Another newbie

[Vinylwasp]

Hey everyone, thought it was time to reach out and meet some new brew buddies so here I am.
About me: My nickname is a play on my last name: Lethaby = Leatherbee = Vinylwasp. It made sense to my school buddies when I was 12, and I've carried it ever since.

Brewing? Well after living in the UK since 98 (my wife's English) we decided to move back to NZ in 2016 and in an effort to leave the rat race behind I almost bought a small brewery as a going concern, but came to my senses when I realised I had drunk a ton of beer in my life (us Kiwi's start young and go hard), but had never actually brewed any. After some research I decided that I needed to have a 3 tun HERMS to mimic a real commercial system and learn the ropes so in Dec 2017 I bought 3 x 45l tuns from eBay and a lot of kit from the BrewPi store in the Netherlands. Soon after it arrived in NZ in my wife got promoted to a new role in SG and we left NZ (again) and it wasn't until May 2022 that I had it all back here in the UK with me and I actually got around to building it. (I'll do a HERMS/BrewPi build thread if anyone is interested)

Since then I've done 6 brews so still learning every day. The first was a really great Two Bells IPA clone, then I had two brews that were total disasters which I poured down the drain (got cocky), one we can blame on bad hygiene and the second was down to not understanding how BeerSmith profiles work across multiple computers at the time which I've since sorted. The next 4 have been great.

My Kit:
3 x 45l stainless tuns with 2 pumps and 3 temp probes
BrewPi/Brewtroller controlled HERMS (manual hose swap)
BrewPi/Brewtroller controlled Fermentation chamber built from an old fridge
Fermzilla 35l All rounder with Thermowell, Pressure kit, Hop Bong and Spunding Valve
BeerSmith 3
Inkbird controlled Keezer with a 2 tap font

I'm in Berkshire so really keen to learn about what's on around the county and in the south. I'm totally hooked on home brewing now and tbh, I don't think I can drink pub beer ever again.
Ok, hope to learn, share, laugh, and brew with you all, virtually and irl.

Cheers

 

[Rodcx500z]

Hi and welcome, that is some setup you have, we like pictures, sad to hear they are having a bad time on the north Island

 

[Rodcx500z]

Also there are a couple of guys from NZ who post on here

 

[Vinylwasp]

Hi and welcome, that is some setup you have, we like pictures, sad to hear they are having a bad time on the north Island

Hey, nice to see another biker here too
Yeah, I'm a main lander from the far south myself (Kiwi joke) but all our family is in the NI these days. Thankfully none of them are in danger at the moment.
Will post some photos soon.

 

[Rodcx500z]

Hey, nice to see another biker here too
Yeah, I'm a main lander from the far south myself (Kiwi joke) but all our family is in the NI these days. Thankfully none of them are in danger at the moment.
Will post some photos soon.

I had bikes for over 42 years, the one in the picture was my last, Honda cx500 v twin known as the twisted twin because the heads were turned in so the carbs cleared your legs, it was my last bike i had it 12 years did over 70,000 miles on it all over the Uk and Europe, they have a massive following all over the world, it is still on the road and 44 years old

 

[Rwilts]

Welcome

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Welcome to the forum

 

[The Baron]

Welcome to the forum

 

[Vinylwasp]

I had bikes for over 42 years, the one in the picture was my last, Honda cx500 v twin known as the twisted twin because the heads were turned in so the carbs cleared your legs, it was my last bike i had it 12 years did over 70,000 miles on it all over the Uk and Europe, they have a massive following all over the world, it is still on the road and 44 years old

I've had bikes (on + off) for 45 years so think we might have similar tastes. I've never owned a CX, but I remember walking into my local Honda dealership back in the early 80's and seeing a CX 650 Turbo on the showroom floor. It just blew my mind.

I think I was riding either an XR500 or a CB750 K3 at the time (I've owned a lot of bikes).

There's a 76 CB750 F1 parked in my garage right now that I bought 8 years ago with a dropped timing chain that is on my list of 'things to do' when I can find time.

 

[jamiew]

Welcome Vinylwasp!

That is some kit you’ve got there l’d be interested to hear how the brewPi performs. My understanding is it is a temperature controller but I assume it does more than that?

 

[Rodcx500z]

I've had bikes (on + off) for 45 years so think we might have similar tastes. I've never owned a CX, but I remember walking into my local Honda dealership back in the early 80's and seeing a CX 650 Turbo on the showroom floor. It just blew my mind.

I think I was riding either an XR500 or a CB750 K3 at the time (I've owned a lot of bikes).

There's a 76 CB750 F1 parked in my garage right now that I bought 8 years ago with a dropped timing chain that is on my list of 'things to do' when I can find time.

I had a go on a 650 turbo on a cx rally at Loders in Somerset 2006 what a bike, you had to watch for the turbo kicking in though there was quite a bit of lag and could catch you out, there was a guy in the club Turbo Tim who used to drag race them, look him up on you tube

 

[damienair]

Wow you have some set up already. Happy brewing. I’ve very simple plastic bucket fermentation vessels but so far so good. 25 brews in and agree that it’s hard to drink pub beer now. Welcome to the forum

 

[Vinylwasp]

Welcome Vinylwasp!

That is some kit you’ve got there l’d be interested to hear how the brewPi performs. My understanding is it is a temperature controller but I assume it does more than that?

Yep, the main purpose is fermentation and brew temperature control, but you can actually extend it and drive the whole system from the interface, and even automate opening valves etc, but I've gone for a manual hose swap system though I do have it set up so that I can run my pumps by clicking on the icons for the pumps on the following screen cap.

On the fermentation side you can create temp profiles (e.g. 2 days at 19c, 9 days at 22c, 1 day at 16c, 1 at 10c, and 1 at 5c), and it will manage the whole process end to end +/- 0.1c. It's very accurate.

In the pic below, you can see that the pumps are running, and I've figuratively opened the valves to run the wort through the HERMS coil (right pump) and circulate the water in the HLT, (left pump).

You can also see that the MT is 63.5c with a target temp of 66c and in the box between the HLT and MT with the slider icon is where you configure the offset for the HLT temp which is set to +6.0. This PID is set from the MT target temp and then controls the setpoint for the HLT (shown as 72c (target 66+6 offset)) and the HLT PID will then try to reach and maintain that temp while also ensuring it does not overshoot the MT target of 66c.

You can also see that at this time the HLT PID was driving the element at 100% but when it gets within 3c it ramps down to as low as 6% of each 40sec period. (I might have that figure wrong, but pretty sure it's 40sec), until it slowly creeps up on the target temp.

The top thermometer icons on each of the 3 vessels are feed from temp probes in the outlets, just before the ball valve.

I've worked in IT for 25+ years and can tell you that this is a very slick piece of open source software. You do need the hardware component (Spark 3 or 4) to run it, but it's worth every penny IMO.

Last word. The brilliant thing for me is that you can run 100 devices off one daisy chained ethernet cable so you can have 2 dozen fermentation fridges running of one Spark easily if you wanted to.

 

[Vinylwasp]

Hi and welcome, that is some setup you have, we like pictures, sad to hear they are having a bad time on the north Island

Ok, here's the pics' I promised.

This is the pile of kit that had been sitting in a container in NZ since 2018. SG law prohibit importing motorcycles older than 7 years so we left left a lot of stuff in NZ while we were there. Then we moved back to the UK mid covid in Oct 2020 and it took until May 2022 to get the container shipped here.

Step one, repurpose an old Ikea desk my kids used with a sheet of plywood on top to create the brewstand, and find a donor fridge to become a ferm chamber

A mate of mine who had recently upgraded to a G70 gave me a Collosus counterflow chiller, two pumps, and a whole bunch of hose and fittings, so I was now ready to start the build.

Decided that I would use two different 230v circuits in the house to feed two seperate control boxes. Each one would control 1 pump and 1 2500w heating element, one for the HLT and the other for the BK.

So I bought these boxes, buses, plugs and sockets etc on Amazon and started messing around with the layout. The 40A solid state relay on the right came from BrewPi for the element while the cheap one of the left for the pump came from Amazon.

Getting close to finished. Raspberry PI (for web interface) and Spark on the left.

Closeup for the curious. Feeds coming in from the left are either temp controls or running to the BrewPI Solid State Relay expansion boards like the one screwed to the 40A SSR on top of the heat sink. Each expansion board can trigger two SSRs, one it is screwed too across the 12v terminals, and another via the push-lock wire block you can see between the SSR body and ethernet intefaces with the gray wire running from it. That one is connected to the pump SSR in the 2nd box.

This is how it looks mounted up (but missing the blue 230v in cable and orange pump cable).

Finished but untested rig.

This is the fermentation chamber. There's another One-wire expansion screwed on the back which connects the 2 temp probes (fridge and beer/thermowell) back to the spark, and also controls 2 SSR's, one for the Fridge (hacked to be 100% on when it has power) and one for the Tube heater and PC fan that are under the shelf I made.

I've only done 6 brews but with each one I've tweaked the setup, fixed things that have broken, and improved the process, so it's getting close to being 100% reliable now.

Hope you guys enjoy the thread and though I'm no expert I'm very happy to answer any questions anyone has if I can.

Cheers

 

[Rodcx500z]

That is some setup shiny shiny thanks for posting, how big is the mash tun

 

[Vinylwasp]

That is some setup shiny shiny thanks for posting, how big is the mash tun

40l with loads of boil space as I was aiming for 19l brews, but the nice thing about using weldless fittings is that I can scale up simply by buying larger tuns and moving all the fittings across. Don't think I ever will now though.