Difference in Temperature Between Wort and Refrigerator

I gave the new setup that I talked about in my last post a quick whirl on the Special Bitter I had in the fermenter, cold conditioning. I was surprised. There was about a 3° to 5° F difference between the temperature of the wort and refrigerator. My refrigerator was varying between 34° and 36° F, but when I dropped the thermometer into the thermowell, the wort was 31° F.

I figured that, if anything, the wort would be warmer. I guess, though, that parts of the refrigerator were colder and warmer, and I had my thermometer in a warm spot.

It just goes to show that just because you have a thermometer inside the refrigerator, you really don't know what going on inside the fermenter.

My New Lagering Setup

I'm going to start getting more into lagers. I've done a couple of them before. However, I really did not have the setup I wanted to do it. That being said, they still turned out okay.

This is my setup for doing lagers: I've already got a stainless steel conical fermentor that sits inside a small refrigerator. This refrigerator can get down to freezing.

In the past, I had an analog temperature controller, like this one you can get from B3, so that I could ferment at around 50 F, and drop the temp slowly to lagering, around 32 degrees F. This worked okay, but does not have the fine control that I'm really interested in.

To remedy the situation, I just ordered a digital temperature controller. Even with this, however, I still wanted even better temperature control, so I've ordered a thermowell with it. With this, I can put the temperature probe directly in the fermenting wort, to control the temperature of the wort, rather than just the refrigerator. The thermowell and airlock fit into a bung with two holes.

The diagram below outlines the setup:

Why do I need all this? Well, lager yeast is very sensitive. A temperature fluctuation of five degrees F or even less can cause off-flavors. With this this new setup, I can control temperature within a degree or two.

Along with all that equipment, I ordered another 2000 ml Erlenmeyer Flask, so that I have two. I've been using Jamil Zainasheff's pitching calculator to figure out how much yeast I need, and determined that I needed to pitch more than I could with just one 2000 ml starter. With two flasks, I can make two starters to pitch enough yeast, even for high gravity lagers.

I'm going to do a pilot batch here shortly to test it all out. I'll keep all you guys informed as to how it works.

The Piña Colada Truck

Julie and Julie's mom had left the beach about 20 minutes before, to get in some quality last minute mother-daughter time, washing the dogs. The dogs were soaked and filthy after playing in the surf. Sarah and Dave remained at the beach to soak in that last bit of sun. Other than a Mexican family playing the the water several hundred yards away, the beach was completely deserted. It was the end of the last day of their trip to San Felipe, Mexico. Julie, Sarah and Dave were going home the next morning.

"This sun feels nice," Sarah stated while sitting in the sand next to Dave.

Sarah's shoes sat beside her as she buried her feet in the sand. Dave laid on his back with his hat perched in such a way to keep the sand out of his hair, but still keep the sun out of his eyes. The sun was low in the sky behind the both of them.

"Yeah," Dave responded.

"The only thing is that I wish we had brought something to drink, like some beer or something," she continued. The house lied a half mile behind them, up a sandy dirt road, and the thought of trudging back to get some drinks did not appeal to her.

"Exactly."

As if on queue, Sarah saw a vehicle coming up the empty beach.

After a moment, Sarah asked, "What is that? Is that the piña colada truck?"

The piña colada truck had been a magical elusive creature. It had been witnessed earlier in the trip in the madhouse that was downtown San Felipe, but never this far out; this creature fed on crowds, not empty beaches. Julie, Sarah, and Dave had wanted to taste of its elixir the whole trip, but could never manage it, as the crowds always pushed them away.

Dave sat up. The sand trickled off his back, as the vehicle loomed larger and larger, turning toward them.

"Oh my God, I think that is the piña colada truck!" Dave finally said, climbing to his feet. He could not believe it.





"That could not have been more perfect," Dave said, his sticky fingers cradling a pineapple full of sweet liquid with the aroma of coconut, fruit, and alcohol. Two straws and an umbrella poked out of the top.

Sarah agreed and mused at the chances of actually finding the piña colada truck, at the last moment, on the last day of the trip, just when they were needing an alcohol fix.

The piña colada truck drove away, down the empty beach. Both Sarah and Dave had huge smiles on their faces.

San Felipe Beach Pictures

Yes, amid the crowds and chaos, we did manage to get to the beach in San Felipe. Want proof? Here you go:

"Loco, Loco, Loco!"

My wife, Julie, her best friend, Sarah, and I went to San Felipe, Mexico, over the weekend. Julie and I had been there before. However, this was Sarah's first time. We'd planned the trip for months as a small vacation, and a visit to Julie's parents, part of the growing group of Americans that live there almost full time.

San Felipe, for those who do not know, is a sleepy little fishing village, on the Sea of Cortez, on the Baja side. It is a lot like what Rocky Point was 20 some years ago: there is a dichotomy between the sleepy-fishing-villageness of the town and all the mass amount of developers trying to make it into a tourist destination.

When I say "sleepy," however, I mean most of the time; there a couple of times a year it wakes up into full bore madness. Easter weekend is one of those times. Called holy week, the locals get a week off from school and two weeks off from work. Unfortunately, we did not know this before we decided to go there.

The pitted two-lane highway was packed almost bumper to bumper getting in, and when we finally got in, what was normally deserted desert beaches was packed with tents and RVs. Most of them were Mexicans from Mexicali, with a few American Spring Breakers interspersed.

We were fortunate, though. We stayed with Julie's parents, who live in a house near the beach. As a result, we did not have to camp out or anything. That house, however, got buzzed every couple of seconds by ATVs and a constant stream of vehicles in various states of repair, all day and all night, all going down to the beach. Nighttime in particular, the buzz of the ATVs, was accompanied by the occasional whoosh and pop of fireworks.

The defining moment occurred the first day, when I walked down to the beach, and someone in the crowd of people, campfires, and blasting distorted Mariachi music was yelling, on a megaphone, "Loco, loco, loco." We took that as the theme for our weekend, because that was just how it was there: loco.

One of the things we bragged to Sarah about about before we even left for San Felipe was eating tacos at The Taco Factory, a restaurant and cantina, on the Malecon, a beach, boardwalk, and road that is the heart of downtown San Felipe. Normally, there you can hang out, eat tacos, and drink margaritas all day, sitting outside under a thatched palapa, overlooking the water.

The reality of executing that idea, became quite a problem. With tens of thousands of people from Mexicali descending on downtown, the traffic jam madness that resulted made it impossible to fulfill that dream. Every time we tried to drive downtown, we aborted the attempt, making our way back through the maze of cars, dune buggies, ATVs, and dirt bikes. The scene was accompanied by the smell of dust and exhaust. It was simply too "loco, loco, loco."

We always ended back on the other side of town, in the more Americanized area, at a cantina at Playa Del Oro -- still fun, but not quite our goal.

Below are pictures from Playa Del Oro:

Julie's mom, Julie, and her dad, with me behind them, having a good time.

Julie with the neighboring table's dog, Peanut, or as we called him, "Señor Cacahuete."

The girls -- Sarah, Julie, and Sherry, Julie's mom -- hanging out.

We attempted to go downtown each day we were there -- Friday, Saturday, Sunday -- but gave up each time. However, finally, on Monday, people left in a mass exodus. We too were supposed to leave on Monday, but decided to stay an extra day, to see if we could catch a glimpse of the "sleepy" San Felipe that we so desperately wanted to see. That day, we made it to The Taco Factory, our goal the entire time -- hooray. Below are the pictures from that day:

Julie and Sarah at the entrance to the Taco Factory

Me lounging around after gorging on tacos and beer.

Julie with the beach and boardwalk behind her.

Julie and I having a good time.

Sarah with a huge Margarita and a smoke.

A Bitter-Sweet Weekend

Someone once said -- and I don't remember who or I'd credit them -- that all-grain brewing is like a combination of baking a cake, running a science experiment, and troubleshooting a swamp cooler, all at the same time. Needless to say, there is plenty of room for problems to creep up. Sunday was just such a day.

Sunday was brew day. I had the great pleasure of having a friend over to help me brew -- his first brew. This brew was a repeat of the Special Bitter I brewed last time, tweaking the recipe a bit. Of course, while trying to show a newbie how cool brewing is, all sorts of little things had to go wrong.

The first thing to hit us was right out of the gate, at the beginning of the brew day. When mashing in, usually, I heat up my strike liquor to 177 degrees F, to mash in at a nice 153 degrees F, perfect saccharification temp. Unfortunately, I left the heat on my mash liquor, so it kept heating as I mixed it slowly with the grist. By the end, it way exceeding 177 degrees F. As a result, I ended up mashing in at 159 degrees F, pushing it for even Alpha Amylase. In a minor panic, to compensate, I had to add a bunch of cold water to get the temp back down. In doing that, though, I ended up too cold, at 149 degrees F, way down in Beta Amylase, so I then had to add boiling water to bring it back up. The result of all this: my mash temps were all over the place in the first five to ten minutes of the mash, meaning that I have no idea how sweet or dry the beer will be. Not only that, but it was one of the most watery mashes I've ever seen. Oops.

The second thing that went wrong was that I forgot to turn on the heat to my sparge liquor. I usually do this at the beginning of the mash, so that it is ready to go by the end of the mash. As mentioned above, however, the beginning of the mash was filled with wild mash temperature panic, leaving me a bit forgetful about other important steps. As a result, with 15 minutes left on the mash I realized that my sparge liquor was as cold as it was coming out of the tap, because I never turned on the heat. We ending up waiting around another 45 minutes at the end of the mash for the thing to heat up -- no big deal, but annoying. Oops.

The third thing to go wrong was after everything was done, while siphoning the beer into the fermentor. Part way through this process, the nice sanitized siphon tube tube flopped out of the fermentor and onto the dirty floor, spewing wort everywhere. I grabbed it, turned off the flow, and re-sanitized the thing. However, the sticky liquid got all over the front of the cabinets, the front of the stove, the top of the fermentor, my shoes and, of course, the floor. Again, this was not the end of the world, but still annoying. Oops.

Finally, when all was said and done, I took my original gravity (OG) reading, and it was low. I have not been low in years. In fact, I've been right on or a couple points high most of the time. Oops.

That is the whole story, really. All in all, it was one minor disaster after another -- nothing bad enough to abort the brew day, but enough to keep the day from going smoothly. And yes, we relaxed and had a homebrew at the end of the day. We needed one, that was for sure.

For those interested, here is the recipe:

7.0 lbs Pale Malt, 2-row, Marris Otter
0.25 lbs Biscuit Malt, British
0.5 lbs Crystal Malt, 60 L, British
0.5 lbs Carapils Dextrine Malt
0.125 lbs Chocolate Malt, British
2.0 oz East Kent Golding Hops, 4.2 AA, 60 minutes, 37.6 IBU
White Labs Burton Ale Yeast (WLP023)

Promash Numbers: 8.375 lbs, 5.5 gal, 1.043 OG, 80% Efficiency, 1.012 FG, 37.6 IBU, 12.4 SRM, 4.07 ABV

Update: To add insult to injury, this batch gave one of the longest lag times, between pitching the yeast and seeing air lock activity, that I've ever had for an ale. Sheesh.