adjust the distance between your rollers uh this does a really nice job this is the one I use most of the time and um again readily available from your local brew shops and reasonably priced that's right okay so much for the grain Grinders we've ground our grain we've gone through our mesh now we've you remember in the process we go through a boil uh we don't really have any kettles here Dave for uh to show today but you basic pots although we don't have any kettles to show Gary um you can use a similar setup to this particular Mash ton as a boil kettle that's right the uh the easy Mash system that I showed you can be used to strain the particulate out of your
021final boil so you can use a setup just like this for a uh you know for a good siiz batch this is very handy for a 10 gallon batch okay so let's assume we've got the boil done next thing we do is we have to chill the beer chill the hot wart as it were to get it down to pitching temperature so we have two styles of chillers here Dave when we uh pull these up let's see we have an immersion Chiller which is actually the easiest to make the cheapest to buy and the style that I personally use most often this is very simply some 3/8 in copper tubing wrapped into a coil you have an inlet here which will screw onto a faucet adop faucet adapter on your sink and then this is
022your drain what happens here is you run cold water through the inside of this copper coil this sits right down inside of your Kettle and if you kind of jiggle it a little bit while it's in there the cold water going through here will cool the work on the outside if you can somehow as you move this up and down if you can do that it just exposes uh more of the surface of the wart to the uh to the cooling coils and it cools your w a little quicker these are great you can make these with as many coils as you want they're really nice because the work never goes through the inside it's really easy to clean the outside and for sterilizing before you put it into into the uh the boil that's
023exactly in fact Dave how you do sterilize these just drop it down in the boil for the last 20 minutes or so and uh you're on your way now another uh style of chilling which Works a little faster a little more complicated a little harder to clean though is the counterflow work Chiller and we have one of those here you can make one of these I made this one you can also buy these now the difference here see if we can turn this around just a little bit and see what the the business end here on this one what you do is the uh that out the way way see we can get a get a bead on that your beer flows through the copper pipe here the copper is going all through this whole
024coil inside the the garden hose and then it comes out this end over here now what you want to do is this the garden hose connects up to your cold water faucet and what you're doing is putting cold water around the outside of the copper tube as the beer flows through the inside of the copper tube and as fast as you can run the beer through the copper tube it starts out boiling at one end and ends up pitching temperature at the other end and it's called a counterflow word Chiller because the beer Flows In One Direction or the W Flows In One Direction and the cold water flows in the opposite direction that's right that's uh basic physics heat transfer it all works part of the technology of Brewing again about as Hightech as
025we get difficulty with the counterflow chiller is trying to clean the inside of that copper tube uh because the tro and the proteins and other sediment sticks to it and it does make it a little bit harder to clean out although I found that uh flushing it with real hot water and then uh running an Iota for solution which is nothing but some iodine uh a small amount of iodine mixed in couple of gallons of water running that through and then plugging the end and letting the uh the inside 3/8 in coil fill up and then plug it and just put it away just like that and when you're ready to use it drain it and uh flush it out with hot water great okay now uh we have just a couple things on fermenters
026to show you I've got two one of them uh you've seen before but I want to show you uh something with the handle if you can show us the uh regular uh car boy there Dave this is a standard glass car boy this is the 7 gon versions that are available these are really handy they come with the styrofoam cover here which um helps prevent breakage another hard- earned lesson that I've I've picked up they're nice cuz they have the screw cap which uh allows you to keep them clean now you can put the orange Carboy handles on here they fit a little better on the five gallon ones but if you want to put these on the 7 gon what I do is put it down below the bottom rim on the neck and
027you do have to put a longer bolt on these the the standard bolt is just too short to reach all the way around so that's your standard glass car booy now we have another one here that you might have seen in some of the magazines it's kind of neat it turns Brewing upside down and that's exactly what it does this is this is the Brew cap by uh brewco there's also a uh another one called the ferment tap which uh works the same way basic what it allows basically what it allows you to do is this cap fits on the bottom there's a tube going up through the middle that acts as your blow tube which is connected to this pipe here as you recall when the fermentation really gets roaring you get the high
028crois you get foaming lots of CO2 a lot of gas release from the beer you need a blow tube and that's what this serves as this then doubles as your air lock because you can put some water in here and down here at the bottom it'll form a little air lock that'll allow the bubbling to come through that just then sticks up there at the top the other neat thing about this is as you know when the fermentation starts to slow down the yeast starts to settle out with the carboy upside down the yeast settles down into this cap we have a hose connected that comes right off the bottom of the cap and there's a little valve on the end normally you'd keep it closed but if you open that you're it allows you
029to harvest the yeast as it settles down through that keeps your beer uh off the yeast very easily you don't risk the oxidation that occurs when you uh rack to a secondary and it allows you to reuse the freshest part of the yeast now you have no problem at all with any of the uh fermenting beer coming through that well not more than you really want it's important to taste your beer as throughout the entire process as you recall so you can pull off samples for specific gravity measurements calculating the apparent degree of fermentation and of course tasting now there is one little drawback to these I found is that if you remember the commercial fermenters if you've ever seen those they have very steep sloped s sides your car boy doesn't really have that
030steep of sides to it the yeast does tend to hang up a little bit on the shoulder here now if you can keep after it just give a little shake to it and it it will take keep most of it down through uh basically though it's a pretty neat little rig okay and that's it for fermentation well Dave we're running out of time and uh so we're going to have to move along any show on gadgets for home Brewing wouldn't be complete without taking a look at the ways in which we enjoy those fruits of our labors and we do enjoy them we certainly do what we have here is just a small sampling of some of the glasswar that is used for enjoying your home brw you have your basic Shaker glass which uh
031holds a full Pint you have the English dimple glass which is perfect for holding your English alses and then you have the English Pub glass complete with the Pint crown symbol and this is perfect for those rich and creamy Stouts that we enjoy so much just as a little uh side note this is a true pint these Believe It or Not although they might look bigger usually in America hold 14 o so when you see one of these you know it's the genuine P that's right and here we have moving up to the high end on enjoyment this this is a uh half yard glass which is really uh enjoyable to watch somebody try to drink out of it which I'm not going to do right now but when you tilt this back um you
032have to be real careful in watching the the beer come down the end but it the the uh tulup end here adds tremendous Aroma to the beer and really just makes it a fun way to finish off the only really significant piece of glass wear that we're missing is one that uh many of you I'm sure familiar with the so-called pilzner glass you know the one that looks like an inverted uh funnel small at the bottom and tapering straight up with little bit of a stem and that's traditionally used to drink pills Style Beer we just don't happen to have that sample here well Dave I think uh we made it through uh at least some of the equipment we have I think we've got enough left over to uh continue at some other time
033but that's going to do it for this show with the exception of the infamous mail bag mailbag yes we've been collecting all of your cards and letters and reading all of the email that we've been getting and uh we love hearing from you we have to whittle it down due to time to just a couple of letters so why we dig down deep into that mailbag Dave and see what we have from our uh viewers at home well we have this from uh Fred in Franklin who asks what is first word hopping and why would anyone want to do it first word hopping Fred first word hopping is when you add your first addition of hops into the kettle as you're starting your sparge this is even long before the boil starts and uh you
034might think that by adding your hops that early you're going to boil off all of the Aromas as we've said before however by using this technique the Aromas actually stay in the beer and you get a lot more Aroma and uh hop flavor by doing a first work HPP there you are Fred there you go Fred what else you got Dave got anything else in there our second and of necessity our last letter is from Ashley uh right here in town where can I get that famous Mac Mac wear that everyone is talking about uh the famous or inFAMOUS mawar well Ashley I'm sorry to say that our plant in Indonesia got shut down it was also making Kathy Lee's clothing and uh that has caused tremendous delays in our orders and we hope to
035be uh getting in our first shipments any day now but they want 4 cents an hour unbelievable all right Dave it's been a great show we'll do it again everybody out there in [Music] mland B why back whatever is that pitched on your melon looks like something you found in the park and lot of schaer Stadium after a patch game H Dave this is the latest in our round of Macar this is the perfect black and tan helmet got a rich creamy Stout on one side and a cool golden pilsner on the other Blended to Perfection I'm glad the Russians don't have your mind now what do we do that's [Music] it well I don't know we're not we're not the Russians don't Factor anymore