Brewing -- Beer

I've made homebrew beer for several years. Operations were shutdown while I lived in the last apartment, which wasn't easy to brew in. Since I moved to my house, I brewed a couple of batches of beer. I've purchased a 10 gallon SS brew kettle, and built my own lauter-tun. With that equipment I've done a couple of partial mash and two or three full-mash beers. Since I build the lauter-tun, I've brought it over to friend's houses to help them do full-mash brewing as well! My friends Tom and Liz wanted their wort chiller back (which I've been borrowing for a few years) to make some beer of their own, so I'm planning on building my own wort chiller next.

Earlier in my brewing career I purchased a small mill from Atlas Products (as in the pasta machine) to grind speciality grains with. I am a big fan of roller mills, and this mill is a three roller mode. You can either use two rollers for cracking, or crank the eccentric adjustment over and use two rollers for cracking, and the third for making flour. Plus, I can always use it in the kitchen for custom grinding, though I haven't done that yet. If I don't get it to work right, and I plan on continue brewing all-grain brews, I'm considering getting a MaltMill. That looks like quite a nice piece of equipment.

I think the mill works well for smaller amounts of grain, but it just doesn't do well for larger amounts. The biggest problem is actually grains getting stuck in the feed hopper, such that you continuously need to "poke" them through the feed hole. Otherwise the grains bridge and you go nowhere. The hopper is also a bit small for the amount of grains you use for beer brewing. I am going to try and make my own feed hopper that can be used in place of the existing hopper. Perhaps I can fix the feeding problems and that will make the mill more enjoyable, rather than a pain, to use for brewing.

The other problem is that the setting that I find works best for crushing malt and other grains seems "non standard", such as the machine was not intended to be used that way. I can easily disassemble the mill and drill more index holes in the setting control, or put some more fine detent system in-place. Until I fix the feed problem and start milling more, this really isn't an issue. It may be that I'm milling stuff with not enough pressure, and that is the cause of my problems.

As a noet, a Hefe-Weisen is a Weiss beer with the yeast still in suspension. That is to be contrasted with a Kristal-Weiss, has the yeast filtered out of the beer.

I'm still working on more info for this section. Checkout the rec.crafts.brewing newsgroup in the meantime.


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Last Modified: Thu May 2 11:10:44 CDT 2013
Bolo (Josef Burger) <bolo@cs.wisc.edu>