One side this homebrewing hobby that can be both a blessing and a curse is the amount of time needed on brew day or preparation for brew day.  Of course this time alone can be a great escape from the stresses of life.  And sitting outside on a nice summer day watching my wort boil and listening to the birds sing I find downright magical.

But telling the kids, “Not now, I’m busy” can make even the most solitude-loving individual feel guilty.  So facing a giant mass of equipment I needed to clean on Saturday afternoon in preparation for a Sunday brew day, I came up with a brilliant idea.

I conscripted the young helping hands I had at home, telling them I’d pay them $5/hour to help me clean my brew equipment.  It was a win-win.  The kids were thrilled to be earning some money to spend on whatever they wanted, they helped me get through cleaning day faster, and instead of this work being alone non-family time we were hanging out having fun listening to music and talking.  Luckily, the kids weren’t up on child labor laws and the concept of minimum wage, so I think I’ll pursue this again in the future sometime.

While doing a yeast starter a while back, I had a strange phenomenon happen to me that caught me off-guard.  Doing a 2L starter in a glass 1/2 gallon carboy, I shake it up about every hour to ensure I am getting good aeration.  While doing this, it builds up pressure as I have the cap screwed on tightly so as not to leak anything.  After it settles down, I loosen the lid a bit and let it vent some of the built-up pressure (and get another dose of oxygen for the fermentation).

During this process, of course the yeast foam wants to rush out as you relieve the pressure, so you have to screw the lid back on again before you lose anything out the lid.  So this day while venting through the lid, I had a slow steady stream of pressurized air going out, watching the foam raise higher in the jug.  Right when it was near the lid, I screwed it down tighter only to find it suddenly rush out and foam out of the carboy.

After this happened a couple of times, I figured out what was going on with the physics of it.  By letting it establish a steady flow rate, when I started tightening the lid I was decreasing the area it had to flow through, which made the flow speed up.  Same phenomenon as a garden hose when you start to bend it over to pinch the flow.

So next time around, I’ll either not let the foam get too close to the lid before tightening the lid down, or not let it build up a steady flow stream by venting for a period of time.

There are different types of LP regulators out there, and some function differently.  I stumbled across this on brew day as I was using my new propane burner.  It came with its own regulator and it looked slightly different than my old one.  I didn’t think much of it and just used the new hose/regulator with the new burner.  But I found the function of the adjustable knob on it was different.

Instead of being an open/close valve (with variable opening amount in between), it actually adjusted the pressure regulation.

This wasn’t intuitive at first and I was frustrated by the fact that I now had to turn the knob in the opposite direction I was used to.  Bigger flame on pressure regulator meant turning the knob clockwise.

However on my old regulator that was a flow control valve, the pressure was fixed (at 10 psi) and my flow control valve opened by turning counterclockwise.

After getting my brain used to turning the knob in the opposite direction, the other issue I found was turning the flame off took a lot more turns of the knob, and it felt somewhat disconcerting that the flame went out before the knob was fully turned all the way it could go.

Not realizing that the new one with the pressure regulator adjustment gave me greater gas flow capability (adjusts up to 30 psi), I switched to the other one that I was more familiar with.  But when I went to boil the wort, I didn’t get any speedier boil than with my older/smaller burner.  So in the end, I switched the lines again.

In the end, it’s worth understanding the function of the adjustments on your propane line because just because the fitting on the burner is the same and the propane tank is the same, what you put in between can have an effect on how well you can use your burner.

After having a major disaster where I dumped a bunch of garden hose water into what otherwise would’ve been an awesome IPA, I made a couple changes to my equipment.  I changed the fittings on my wort chiller from a simple worm screw clamp solution on a smooth copper tube to a compression fitting mating to the copper coil, and then the plastic hose was press fit over a barbed fitting.  In addition to that, I modified the copper tubing routing so this fitting no longer would stay inside the boil pot, but instead would overhang the outside edge of the boil kettle.

The connection seemed like a super-robust solution as I checked it out when I made the change.  It wasn’t until I did my dual brew day batch where I was chilling two batches with this one wort chiller that I found a new issue.  The hot end of my wort chiller (the output side after it goes through the hot wort) had the hose sliding off just with the tug of gravity.  Luckily it was toward the end of the chilling phase so the hose was starting too cool down, shrink, and no longer slide off.

So in the future it’ll be belts & suspenders, and those barbed fittings will also get hose clamps on top of it….

About a week ago, I was preparing for my homebrew day (actually a dual homebrew day, doing 2 batches simultaneously), and I was in & out of the house gathering equipment for my brew day outside.  While re-positioning cars in the driveway to clear my brew space, something crunched in my back pocket.  I pulled out my BIC lighter and found that it was not very pocket-durable when you sit on it.

Luckily, I had bought the lighters as a 2-pack way back when, so I tossed the broken one aside and got my backup.  I briefly thought about what a disaster it would’ve been had I not had a spare.  My intricate schedule of balancing two different brews, my smack-pack yeast warming in the house, my crushed grain waiting in buckets in the basement, …  I would’ve had to scramble off to the store to buy another lighter, and screwed up my whole schedule for the day.

I was reminded that I had already taken precautions on my propane tanks, and I always keep 2 tanks
on hand for brew day.  Years ago, I ran out of propane in the midst of my boil and that really sucked.  Much worse than it would’ve been had I not had a spare BIC lighter.  It reminded me that I needed to do a bit of an equipment review and figure out which items would be a true disaster if I sat on them or something on brew day and didn’t have a spare…