Think Small, part 2

Welcome back,

If you haven’t seen part 1 yet, I’d maybe recommend reading it for a larger chunk of background (why do this? what are the challenges?), and which chronicles the brewing of a quart of beer. This did really happen, and the beer was perfectly adequate, but upon telling my brother of my triumphant micro exploits, he responded with a sigh, a roll of the eyes, and a fateful jeer: "what's next, a shot of beer?"

Yes, that's what's next. I took his acerbic words as a challenge and, as I'd just tested a method of mitigating the heat loss of small batch brewing, namely using a sous vide water heater, I had all the pieces I needed - a 50 mL graduated cylinder and a PET bottle with a CarbCap® were all that was needed to cook up this Frankenstein's monster of a beer

Technically speaking, the process was seamless: salt a gallon of water (see recipe below), crush some grain with a hammer, add that and hops to a sealed sous vide bag, mash at ~152˚, isomerize at ~180˚ (17% efficiency), run the tiny pouch under cold water to cool, strain into the "fermenter," place in a temp-controlled wine fridge at ~65˚, wait, cold crash, rack to PET bottle, carbonate, and enjoy. Surprisingly straightforward

As for the big question, the taste, I recorded the following notes: "Malty, round, yeasty, just a touch thin, no real off flavors besides light astringency possibly due to high temp mash, warm due to carbing method, would consider brewing a gallon of" [a gallon being my default size - stay tuned for a post on my all-electric HERMS & thermowell'd gallon setup]

Here's the recipe, and leave your hate mail below:

45 mL of Pale Kellerbier:

- 15 g Munich malt, DME to correct gravity if necessary
- 1.15 g 4% AA hops
- for the water: .6 so4, .5 cl per gal (make one gallon, divy)
- since 1 mL per g grain absorbed, use 75 mL water for mash
- mash w hops, 152˚ -> 180˚
- chill, rack to 50 mL graduated cylinder
- add .1-.2 g dry ale yeast, ferment at 65˚
- yield will be ~45 mL beer, 15 mL sediment
- carbonate at ~15 psi, 38˚, in a chilled PET bottle (the beer will, as it did for me, absorb a ton of heat and be raised into the high 50s/low 60s if you don't do this)

Think Small, part 1

There comes a time in every one gallon brewer’s life, when they ask themselves: why not less? I’m already brewing a cumbersome, impractical amount, why not take it to a freakish extreme? Heck, some of the tricks I employ in brewing so little so well would actually be easier on a smaller scale…

Well, dear readers, that ball of fool’s lightning struck not once, but twice, and the result is the following ***TWO PARTER***!

Part the first: a gallon, split in twain, then split again! Or, a quart

Brewing a quart has one fiendish difficulty: no, not the boil, or even the recipe design, but indeed, keeping the mash to-temp. And while something like my patented Reverse-HERMS® would certainly work, another modern tool works just as well - the Sous Vide temp controller!

That’s right, I bagged the sucker. Oh, and it goes without saying this batch was all grain - without that complication, you just boil, chill, and ferment. But neigh, I wondered if doing even something as exotic as a step mash might be, god forbid, convenient at this scale!

And while the process is documented below, spoiler alert, the large volume of wort involved (relative to the size of the heat bath, of course) made step mashing impractical (it would have taken a good deal of time to hit target temps, and as such, the Helles wort came out way under target - but the Mild was nice!)

The recipe is as follows:

• 5 oz British Base Malt

• .5 oz Crystal, 90 SRM

• .3 oz DRC

• .3 oz Flaked Oats

• .2 oz Chocolate Malt

• .1 oz Black Malt

• .05 oz EKG, 60 min

• Add to 2.18 qt (salt treated) water, mash at 150˚ for an hour or so

  • something like .6 g/gal sulfite, .5 g/gal calcium - roughly

• Strain, boil for 60 minutes; low simmer, with the goal of, you guessed it, 1 qt

• Ferment at like 65˚-68˚ with a nicely estery british yeast

• Force carb in a PET bottle with a CarbCap®, or in a keg, or bottle condition with a small amount of, say, invert sugar! ‘Cause fuck you, bud!

Thanks for reading, and brace yourself for part 2 (Less than a quart?? Psycho. No. Out.)

The Lemon Soda Trials

You may have never asked yourself, “how do you make lemon soda? Is it as easy as making lemonade and then tossing it in a SodaStream?”, or possibly thought “I’d like to know literally everything about how lemon soda in particular is made” and yeah, I haven’t either, because I’m not a psychopath. But alas, the blade was pressed to my back and I was asked to make some lemon soda, and in developing a recipe, I’ve discovered a few things you may find interesting - certainly if you’ve made it this far.

Like punch, which is my natural starting point for all things citrus, any good soda, even Coca Cola, consists of a few elements: clean base water, carbonation, sugar, acid, and flavorings. Like punch, but swap hooch for CO2. So the game is twofold: balance these elements, and make creative decisions around each element. As such, I’ll start with each element, and then discuss the balancing game.

Acid

It’s lemon soda, and you’d be commendable to suggest one use only lemon juice. This is a valid approach, and perhaps the best one, but in prototyping, I found, and heard the comment more than once, that a pure lemon juice soda, particularly one using fresh lemons, came off as “carbonated lemonade.” As such, there are a few possibilities as far as augmenting or replacing the lemon juice

• Citric acid - citric acid salts, readily available and cheap relative to the price of lemons, is very clean, though not particularly lemon-y. For reference, lemon juice is ~6% citric acid (by weight?)

• Grapefruit juice - this may seem wild, and I have yet to attempt it, but in comparing my sodas to San Pelligrino’s, my golden standard, I detect some quinine (more on that later), and possibly a thin layer of Grapefruit juice. I have yet to try this, but I’m guessing 10% is a smart start

• Boiled lemon juice - I haven’t tried this either (there are, believe me, a million things to try - more on that later), but I suspect this may take the fresh edge off the juice, which is good for long term flavor stability (I’d like a month)

Sugar

That tartness needs a counterbalance, and bitterness aside for now, that means sugar, and a not-insignificant quantity. Any punchmaker worth their salt will have experimented with layering sugars, such as superfine (very easy to dissolve) and darker, funkier sugars like Demarara, Muscovado (my favorite), or even Gula Jawa. As such, I first attempted an oleo saccharum (see recipe) with straight superfine, but have recently landed on a 50:50 blend of this and a Sugar in the Raw type sugar. This helps solve an early complaint, that the finish was both thin and dry.

• Superfine - clean as heck, easy to dissolve. I seldom make punch without it, for its sweetness minus all flavor, and ease of use

• Raw - flavorful, and could be used as 100% of the sugar (I don’t because it darkens lemon soda past what I deem wise)

• Muscovado et al - very funky, super delicious, and just not great for this context. Definitely smart in a Root Beer

Water

Worth mentioning is water, and as a brewer, I am particularly sensitive to its contents. It should obviously taste good, but it should be more than the distilled/RO stuff found in seltzer cans (a good thing in that context). Upon the suggestion of the head brewer that I add a touch of Gypsum, i.e. Calcium Phosphate, normally used to “dry out” beer, the sweet-if-blandly-tart soda I’d made became a mouth-puckering, dry, if wildly interesting soda. I plan on dialing back the rate, but the point is: salts matter. Common salts include Gypsum, CaCl2, and perhaps Epsom salt and baking soda. Stay tuned for trials, should they ever happen

• Use clean, low-TDS water as a base and built up with salts

• Gypsum seems important, perhaps at the 25-50 ppm level

• I suspect CaCl2 will come in handy in the final recipe

Carbonation

I have little to say, particularly to anyone who’s brewed and kegged, but suffice it to say, I’m guessing 20 psi will do the trick at like 38˚. Maybe 2.5-3 volumes. Idk, bro

Other flavors

This is the interesting bit. Beyond lemon and sugar, what does a lemon soda need? I’ve thus far considered texture and bitterness in my experiments, and discovered a few things.

• Xantham gum - this powerful thickener can be used to add a roundness and fullness to body - see Gum/Gomme Syrup - but leaves an odd “head” at the bottom of the finished glass. Use at a rate of perhaps .05%-.1% by weight in the syrup, which as you’d expect is like .03g-.06g for a 12 oz serving

• Quinine - on tasting the San Pellegrino lemon soda, as I often do, I thought I detected some bitter, tonic-y vibes, and looked into adding that to the soda. The punchline is that it’s pretty dangerous, unless you can get the food grade quinine phosphate, and even then you have to weigh carefully, and since I’m working with tiny trial batches, I won’t mess with this until I’m filling kegs. In the meantime, I plan on buying a commercial tonic syrup and subbing some syrup for that

• Grapefruit - I want to try adding this, as it adds a pleasant bitter edge which accentuates hops in Shandies, and reads as an “adult flavor,” adults being kind of the target audience, so I plan on starting at 10% GF juice in the juice blend and working from there

• Lemon extract - while the Oleo Saccharum described below adds some of these flavors, if I end up pulling out enough lemon juice and replacing it with citric acid, I’ll need more lemon-y-ness, which I’ll probably lean on an extract for

Putting it all together

Here’s the current version; it’s solid, if not as interesting and full-flavored as SP’s

• a day ahead, vacuum seal the peels of like two lemons with 15 g each superfine and raw sugar

• on soda day, open the bag, transfer the contents to a heatproof bowl or something, and add hot-to-boiling water until the sugar is melted (start with 30 g - a 1:1 simple is the implicit goal); discard peels

• boil 1.25 oz strained lemon juice in the cutest little saucepan for like, I don’t know, 5 minutes

• add the lemon juice to the syrup, along with .03 g each Xantham gum and Gypsum (you have a .01g scale, right? Of course you do)

• Blend in order to reduce lemon fragment particle size

• Add water to 12 oz (clean, maybe RO or distilled; or straight seltzer from a can, which is what I do - but definitely not club soda or soda water, which have salts added)

• If not using seltzer, carbonate using the Dave Arnold method (carb cap, 1L bottle, chill the heck out of your potion and then carbonate at like 30 psi), and enjoy!

Practical Temperature Control - the Reverse Herms®

While most brewers who have contemplated temperature control are probably concerned merely with, obviously, temperature control (i.e. tightness of control), quickness of ramp-ups, simplicity, and reliability, none but the one gallon brewer is concerned with the quart or so of wort “lost” to a HERMS system, or large-diameter RIMS tube. Hence, I’ve thought and thought and thought about ways to shrink the RIMS requirements, and possibly employ a HERMS system, on a system so small. Quick fixes: smaller diameter tubing, both in terms of the standard vessel-to-vessel silicone as well as the RIMS tubing itself, and perhaps a shorter HERMS path. Hell, I’ve considered steam heating, easily the best solution of them all, though wicked dangerous if one doesn’t want to buy a needlessly large system (particularly for one gallon - a common crutch; i.e. most premade equipment, even if very useful, is often off-sized in one way or another)

However, in wondering how I might work a Sous Vide device like an Anova into the system, an idea dawned upon me. If the HERMS is all about building a heat transfer device without the grain-trapping nature of counterflow plate chiller (one plan: co-opt a hop back, fill it with rice hulls, give the output to a plate chiller and use that with a PID to hold mash temps - truly insane, but I may try it one day), borrowing from the tech of an immersion chiller, why not use it like an immersion chiller, and run hot water through the coil, submerged in the mash? That way, you could feed either RIMS-PID controlled hot water, or else Sous Vide’d water, through the counterflow chiller you’d use later, and certainly maintain and possibly raise mash temps. Pretty sweet, right?

The idea drew from, in part, a strategy I’d attempted, namely to use an electric heat blanket wrapped around my mash tun in order to maintain temps. While any course in differential equations will elucidate you to the Goodness of this idea, it doesn’t really matter unless you thoroughly pre-heat the tun, so yeah, do both, but if you do one or the other, add the hot mash water some 10˚ above your target about a half hour before you mash in. In any case, I can’t imagine this wouldn’t work for holding temps, and may be able to handle, say, a rise from protein rest temps to a middling saccharification, though who knows if it could practically get you to mash out

In terms of equipment, you’d need the coil, probably just a standard brew pump, and a Sous Vide setup of some description. Maybe overshoot the target temps, and hell, you could use a fermentation box temp controller to turn the pump on and off, because even if you can change the water temp based on your mash readings, the system would have a massive delay unless you had a sickeningly overpowered heating element (say, 5000W for a a gallon of heating water - pure conjecture)

Finally, as a one gallon note, unless you can nail bleeding off the plate chiller (no spills, and you collect the priming wort), and have a source of sanitary pressurized air to clear the chiller (CO2 works, but what kind of animal would splice a hose fitting into their CO2 line?)

In any case, by all means let me know if you try this out, particularly if you beat me to it

Pumps - can't live with them, etcetera

So, you' either have a pump, and hate it like I do, or are considering buying one - well, I’m here to give you my thoughts, the full scoop, and share some of the little joys of Pumpsmanship.

First of all, as a concept, pumps rock. While one gallon is hardly a back-breaking quantity, 5 gallons and up is a ton of volume (especially since it’s about an extra two gallons pre-boil), and if you don’t have a gravity fed system, but want to sparge, or recirculate in a RIMS or HERMS system, you just don’t have a choice. The rub is that the pumps with unlimited power and no need for priming are ungodly expensive, so we mortals are stuck with pumps that need ginger care starting up (though for whom power is seldom an issue on the homebrew scale)

Which is to say, one must plan for priming. Priming is pretty simple - fill the pump chamber with liquid, because the cheaper pumps don’t enjoy having air in their chambers (while I haven’t looked into the “why,” one hears a grinding noise when one forgets to prime, and I suspect wear-and-tear is a concern without the lubricating effect of liquid; also, these pumps suck at pushing air out, so your practical max flow rate plummets). So, knowing we have to do this, here are some bits of advice to make your priming life easier:

If you’re just now designing a system, or have the flexibility to change yours, add a tee and valve at the output of your pump - having a bleeder like this for air is night and god damned day. I’ve had to prime pumps by removing and replacing just straight raw tubing by hand, and no hands in the world are immune to the pain produced by such scalding, boiling wort. Plus, your losses are way lower if you don’t spray wort everywhere. Trust me, add a bleed valve somewhere

Also, and this is for those who recirculate their mashes, I recently discovered that, assuming you run your sparge water and wort through similar lines (i.e. through one pump in a closed system), it’s way, way easier to prime the line with hot water than pray to the gods that your wort will happily spare the quart it can take to fill the lines

Finally, there’s Bernoulli’s Law to consider - which is to say, if you, like me, have a bunch of valves on the front and back of the pump leading to various things, remember that a closed valve on the output will prevent much of anything from passing the chamber of the pump, even with a bleed valve; which is to say, I’m nearly certain it’s a good idea to keep your outputs open while you prime your pump. I suppose in theory the ideal order is: in open, out open, bleed valve open, out closed (because cheap pumps hate pulling vacuum, so always throttle from the output, i.e. start with output closed)

Deep breaths. Deep. Breaths.

PID woes, and a wild fix

I’m nearly done with the multi-year, many-times-delayed construction of my PID box, and while I’ve successfully crammed everything into a 4” cubed box (no easy feat), upon plugging it in, the PID worked fine, but the SSR wouldn’t fire. I tried changing outputs (1 to 2, hot and cold), but to no avail. Upon examining the leads with a multimeter, I was further baffled: no voltage reading above some 20mV, no current, nothing. After some research, it turns out that, indeed, I’d purchased the near-useless Dwyer Love 32B 33 model - two 5A relays, no logic signal out. Woof. While this is still a solid PID, it’s useless for the power I need (minimum 1,000W, sake of argument), so how can I fix this issue?

Well, the cleanest solution would be to simply buy a new unit, but they’re $90, and then I’d have a useless PID. Well, what about trying to pass a logic signal through the relay? An interesting idea; here are the pitfalls: it’s an AC relay, so can it handle a DC signal, even if the amperage is low? What would be the power source; could I cram a small power supply into my already-cramped box? Could the SSR even take that amperage?

Let’s cross the power supply option off, as best case scenario I’d have to cut the thing open to wire it into the power line in the box. So, what could give me a logic signal that doesn’t require a second cable into the box? That’s right, a battery.

Next problem: can the PID take a DC signal? Assuming the 3A, 240VAC SPST relay in mine is like most others, it should be able to handle a sub-50 mA DC signal, so we have to design around that. I couldn’t find anything suggesting the SSR wouldn’t be able to handle that, but for the sake of power conservation, I deferred to the Arduino’s 20 mA signal as a target. As for the battery itself, 9V seems simple enough.

Thanks to good ol’ E&M, we know V=IR, so for a 20 mA signal, that’s 450 ohms, which is good, since P=IV, and hence the circuit should draw .18W, whereas the common resistor I found was rated to .25W. It all checks out.

Finally, where to place the resistor? Well, the SSR needs to see the full signal voltage, so we need only place the resistor in parallel with the SSR terminals; that way we get a signal of virtually 20 mA assuming small internal resistance, and all 9V (we just need 3V, but can go into the 30s). And there you go! That’s one way to get a logic signal out of a relay-based PID without using a power supply. Neat!

About that pressure lager

Good news and bad news folks: the pressure system worked surprisingly well, 1.5 gallon pressure grant at all, and beer is definitely being made. The bad news: it’s a slightly elaborate and bulky system, and if there’s a bleed anywhere, as I suspect there is on mine, you’ll probably find out the hard way: with a gradual slip in psi (assuming you ask the yeast to put up 100% of the CO2)

However, the system is functional, and having the Sankey keg makes adjustments super easy and safe. Here are some caveats:

1. the High Pressure Lager Yeast, especially after two starters, really rips at room temp, so don’t do what I did, and definitely throw that spunding valve on ASAP. After some 20 hours without one, i.e. with no vents whatsoever, the spunding valve was screaming when I attached it, so I’m guessing the psi was at something like 30-45; not a death knell for my intrepid yeast, but not great, and definitely not necessary

2. while leaving the yeast to make all of the CO2 is cool and something I’d like in the future, and a great way to pressure test your setup, adding a tank of CO2 to the liquid in port on your keg hedges your bets

3. time will only tell if precise temp control is necessary, and I certainly didn’t control it for this beer (a rarity for LA, the ambient temp is in the low 60s in the building), but hopefully not?

I’ll certainly be doing this again, probably in a 2L bottle since I find the idea positively hilarious, and if you do, good luck!

Fermenting under Pressure: Spunding Valve on a Sankey Keg?

As a huge german lager fan, and someone uninterested in the lengthy lagering wait, it’s inevitable that White Lab’s High Pressure Lager yeast would have come to infect my very subconscious. If this product is news to you, let me fill you in: the lagering game is more or less all about minimizing ester presence in the finished product - that is, make as little as possible during primary, and clean up most of what remains during lagering. While the normal approach is to pick a clean lager yeast, and ferment cold, where metabolism is slower (probably due simply to chemical processes running more slowly at lower temps - the yeast are in a liquid medium, and as such, heavily dependent upon the gods of chance to bring them food through collision and convection - but parts of that may be incomplete, I’m running sourceless here).

But some enterprising brewers, probably around the time that fermentation chambers became capable of higher pressures, CO2 began coming in tanks instead of through fermentation, and once fermentation volumes ballooned into the ~1000 barrel range, discovered that pressure could suppress ester production (I’m so unsure as to why that I’d be hard pressed to venture a guess). So, the trick becomes finding a yeast capable of holding up to the 15 psi common for the trick (fun fact - that’s the pressure about 30 feet down). Well, that’s where HP Lager commons in.

As to the practicality of such a maneuver, we live in the age of kegs, so it’s quite simple. One can either assemble a spunding valve with simple enough parts from McMaster Carr, or buy one for about $35 from a homebrewing store, and toss it onto the ball lock gas in (head space! Leave head space for the kräusen). Then, I suspect you can either set the psi right off the bat to 15 via the gas in (prior to adding the valve), or let the yeast give you the CO2 (No idea how this affects the ester production - definitely worth looking into or trying). And that’s it! The darned thing ferments at 68˚ for all of a week, ramps down to 32˚, sits there for maybe another week, and you’ve got pseudo-lager.

Now, how about doing this with a sankey keg, when you’re in a standard chest freezer that lacks the space for an elaborate tower of piping above the keg? Using a pressure grant *patent pending. The idea here is akin to a blowoff tube - you lock the beer out on the sankey, hook the gas in to some vinyl, and then attach the other side to the beer in line on a small, second keg - say a 4L or 1.5 gal mini keg, such as I use for my 1 gal system. To connect the beer thread on one side to the ball lock on the other, $5 will get you either a male beer thread-to-male ball lock connector, or a ball lock flare-to-male beer thread connector. Problem solved. Finally, toss the spunding valve onto the gas in on the pressure grant keg, and you’re good to go. Sanitize everything, and maybe pressurize slightly. I suspect that when I use this, I’ll go straight to 5 psi, and then let the yeast provide the rest - which may burn me! But then we’ll all be better brewers for it, which is worth the price of entry. Also, I may just start with the Rauchbier, and save the Helles for a safer, later trial

Diving into Statistics: Standard Deviation

I have a pretty damning admission: I know very, very little about statistics. I remember (or can quickly recall with the help of Wikipedia) what the mean, median, and mode are, and I've dealt with some distributions and statistical physics as a result of past coursework, but were I presented with a data set (say, sales as a function of time), I'd be hard pressed to give you much else. 

Which leads me to Standard Deviation. So, first of all, the mean. Let's say I have a dataset of seven points: [1, 1.5, 4, 5, 6, 6, 9]. The mean is just the sum of the values, divided by how many there are - in other words, 32.5/7 or 4.6. That's your classes Algebra II (?) mean, and it's nifty

But let's say you have two datasets - [50, 50, 50] and [0, 50, 100] - they share the same mean, 50, but they look way different. One dataset is all 50's, while the other ranges from 0 to 50; were these temperatures over the course of a day, for instance, one could be a survivable, hot day, while the other would swing from freezing to boiling. Way, way, different. So, and this part I vaguely recalled, is there a way to quantify this spread? Among them, standard deviation presents an option

And apparently, it's not too wild a concept. First, determine the mean - we'll use the simple sets above, and set it to 50. Check. Next, things get spicier - we basically want to get a sense of the distance of the data points from this average, but, while you could in fact just average the absolute values of these distances (for the second set, that'd be 50+0+50/3 or 33), this method doesn't "point out" or amplify more egregious spreads - which is to say, it gives the same weight to small deviations from the mean as well as massive ones. 

So, how do we "pick out" these more extreme outliers? One simple way would be to square these differences, which would disproportionately "amplify the signal" from far out points. So, instead of what is apparently called the MAD or Mean Absolute Deviation around the Mean (very literal), where we do as above and get a MAD of 33, we'd square those differences, and get what's called the Variance, or (50^2+50^2)/3, or 1,667. Finally, in an apparent effort to get this unwieldy, large number into both the units and the scale of the original set, we simply take the square root, yielding a Standard Deviation of ~41 (right?)

So, yeah, that's pretty cool. One question I'm left with is: is there a way to normalize that number, in order to get a sense of spread that applies to all sets? Like a number between 0 and 1? Word on the street is there's this thing called R^2, an attempt to do just that, but that's for another post