Beer Gadgets

Pond Pump Cooler

Push Eject — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST

Forum user Petedadink came up with a way to beat the California Summer heat in his garage by using a small pond pump and a carboy-sized cooler.

Controlling fermentation temps is key to a clean beer. If you have a fridge keeping your kegs at serving temperature and there is room for one more you can put that cooling power to work for you.

Peter was using frozen water bottles in an ice bath to keep his carboy temperatures lower, but freezing water bottles can be a pain especially if you find yourself fighting for freezer space.

He bent 1/4" aluminum tubing to fit the water surrounding his carboy and ran hose line to-and-from it to his serving fridge. In the fridge among his beer kegs, one corny simply holds several gallons of water
and a small 250 GPH pond pump.

That pump recirculates the 40F water from its keg through the aluminum coils to chill the water far more evenly, and ultimately more effectively, than frozen bottles did.

One could easily add a digital thermostat with a thermowell in the cooler's water to this system and turn the pump on and off only as needed to maintain fermentation temperatures.

To go completely nuts with cooling power, pump anti-freeze (glycol) from a freezer through the coils instead of refrigerated water.

Cheers,

Push E.

Ever-Changing Tap Handles

Push Eject — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST

Dry-erase markers, magnets, masking tape, stickers... Unless you brew the same beers over and over all homebrewers who keg eventually have to come up with a way to non-destructively label their tap handles.

A recent post on Onebeer.net, Erik Beer's excellent site, inspired me to unscrew the Sierra Nevada, Boddingtons and Strongbow commercial handles from my taps and make my own with interchangeable heads for various beer styles.

A bonus to the new handles is I could make them as short (or tall) as I wanted to. No longer would I have to worry about opening the over-head freezer door and dumping beer.

The handles start with a trip to the local hardware store and a search for a decorative wooden dowel worthy of pouring beer. My local store had inexpensive wooden spindles or balusters in building supplies that were perfect and were quite similar to Erik's original design. They were also a perfect diameter to fit More Beer's threaded brass tap handle insert.

A local art supply store had 1.5" "doll heads" that would become my interchangeable tap handle tops for about $.50 each. I ended up with about 20 of them to cover all the styles I brew.

With the raw supplies purchases it was a simple matter to prepare and assemble the new handles:

cut the spindles to size
drill the bottom of the spindles to accept the threaded insert
drill the top of the spindles and bottom of the balls to accept a 3/8" dowel
glue the dowel into the spindle
stain and finish both spindle and ball
drink copiously

I then built a small rack to hold the unused tap handle balls out of left-over dowels and a strip of molding I had lying around.

It's a great way to deal with those tap handles that can change so frequently. Kudos to Erik Beer for a killer project.

How do you deal with your changing taps?

Krotchrott's Filter Project

Krotchrott — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 23:39:56 EDT

Well, I decided my next brewing project would be to construct a filter for when I'm transferring the beer from the fermenter to the keg before carbonation.

I went to home depot and purchaced a water filter with a 5 micron rating. I've seen places that sell filters that go as low as 0.5 to 1, but they are $$. So, i figured, "What the heck. Lets see what the 5 micron does. If I have to buy the smaller ones, I will."

Set the CO2 to 10psi to push it through the filter from one keg to another.

Here goes the real test! This is the other 1/2 of the West Coast IPA that was dryhopped with 3 ounces of hop pellets. It is weighing in at 93 IBU's (International Bittering Units)!

Pint glass of the unfiltered beer. You cannot see through it.

Pint glass of the filtered beer. You can clearly see my fingers on the other side of the glass.

SUCCESS !!!

Breathe Life into a Dead Chest Freezer

Fastdogbrewing — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 16:31:36 EDT

After picking up a chest freezer from Craigslist for $50 I got it home only to have it die the next day. After staring at it for about 6 months I read some of the fermentation chillers that were built using glycol baths chilled by freezers, or AC units. Remembering I have a working fridge with a freezer an idea was born. So after some parts and pieces and a days worth of work I had a working fermentation chiller and no longer had a useless dead chest freezer.

From Summit racing I got a frame rail mounted Transmission cooler and from All Electronics I got a set of fans for a server. These normally run on 12V, but at the voltage they scream. I am running them in pairs of 4 at 5.6V. At this voltage they work great.

The cooler is mounted on the end of the chest freezer with the hoses passing thru the back.

I mounted pieces of plexiglass to the top and bottom to control airflow. The fans are mounted on the bottom and pull air thru the cooler and blow it down against the bottom.

My digital controller is hooked to a power strip that the power supplies for the fans are plugged into. The thermistor from the controller is mounted in the middle of the back wall of the chest freezer.

In the freezer there is a rubbermaid tub with glycol in it. In the glycol is a small fountain pump from Lowes. The glycol passes from the tub thru the cooler in the chest freezer, then back into the freezer where it passes thru a 10' length of copper tubing then back into the tub. The copper tubing helps dissipate the heat in the freezer.

The fountain pump runs all the time, as I found it would freeze up otherwise.

Initial test runs showed I could easily maintain temps down to 60degrees even in my hot garage in the middle of the hot Southern California Desert.

The Portable Kegerator

Push Eject — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 22:04:52 EDT

When my local homebrew shop sported a deal on 3 gallon kegs I knew my wallet was a goner. If you have never had the joy of kegging in a 2.5 or 3 gallon keg you are really in for a treat. It's light. It's small. It's just the right amount to keep them wanting more!

Tote-a-keg, a commercial version of this portable kegerator gadget, came out several years ago and Brew Your Own magazine ran a how-to DIY article not long after.

So I bought three of the little kegs and starting keeping an eye out for the wheeled Rubbermaid beverage cooler that is the heart of this gadget. The end of Summer is the perfect time to pick up one of these at a clearance price from your local home center or big box retailer.

Drill a 7/8" hole in your new wheeled cooler above the cup holder (the cup holder makes a perfect drip tray later) and mount a shank with a 90 degree elbow in it.

Use the faucet and tap handle of your choice on the outside of the keg, but don't make it too fancy if you plan on dragging this thing all over kingdom come as I have. Functional is more important than pretty

For CO2 I used a 2oz cartridge dispenser available at homebrew and bicycle shops. It's a great little pistol-grip dispenser that takes disposable cartridges good for about 5 gallons of dispensing.

Here is the bulkhead fitting I put together for the gas-in line to the keg.

Finally I found my 3 gallon kegs did not allow the lid to close with their fittings on top so I took a hole saw to the inside of the lid and made a bit more room. Now the keg fits in nicely with lots of room for ice around it.

Once I put this portable kegerator together I was amazed how much use it got.

When you have beer in little kegs you simply do not hesitate to take it with you everywhere.

It works out well that after carbonating a 5 gallon keg one can fill up a little keg to take with you and bottle a dozen or so for competitions. Perfect!