I have not done any homebrewing in two decades,
but when I was doing it experimentally for a
couple of years in the late '70's I made
some interesting ["good" in my opinion at
the time :-)> ] homebrews inspired by a book entitled
"Wines and Beers of old New England, a How To Do It History"
by a retired Dartmouth Physics professor.
I last purchased this book in its latest
printing from Amazon.com a year or so ago.
[I know its around here somewhere... and if
I could find my copy I'd be more specific
about the author --- grrhh! Search on that title
however and you'll find it...]
Taking off from that book's comments
about beer brewing before the German
Lager(hops) ingredients and style of
brew became popular after the 1850's or
so, I use several gallons of unpasteurized
Apple Cider, a gallon of Maple Syrup,
3 pounds of ground and boiled Ginger
root, 8 Cinamon sticks and 32 Cloves
as the ingredients of the brew simmered
in a large pot for a couple of hours
prior to cooling and fermentation...
The batch size was thus 5 gallons...
In my several batches brewed over 20
years ago, I would remove the cloves/cinnamon
sticks before fermentation. But I don't
know why I did so and I probably will leave
them in the fermentation vats the next
time I do the process...
My key technical innovation was modularity
at the 1 gallon fermentation vat level:
I use 5 one gallon glass containers for
a 5 gallon batch...
My water trap method is inspired by the book's
account of colonists building a clay dam
around the bung hole on the top of a barrel
and letting the yeast-evolved CO2 leak up
around the loosely bunged cork through the
water pool within the dam.
My modular brewing vats and traps are elegant
and simple to make from the typical metal capped
one gallon cider or juice jars one can get in
any supermarket: I hot-melt-glue a 3 oz plastic
bathroom cup to the metal lids of the five
glass bottles (for a 5 gallon batch.) Then after
the glue has cooled and hardened, I drill a
single #60 hole thru the metal cap, the glue
layer and the plastic cup.
After evenly dividing the cooked brew between
the 5 one-gallon bottles, topping off with
extra (boiled and cooled) cider and
innoculating each bottle with appropriate
brewers yeast, I cap the bottles with the
5 water trap lids, fill the traps (cups)
with tap water, cover each bottle's cap
loosely with a plastic sandwich
bag, and then set the bottles aside in a
suitable room temperature space for the
yeasties to do their duties... Within a
day all 5 water traps will be a-bubbling with
the joyous sound of their respective yeasties at
work. When the bubbles fall silent a week
or two later, the fermentation is done...
At the end of the fermentation the water in the
trap is sometimes sucked into the bottle, which
is why I recommend keeping the plastic bag covers
over them to keep random dust with bacteria/spores
from settling in the water and contaminating the
bottle. The key is to stop the process and bottle
the beer from each brewing vat just before the
last bubble is emitted...
If you want the result to be carbonated, the completed
(8+ percent alcohol) "beer" has to be bottled with
just enough extra sugar (maple syrup) to ferment a
tad more and carbonate the "beer" properly while
boosting the alcohol level to the 11%++ level that
kills the yeasties... this secondary fermentation
will take a silent week or more, and the bottles used
have need to be the strong european style [Heiniken or
similar brands] rather than the flimsy X-MAS tree ornament
thickness glass bottles of many domestic US brands.
A 5 gallon batch thus brews in five bottles, and
the merry chorus of bubbles one gets from
the 5 different bubble traps reminds me of
a mechanical clock store's sound of many
different slightly out of phase pendulum
beats...
I have been building my empty beer bottle
collection towards brewing, storing and
enjoying batch of my 12% ginger beer
sometime hence when my storage capacity
has rebuilt sufficiently...
Oh yeah... one could use a Linux box to
take notes with Emacs about the ongoing
progress of a particular batch. Then
use the Linux box to create labels
for the bottles with a suitable
graphic arts application...
And during the brewing one could perhaps
connect a microphone to an analog to
digital converter and use a Linux box
running suitable signal analysis software
to feed a real time series of bubble rate
measurements to a spread sheet to keep
track of the gas evolution rate... :-)>
[Shades of a Penguin Rube Goldberg...]
Anyone for a homebrew tasting? Or
contributing to an anthology of essays on
"The Art of Open Source Brewing?"
...Carl
--------------------------------=|=---------------------------------------
Carl Helmers, Chairman and Founder, Helmers Publishing, Inc.
--< Publishers of
ID Systems and Desktop Engineering magazines
(what else do you do after starting the late lamented BYTE magazine?)
[Favorite look and feel: Linux running X on a big screen]
EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WEB: www.deskeng.com
www.idsystems.com
SNAILMAIL: 174 Concord Street, Peterborough, NH 03458
PHONE: 603-924-9631 -=- FAX: 603-924-7408
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
RESIDENCE: 468 Greenfield Road
Peterborough, NH 03458
603.924.9981 if busy)
(-|-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffry Smith
To: Andrew Foulks
Cc: Greater NH Linux Users' Group
Sent: 11/8/00 12:22 PM
Subject: Re: What do you want to hear about?
On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, Andrew Foulks wrote:
> II. What I would like to hear: (apologies for any repeats...)
>
> 5) How to brew beer while using your Linux box in some way ;-)
>
Using Linux to Monitor & Control the Brewing Process?
I think some of our folks could work on this, although it might
require some experimentation & practice, do we have
folks into home-brew in the LUG? ;-)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffry Smith Technical Sales Consultant Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED] phone:603.930.9739 fax:978.446.9470
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thought for today: raster burn n.
Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of
looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp.
graphics monitors. See terminal illness.
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffry Smith
To: Andrew Foulks
Cc: Greater NH Linux Users' Group
Sent: 11/8/00 12:22 PM
Subject: Re: What do you want to hear about?
On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, Andrew Foulks wrote:
> II. What I would like to hear: (apologies for any repeats...)
>
> 5) How to brew beer while using your Linux box in some way ;-)
>
Using Linux to Monitor & Control the Brewing Process?
I think some of our folks could work on this, although it might
require some experimentation & practice, do we have
folks into home-brew in the LUG? ;-)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffry Smith Technical Sales Consultant Mission Critical Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED] phone:603.930.9739 fax:978.446.9470
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thought for today: raster burn n.
Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of
looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp.
graphics monitors. See terminal illness.
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
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unsubscribe gnhlug
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