Gooseneck Siphon

/My first two brews were straight from the tin along with a packet of brew enhancer. I wanted to start brewing with my own choice of ingredients, including hops. A full wort boil is recommended to get a higher hop utilization, and the 6l pot that I was using just couldn’t cut it.

I got a 24l pot from Brouwland. This is really meant for canning, but it can be used as a brew pot and is a good price. As long as the enamel is intact there will be no chance of the metal reacting with the wort and affecting the taste of the beer. Note that the product page says the pot is 29l. I’ve filled it up from my 23l carboy and that comes to a centimeter or two under the rim, so I think 24-25l is a better guess. (The lid is quite deep, some 5-6 cm, so maybe the 29l is including the lid?)

The pot doesn’t have a tap, so I had to figure out how to siphon the wort from the pot into the plate chiller. I could of course have just tried dangling the silicone hose into the pot, but that seemed to be asking for trouble (brewer’s law states that untethered siphon hoses are guaranteed to jump out and spray their contents at you at the least welcome moment. Hot, near-boiling wort, ouch, no thanks.)

Fortunately, Bodensatz Brewing describe how to make a cunningly-named gooseneck siphon that would seem to do the trick. I liked this because:

1. It solves my problem, nicely. The pot lid has a small hole/steam-vent in it, big enough for the siphon to stick out of, which has worked well.
2. It’s inexpensive and straightforward to make.
3. I get the “I made that!” feeling when it’s finished.

I did some calculations, figured out how long the pipe should be, I went to my local plumbers and bought a length of soft copper tubing, 1.25m for about 125 NOK ($20.) They didn’t have the spring to help avoid kinking the tube when bending, so I just had to take it slowly and carefully, and bend by hand.

Bending the main circle that sits at the bottom of the pot was fairly straightforward, with a few rounds of placing in the pot and tweaking needed to get it the right diameter and level. Bending the straight vertical up the side of the pot was harder, and the “head” at the top was hardest. In fact, I didn’t bother with the final kink, it was too difficult to do by hand and the pipe wasn’t long enough for that (I’d made it to size to the pot, not including the lid. Using the lid was an afterthought) – so mine just sticks up, with a slight angle to take it out of the scorching jet of steam that comes out of the lid hole. It clears the top of the lid by about 4 cm, which is long enough to push on the silicon hose.

Call me lazy, but I don’t see the point of walking around the grass when you can walk straight across, so unless there is some clear advice saying something along the lines of “Keep off the grass” or “You must follow all the instructions or risk complete failure, injury or death” then I will cut a few corners and see how little I can get away with doing, in the name of saving a few minutes now to look forward to the humiliation of spending hours later going back and fixing it properly.

So, with my “I know what I’m doing” hat firmly in place, I decided not to make the holes in the gooseneck, but instead fashion a sieve by fixing a fine mesh hop bag to the end of the copper tube using an elastic band. While siphoning started out well, and cool wort was coming out of the chiller, this turned out to be a bad idea the very moment the hop bag was sucked into the tube, blocking the tube and completely stemming the flow of wort into the chiller. Any attempt to pull out the bag just resulted in the siphon sucking harder. Brewers panic set in. Time was running out – deadly bacteria were surely drifting down in to my precious wort, and my hands were starting to be scalded in the hot wort as I desperately tried to evict the lodged hop back from its new home. And that was despite having cast aside my precious little remaining credibility and donned a pair of rubbermaids – ok they’re not that bad, but I’m trying to keep up the intensity!

I stopped, thought a bit, and Doh! To get the rest of the siphon going I had to simply unscrew the hose from the chiller. releasing the partial vacuum, and then defiantly pull the hop bag out of the end of the tube. The hop bag was then repositioned very tightly over the end of the tube and siphoning continued to completion.

With all that faffing about, blowing into the siphon (I first thought it was just blocked hops) and plunging unsanitised rubber gloves into the wort, I was certain I had infected my beer. Yet the beer came out none the worse. I guess near-boiling hot wort can hold it’s own against one or two nasties that come late to the party.

But that was something I would not know until much later, so I was spurred on in the days that followed to do the work needed to complete the gooseneck siphon and avoid a repetition of this brewing bungle.

To complete the siphon I just had to drill many small holes around the base. Well, that shouldn’t be too difficult? I was wrong again. With no clamp holding the tubing or some kind of mount for the drill, this was as good as impossible – the bit on the hand-held electric drill just kept sliding off the round tubing. So, instead of drilling, I resorted instead to punching in the holes with a nail and hammer. The tube was soft copper, and it is soft enough to easily drive a nail through. This worked a treat, and gives surprising control over the size of the hole, due to the tapered end of the nail.

With the holes done, I crimped the end closed with pliers and tested it with water. A few more blows with the hammer to open some very small holes (ok, they were just dents) and the siphon was in business.

During the following brew, the siphon worked a treat, at least for the first 30 seconds. I’ve remembered without fail to bag up my hops and use hop bags ever since.

Magnetic Stirrer

This paper says that magnetic stirrers can give rise to 10-15 times more yeast compared with not stirring. So, I of course wanted one, given that I’ve got a fridge full of smack packs and vials and the glycerin for freezing yeast is on it’s way from http://vinogbar.no.

Magnetic stirrers are often available on ebay, particularly in the states, but I then remembered the different voltage requirements and it all seemed a bit too much hassle and cost. The BrewWiki StirPlate page has many links to instructions for building a stirrer, which clearly describs how it is built.After reading, I figured it didn’t seem that hard and decide to give it a go.

I had a cheap 25w soldering iron, a 12 volt PC fan, an old hard drive and a small green lunchbox, but not much else. I bought resistors, breadboard, cables and other electric components from Futurlec. Component prices were lower than anything else I could find in Europe, and shipping to Norway was very reasonable ($5), although it did take several weeks for the order to arrive. It worked out most economical to place two orders, each under $30. The biggest saving was that the order was tax free when imported, as each order was for less than 200 NOK ($30). In fact, in addition to tax at 25% the post office also adds 85kr (ca. $15) for the privillege of charging you the VAT, so paying tax on small orders can make the order very expensive. The components needed for the stirrer could easily have been sent as one package, but I bought some project boxes, prototype board and components needed to build a temperature controller.

The key components in my stirrer are:

• A 12v PC fan
• A beatiful flourescent green lunchbox
• 1k potentiometer – 1K was the lowest resistance available, so I bought a dual pot in case I needed to halv the resistance by connecting the two sides together.
• Knob for potentiometer.
• DC Connector, so the stirrer can be pluged directly into a battery saver.
• I also needed some lead-free solder and a helping hand.

As most of the articles suggest, I used magnets from an old hard drive. It was difficult to get the magnets off the backing plates, as the magnets break easily if too much force is used. When mounting the magnets on the fan, I had to also use the backing plate or else the magnetic field would stop the fan from spinning freely. (If I had realized this to begin with, I probably wouldn’t have tried getting them off the backing plate first.)

To balance the backing plates and magnets on the fan, I cut out a cardboard disc slightly smaller than the fan and used sticky tape to fix it all together. The tape was secure enough to hold the magnet and backing plates, but flexible enough that I could reposition it to find the balance point.

Some articles recommend balancing the magnets on a pencil to find the center of gravity, but that didn’t work – the magnets and plates were heavy so that even the slightest movement caused it to fall off.Instead I just connected the fan to the power and listened to how much vibration there was. When the assembly close to center and there was no audible vibration, I picked up the fan and held it in my hand to feel how much vibration there was. After a few minutes adjusting, the fan was pretty much center, and it spins silently at the speeds I will be using.

The fan is about 1cm narrower than the bredth of the lunchbox, so it’s wedged in firmly with some folded thin cardboard. This was quick and simple, and acts as a shock absorber for any vibration that might occur. A hole for the DC connector and pot, a few solder joints and we were ready to roll.

I had 3 magnetic PTFE stirbars in different sizes from www.onlinesciencemall.com. The medium (7mm) and the large (11mm) work best.

When there is airlock activity, there is a clear correlation between the speed and the frequency of bubbles in the airlock. A quick spin, lots of bubbles – a slow spin, fewer bubbles. Well that was my amusement for the weekend. I wonder if the yeast really are metabolizing faster or if it’s just more CO2 being released from the solution due to the stirring.

I’ve made a couple of lagers which got off to a good start, so it seems 1L is fine for medium gravity beers, but I for the higher gravity beers a 2L starter will be needed, and also for larger batches when I scale up later this year. I will buy some larger Erlenmeyer flasks from http://kptnaturfag.no/search?query=erlenmeyer