There is always something I wanna do at the brewery. Ideas come and go. But a lot of them just don't fit in with either my style, my philosophy, my capability, or my budget. And of course I've had a few things come and go this year.

As far as my process goes I like it just fine. Its more of a hands on approach. But that only means I hand dump a bucket or two. There have been those that argue an automated system makes better beer. But at this volume of brewing I have yet to see that as fact.

But none the less, there are things that I have wanted to try or a direction I wanted to start going.

One of the things I have been talking about doing most is moving to 3 gallon batches. Most wanna go 10 or even 20 gallon batches. So me wanting to go smaller seems odd to some. But I can brew more, have more variety, and an experiment gone wrong wont break the bank.

Mini batches for me is more than just cutting recipes in half. Its going electric, its moving to all indoors, its being able to take the brewing system on the road,  its re-opening the bottling line, its all kinds of things.

This year I got further along. I built the two heat sticks to see how I liked the electrics and to decide if rewiring the basement was worth it. I must say I was pretty impressed with the power of two 110 elements.

But while I have been utilizing the sticks, I have yet to move electrical boxes to more practical locations or installed elements to the kettle its self. (But the reason for not having kettle elements will be coming up later.) I am currently assessing the electrical issues and probably will be moving the outlets in the near future, along with a new sink and drain location.

The next thing that I wanted, that actually happened this year, was a fermentation chamber. It was more that my bad luck turned into good luck. My garage has a tendency to kill fridges because we all know my garage is famous for being like 300 degrees. And yep, the fridge died. But in a good way. The thermostat went out and it pretty much turned into a standing freezer.

An STC-1000 temp controller later and we have a heated and cooled ferment chamber. I have used this quite a few times this year all ready. But sadly not for lagering. If you had read the last post, you have seen there were many other things I was worrying about.  But the chamber is all set, the basement is moving twards being too cold for most other brewing, so lagers are in the immediate future.

The other bigger thing I wanted to happen in the brewery again had to do with electric brewing,, but only indirectly. If I had installed the elements into either of my kettles I would have had to come up with a different way to cool. The immersion chiller would not work because the elements would then be in the way. I needed to figure on a counter flow.

I picked up a counterflow from a club member, who didn't like it because he didn't like the gravity feed. I had a small pump I bought a few years ago just for this. http://youtu.be/AYGZa4Bqwls just felt like it was a lot of screwing around with wires and switches. Bleh.  But with my new pseudo tiered system the gravity feed shouldn't be bad at all. My kettle is a good 30 inches off the ground. Plenty of height. I just need to get one more fitting and we are good to go. If this works as well as I hope, my next step would be to pick one of the far smaller plate chillers.

Looking ahead to 2015 I see a few changes coming. Finish these few things I just talked about for sure. Then we can move to getting the brew schedule to the way I had been planning for a while now. Bigger 10 gallon batches of lower ABV “house beers” to keep on tap. But focusing on the mini batches.

As far as styles go for 2015, I'd like to get back to being the Stoutmaster, of the club as there is some serious competition in this style again. And possibly browns. There just don't seem to be any good browns anymore.

Thanks for reading this year.

Although I still have a few more brews to sneak in, I guess this will be the end of the year wrap up edition. I think it will be a two parter.

Not happy at all with the brewing this year. A lot of bad beers. And various reasons why. Right from the start of this years and the end of last years brew have bad. No way around it. Bad.

That damn plastic taste that plagued me before. Its like all of a sudden all my beers were made in a beach ball.

But like a sneaky virus, this problem eluded me for a long time. A very long time. Others were having kind of similar issues, so at first I chalked it up to a bad lot of yeast being sold. But after a while it became clear that that wasn't it.

Then I went back to the cause of the last time I had issues. The lines. I changed out all of my beverage lines. A few new batches thru them and nope. Not it.

After some more thought and tastings, it was pretty obvious that it was a chlorine or chloramine problem. But I have always used my campden tablets. After a bit of research and asking around, I came to find out that these tablets have a fairly short live span.

Things started making sense. I bought new tablets. And things were better. Much better. And after careful thought, I think this is how I solved the problem the first time as well, but I just didn't know it. 

Back when I had the first phenol attack, I finally solved the problem (or thought I did) by changing my lines. But now that I have been thinking about it,, I had bought new campden in that order as well because I had used all of what I had when I was making the rhubarb wines.

Ok. But I must admit that while this sure as hell solved a ton of problems,, there is still something going funny with my beer. Something again that I just cannot put my finger on. But I started doing something that made me take notice.

Bottling. I have been bottling a lot lately. And those beers DO NOT have the issue that my kegged beer does. Its not really a fault so to say,, but just…. something.

I have cleaned my kegs, changed rings, changed lines. I just don't know what it is. So what does my kegged beer have that my bottled beer don't, and something that I haven't changed. Bingo! The gas lines.

I took a look last night and it looks like I poured root beer in them and let it harden. I ordered more this morning. But how or when I got beer back up in there I do not know. But this has to be the problem.

Like I said, it took me a while to figure this out when it shouldn't have. But somethings go right past you. I'm glad I found out whats wrong, but it came a bit late, and have wasted a good chunk of time, money and beer. Most notably 2 batches of 1.100 beers. The Barleywine and the Imperial stout are just terrible. Almost undrinkable. Almost. I don't think I would survive the act of dumping them. I'm gonna drink these suckers no matter how long it takes.

Like I said I got it fixed and I'm ready to get to work on the 2015 TTO open beers. It should be interesting as I have a new outlook on both the contest itself and the beers I put in.

But that's another post.

end of part one. Part two next time: All the stuff I wanted to do this year, and what I actually did.