Beer Drinker Beware!

7 May 2011 was National Home brewers Day!  Most home brewers had set aside ingredients to brew a batch of beer that day in celebration, I was no exception.  However, that is not how that day ended up.  As a matter of fact, my beautiful wife made sure I was able to brew that day and instead of brewing, she allowed me to purchase what she is calling an early birthday/Father's Day present.  Exactly, she let me get a Father's Day present the day before Mother's Day!!  I only hope I was able to show her how much I appreciated it with her Mother's Day gift.  As you can see below, she let me get a kegerator.  Not just a kegerator but the guy was also including the 2/3rds full keg with it.  Coors Light, but it's essentially free beer.  Now I'll be able to keep my kegged home brew cold before drinking, and finally get to lager some beers, I'm so excited.  I have some other plans for the kegerator as well, going to make an original Muddy Water Brewing Company tap pull cannibalizing one of the taps you can see on top in the picture.  I've also had my two beautiful daughters help me decorate the front of the kegerator as you can see in the second picture.  All I need so far is a coupling for the tube from the faucet and the tube for my out-put keg connection and I'm all set.

So I didn't brew on National Home brew Day but the following weekend I did.  I even had some help from my oldest daughter Rose.  Early (0550) I started getting things ready for brew day, and had a little trouble with the new grain mill.  I would show you the video I was trying to take while doing it but you really can't see anything.  That's because as I was flailing around trying not to spill ALL the grains on the ground when the torque of the drill flipped the grain mill.  Needless to say I wasn't successful.  My malt went everywhere.  So like any home brewer who doesn't really have the money to just run out and buy more malt on the spot, I swept up what I could and used it anyway.  Thus Muddy Water Porter was born.  Anyone who drinks this one when its done, be warned, you may actually be drinking mud. 

 

 My good buddy and assistant brewer Nate Kehn warned me it was bad juju to name a beer before the brewing process began, a rule we set when we really started to get into brewing. The last time you remember I named a beer before the brewing process, I brought about a week and a half long cold spell, with freezing rain and ice, that was my Wet Willy's from the post, My Apologies to the Alaska my apologies to the beer. Didn't follow the warning so this time the brewing gods made sure my beer was muddy from the dirt of the garage and by the weather again. See below

 

Always trying something new.....and cheap.....

So for those of you who already know, this will not be a surprise.  I decided, after a lot of searching around, to make my own Draft Beer Jockey Box.  What, you might be asking, is a Jockey Box?  A jockey box is a "box" (or in my case a cooler from Lowe's) that keeps and dispenses cold beer anywhere you need it to without the need for a plugging, as in the case of a kegerator.  Imagine, a cold environment that holds a beer or so in a tube and dispenses that beer cold even if the keg its coming from is room temperature.  I'll just show you how I did it and you can see for yourself.

First of all, I searched everywhere for a cheap kegerator or jockey box before deciding that I could make one cheaper than I was going to be able to buy one.  I believe in total, including the $10 off from a Lowe's coupon, I spent around $75, give or take.  There were two kegerators I found on craigslist for $35-65 but neither one was available.  (IF ITS SOLD PEOPLE, TAKE DOWN YOUR POST!!!)  Sorry about that.  The next cheapest would be $200 so I wasn't so quick to buy those.  Then I thought, why not build one myself?  Cost of a fridge big enough to hold a 5 gal corny keg and all the conversion kits and such would run me close to $200 and that's if I bought an old fridge.  This also doesn't take into consideration the possibility of messing the fridge up when I went to start cutting on it.  Then I saw the Jockey Boxes and thought that it would be a good next step in the kegging and beer dispensing process.  New ones with all the bells and whistles are roughly $300 and I did find one on another site for $178.  So making my own for $75 seems like a good investment......Lets get started shall we....

I started with:
1 5gal water cooler
25 ft. of 3/16" tubing ( has to be this size to fit the keg connection)
1 long tube of 1/2" PVC piping
Connectors to make a tap  (get creative here, I did)
Connectors to hold the PVC pipes together

First I cut the PVC pipe to make the frame work to hold the tubing.  I'm horrible because I just eyeballed it, making sure that it wasn't going to be too tall.

Next came the tedious task of wrapping the tubing around the frame work.  I managed to wrap the tubing downward around three of the four legs of the frame and then wrapped upward using the other leg and the two middle legs.

I know it doesn't look pretty, but it doesn't need to.  The beer will be in the tube and the tubing will be surrounded with ice and water.  Make sure to leave enough tubing on one side to be able to run to the keg and just enough tubing on the other end to connect to the faucet outlet.

The next thing to do was drilling holes in the sidewall of the cooler, one for the faucet and the other for the tube to run from the keg.  My set up was just a 4" connection with a barbed 3/16" on one side and then a valve on the other with a plastic "nozzle" connected to the valve.

Then I drilled the hole for the tubing to the keg.

Then after all the drilling, connect the tubing to the keg connector and to the barbed end of the valve/faucet.  Once that is done, connect it to your keg and test to make sure there is no leaks.

Connect your beer, add ice and water to the Jockey Box, pour a beer and enjoy!

Keg Beer at Home!

After all that I went through brewing BST Amber Ale, you think I would have made it easy on myself by remembering to get some Corn Sugar for the bottling/priming.  Not so.  My Wife suggested we go to Tallahassee, Florida and visit the Home Brew Den, a home brew store I've checked out online before, and is the closest home brew store to where we are now.  Of course its 2 hours away.  The morning of our trip, we were searching the site for items of interest and discovered we had the funds to get something I had been wanting for a while, a 5 gallon "Corny" keg with a 5 pound CO2 tank and all the regulators and tubes.

Now I learned the process of kegging my beer from a video on YouTube, I'm sure you could do the same.  As always the most important thing when brewing or bottling or kegging beer is cleaning and sanitizing your equipment.

I picked up some San Star from the brew store and added it to the keg to sanitize it.  It foamed up pretty good as you can see, and I made sure to dangle the cap in the sanitation as well.

The next step was to start to transfer the beer from my fermenter to my keg.

This time around I decided to utilize a secondary fermenter.  I've read and heard that a wort chiller and transferring your beer to a secondary fermenter will drastically improve beer clarity, and it does.

Once the beer is in your keg, you seal it up and prepare to carbonate it.  I decided to use the quick "force carbonation" method.  I apologize for not having more pictures of this part, I was too excited about doing it and forgot to take pictures.

First I set the regulator to 30 PSI and opened the valve to allow the CO2 to enter the tank.  For the next 4-5 minutes I vigorously rolled the keg on the floor back and forth ensuring to keep the gas hose and inlet closest to the floor.  After that some say to turn off the gas and remove the gas tube and age the beer for one day.  Others say you can blow off the excess pressure and pour a beer. I'm fairly impatient, so I released the excess gas and poured my first glass of BST Amber Ale.  I was not disappointed.

I leave you with a picture of my new keg system.......

Until next time.........