Brewer's Friend Home Brewing Software

Brew Shed Exhaust Fan – Need More Power!

Choose your brew shed exhaust fan and ducting design carefully. My shed is exactly what I was after with one exception: the exhaust system. On wet days the condensation from the boil off can become a bit of a problem. Note that there are zero problems on warm days, but doing a 90 minute boil on a rainy day leads to this situation:

I did a lot of research on fans in terms of price, noise level, and cubic feet per minute (CFM). The more CFM you want the more expensive they get and the more noise they put out. The ideal solution is a reasonably priced fan that can keep the room dry but not drive me nuts with racket. Going in I knew a kitchen hood fan like the ones that normally go over a stove would not be powerful enough.

Where to find a powerful exhaust fan? It turns out exhaust fans are a big deal for ‘growers’ too. Their supply stores have several models to choose from. It felt a little strange ordering from one of these places. Thankfully, the shed has a sky light so big brother can already see what is going on in there.

After trying to find a balance between noise level, cost and CFM, I went with this:
Can MAX Fan 6″ – 334 cfm w/ Speed Contrl
https://www.bghydro.com/BGH/itemdesc.asp?ic=AEFCFMF06&Tp=
https://www.growwurks.com/can-fan-max-fan-6-3-speed-complete-control-334-cfm.aspx

The max fan is $150 before shipping. The noise level is tolerable and I thought 334 CFM would be plenty. It works fine for a 60 minute boil in dry weather. However, it is too weak to keep up with a 90 minute boil if the relative humidity is over 75%. What I ended up having to do a couple times earlier this winter was wrap a towel around the unit since there was so much dripping coming out of it. That works pretty well and has gotten me by until I have time to make a more permanent solution.

Possible Solutions:

1. Get something with a higher CFM, and then build an insulated box around it to block out some of the noise.
2. Redesign the duct work. What I accidentally created is a reflux chamber – doh! When the hot gas goes up through the fan, some of it cools and condenses on the walls of the ducting and then drips back down (all the way). My fault for designing it that way, but it was the shortest distance. What I probably need to do is orient the fan sideways and rig a dip tube that goes outside.

Other considerations when it comes to condensation in the brewery:

Selecting a hood is another issue. The loft makes for a built in hood, but it is not the same thing as a professional stainless steel hood. Those things are insanely expensive, coming in upwards of $1,000 for a cheap one. I had a left over dust collection vent from my wood shop so I mounted that. I don’t think the problem is the hood, I think the main problem is the reflux.

https://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=11312
https://amzn.com/B0000223WV

Looking forward to anything our readers can share on this issue!  Don’t build a re-flux chamber like I did!

Posted in Equipment | 1 Comment »

1.09 Launched – Random Beer Brewing Goodness

• Ability to sort hops and grains (see buttons in each box). Hops sorting is based on the order the hops would be used in the recipe.  Grain sorting is by weight.  Several users wrote in about this, and it started bothering us too!  Now you can add/edit hops all you want, and hit the ‘Sort Hops’ button to get a nice and tidy listing.
• Selecting a hop use of ‘Dry Hop’ will change the time box to ‘days’ instead of ‘min.’.  All existing Dry Hop entries have been set to 7 days (just this one time because of the change in this release).
• Added URL field to Recipe Editor below the notes field. The input field is only visible if you are logged in and have confirmed your email address.  This will help keep the content at Brewer’s Friend of a high quality and deter spammers.  When a URL is set, it will appear under the recipe’s name on the recipe view page.
• In Other Ingredients section allows grams and ounces to be specified for both US and Metric units.
• Added Extra Light DME, Extra Light LME, and clarified Canadian 2-row in grain list.
• Added 8 types of hops and updated the average AA value on several others. Thank you John H!
• Fixed bug with backspace key reported by Brian at https://thebrewmentor.com/.

• Added ‘Rebuild’ tab to Brew Session which allows you to recompute the brew steps and water requirements without deleting a recreating the brew. This is useful if you changed the recipe or profile settings after the brew was created.  This also resets all the brew steps that were checked off.
• Added ‘Recipe View’ tab to Brew Session. This makes it easy to see the ingredients in the recipe without having to navigate away from the Brew Session page.
• Temperature adjustment field allows more than 3 characters.

• Mobile support improved on recipe view and search pages.  Try it out and send us feedback.
• If you have not confirmed your email address, you will now see a red status about this in the upper right hand corner with a ‘resend’ button you can use to trigger the email again. Certain features, like adding a URL to a recipe are blocked until you confirm your email address.

Posted in Announcements | 13 Comments »

Myths About Electric Brewing Dispelled

Personally, it has been eight batches since the upgrade to electric. The electric brewery is just awesome. There have been zero leaks on my weld-less fittings and no problems with operation.

Going into the upgrade, there were a few myths I was concerned about. Let me tell you the facts:

You can only do dark beers with electric brewing because the element will scorch the wort.

This is completely untrue given the right equipment. My first batch was a 3.2% Hefewiezen came out perfect. Subsequent batches, including an American Lager (arguably the lightest beer in the world) also had no scorching. In essence, expect ZERO scorching using the HighGravityBrew elements. If you build your own controller, or use a different element, this could be a problem.

The electricity is expensive.

According to our calculations electricity reduces the energy cost by 70%!

Equation for electricity consumption in home brewing:
hours * (watts / 1000) * price/kWh = total cost
For an example, let’s say the the price is $0.12 / kWh, and a typical batch is brewed:

• 1 hour * (5500 / 1000) * $0.12 = $0.66 (hot liquor tank 5500 watt element)
• 1 hour * (4500 / 1000) * $0.12 = $0.54 (boil kettle 4500 watt element)

Total electricity cost for a standard batch of beer: $1.20

A 5 gallon tank of propane is around $20 to fill, and you get at best 4 batches out of it. That puts the cost around $4/batch with propane.

It requires an expensive computer controller.

Yes and no. You can ‘build your own’ controller out of parts for under $100. That would also require knowledge of electronics. The one from HighGravityBrew is a turn key solution. Most electric brew rigs also have fancy controllers to automate valves and pumps in addition to controlling the electric element. This goes way beyond the issue of switching from gas to electric for a heat source. Besides, at that point it becomes a labor of love. As long as you are having fun and your wife is okay with the project, go for it!

My submersion chiller won’t work.

This is true. I had to adopt my chiller to look like this so it would straddle the heating element. Cools faster and looks interesting. One online reviewer said it looked like the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

I was against upgrading to a plate or counter flow chiller. That style of chiller leaves a lot of hot wort sitting in your kettle while they are draining. This is not good. Plate chillers are also a bear to clean without using caustic solutions.

An electrician is needed:

Actually, this is true. Pay for a licensed electrician and get the permits to make sure your brewing area is safe. Don’t electrocute yourself or burn the house down! All you need is a dryer outlet on a GCFI’d breaker.

Posted in Brewing | 7 Comments »

1.08 Launched – Lots of small stuff

• Ability to check off steps on the Brew Steps tab of a Brew Session:

• In hops section when Hop Use is set as Dry Hop, First Wort, or Mash the minutes box is disabled. Minutes do not factor into the calculation for these hop uses and this update makes that clear.
• Ability to edit Brew Log entries.
• Recipe search preferences are saved between visits to the site (must have cookies enabled).
• Added comments section to public recipes.
• Scaling by efficiency now understands mashable vs non-mashable custom fermentables.

Posted in Announcements | 5 Comments »

Beer Drinking is a Skill

For fun we just posted a tasting sheet we started using around here at parties. This tasting sheet is designed for all skill levels of beer drinkers. YES friends, beer drinking is a SKILL. Guzzling beer is even a skill in certain international sports, as featured and proven in the movie Beerfest! Make sure to turn the boot at the end.

Beer drinking skill comes into play when we start to analyze things like appearance (color, clarity) smells (hoppy, tanic?), after taste (too bitter, malty, sweet?).  Everybody has to start somewhere, and at most parties we have a mixed bag of skilled beer drinkers, macro drinkers, and the beer oblivious. To unite them all in a night of fun, this brew sheet comes to the rescue!

Click Here To Download the PDF Beer Tasting Party Sheet

Evaluating a beer goes like this:

1. Appearance
2. Smell
3. Taste
4. After Taste
5. Drinkability
6. Overall Score

For my first use of this sheet, we had my Blitz Clone which was done as an 11 gallon batch (half fermented with Safale American Ale US-05, and half with Wyeast American Ale II 1272) vs the likes of MGD, Keystone Light, and Hams!  What fun!  It was OBVIOUS that the home brew was better to all who attended, even those who swear by Coors Light, which was a big compliment to the brewer.  Here’s to you having fun with this tasting sheet at your next party.

PROST!

Posted in Fun | 1 Comment »

1.07 Launched – Search, Dashboard, Late Additions

Hello fellow brewers,
Please raise your glasses to the 1.07 launch of Brewer’s Friend!

This launch includes what you’ve been asking for – recipe search, late additions, and a brewing dashboard!

Recipe Search:

The Beer Recipe Search Feature is live!  Every category has a handful of recipes.  There are even a good number of metric recipes from our friends across the globe!

Late Additions and Custom Fermentable Upgrade:

1. The recipe editor now supports late boil additions. Late additions do not count towards boil gravity. This is important for Extract brewers who want to maximize their hops utilization.
2. Custom fermentables may be marked as late additions and have their mash setting toggled. When the mash setting is checked, the ppg contribution is reduced by the mash efficiency value for the recipe.
3. For convenience, PPG and Lovibond are displayed in the expanded view below the selected fermentable.

Brewing Dashboard and My Recipe/Brewing Filtering and Sorting:

The My Brewing Dashboard shows how many recipes you have created, how many times you have brewed, and provides links to items you worked on recently. Below the dashboard is a listing of your public recipes and how many times they have been viewed and brewed.

As part of this upgrade, the my recipes and my brewing page can be sorted and filtered.

Other improvements:

• Recipe view page now displays the brew sessions that you have performed on this recipe (helps with navigation). Only you are able to see this information, even if the recipe is public.
• Mashed hops count as a 5 minute boil addition for IBU calculation purposes. FWH is still 20.
• Improvements to Brew Timer.
• Increased size of notes fields boxes on recipe edtior.
• The searchable flag has been removed – all public recipes are searchable. By default recipes are private.
• The fermentables drop down will only show non-mashable ingredients for Extract style recipes. There were 82 recipes marked extract that had mashable fermentables in their grain bill, these fermentable items were converted to custom fermentables so they could be preserved. Users who notice this may want to move those items down to steeping grains.
• Minor bug fixes.

Stay tuned for 1.08 which will include more hoppy goodness from the team at Brewer’s Friend!

Posted in Announcements | 6 Comments »

How long does it take to brew a batch of beer?

Brewing beer can take as little as two and a half hours for a simple extract batch and up to six hours for a complex all grain recipe. It is not a good idea to rush anything in brewing. Cutting back the boil time is not feasible because that time is needed to convert alpha acids in the hops into the bittering flavors they provide. Similarly cutting down mash time leads to lower efficiency. These are things we just can’t get around in the process. Below is a breakdown of our estimate on how long it would take brew a batch of home brew given different methods.

Extract Batch without steeping grains:

• 30 minutes – setup, and wait for water to boil
• 1 hour – boil
• 30 minutes – cooling, fill primary, pitch yeast
• 30 minutes – clean up
• 2 hours 30 minutes total.

Extract batches are the fastest because there is no mash to worry about and less equipment to deal with.

Extract Batch with steeping grains:

• 30 minutes – setup, and wait for water to warm up
• 45 minutes – steep grains
• 15 minutes – wait for boil
• 1 hour – boil
• 30 minutes – cooling, fill primary, pitch yeast
• 30 minutes – clean up
• 3 hours 30 minutes total.

Steeping grains add real flavor, color, and freshness to plain extract batches. The extra time in our opinion is completely worth it, and the differences will be noticeable.

All Grain Batch:

• 45 minutes – setup, and wait for mash water to warm up
• 1 hour, 30 minutes – mash
• 15 minutes – wait for boil
• 1 hour – boil
• 30 minutes – cooling, fill primary, pitch yeast
• 30 minutes – clean up
• 4 hours 30 minutes total.

All grain brewing does take longer. Complete control over the ingredients and mash leads to noticable benefits in the finished product.

All Grain Batch with 90 minute boil and longer mash:

• 45 minutes – setup, and wait for mash water to warm up
• 2 hour, 30 minutes – mash
• 15 minutes – wait for boil
• 1 hour 30 minute – boil
• 30 minutes – cooling, fill primary, pitch yeast
• 30 minutes – clean up
• 6 hours total.

Some brews, particularly those using a large amount of Pilsner malt use a 90 minute boil. Longer mash times can also lead to higher efficiency.

Other thoughts:

One way to save on setup/tear down time is to have a dedicated brew space, like a shed. This takes time to build up to, but it is really nice to have.

Does time really matter when it comes to home brewing? If you are enjoying yourself that is what matters. Brewing is stress relief.

Posted in Brewing | 2 Comments »

1.06 Launched – Batch Performance

This launch places the cap stone on the brew session section –  Batch Performance. The numbers behind a batch of beer are a big deal to pro brewers. Home brewers can benefit from these numbers as well. I tend to obsess over post-brew stats like ABV, attenuation, expected OG vs actual OG, and efficiency. In fact, before this tool existed I would spend a lot of time at my computer calculating and saving these numbers. It becomes quite a chore. Thankfully with this latest release of Brewer’s Friend everything is automatically calculated.

By recording the appropriate brew logs, such as ‘Brew Day Complete’,  or ‘Fermentation Complete’, check marks on the batch performance tab turn green and the results are provided. Understanding what these numbers mean and how to control them is key to dialing in repeatable batches!  We hope this is a time saver for all brewers. I know I will enjoy using it and have already inputted many of my recent batches.

Another big improvement in this release is on the recipe editor. Now you can see the grain bill percentages as you enter amounts:

Bug fixes:

• Extract recipes with steeping grains now support metric units. Thank you to the brewers who noticed this, excellent reporting!
• Fixed Wyeast Extra Special Bitter 1968 (was mis-numbered, doh).

Many folks are asking for recipe search.  1.07 or 1.08 will most likely include that feature.   You can help by adding more of your recipes and marking them public and searchable.   To keep the content high quality, recipes need a rating system with some kind of community moderation. That’s what we will be working on in the near future.  We may do away with the ‘searchable’ flag and just stick with public vs private recipes. What do you think??

Posted in Announcements | 10 Comments »

1.05 is launched – Brew Timer

Thank you to everyone who wrote in with suggestions for improving 1.04. This release was focused on an innovation we created called the Brew Timer. More information on that below. We also made some basic user interface improvements (very small changes), added additional yeasts, and updated the scaling logic.

The 1.05 launch includes:

• Ability to scale recipes as small as 1 gallon or 1 liter.
• Added Fly Sparge and Sparge as options under Mash Step type drop down.
• Added 10 additional Wyeast varieties (special release strains).

Advanced Mode in the Recipe Builder:

In case you have never tried it, the OG/FG panel expands and allows you to choose which equations are used to calculate ABV, IBU, and SRM. The expanded view shows the stats for the target style. The selected equations are customizable on a per recipe basis. The defaults can be setup in your account profile.

Clicking on the ‘More…’ button (or the triangle on the far left) expands the advanced options for the recipe:

Brew Timer:

Currently in BETA (running inside an alpha release), we are proud to roll out the new Brew Timer feature in version 1.05. You will never need to worry about missing a step in the brewing process with this little beauty. First design your recipe then click on the Brew tab. From there click on the Brew Timer tab. This widget will walk you through your entire brew, start to finish, based on the step profile generated for your batch. It has built in timers! The mash steps, and each boil addition gets their own timer. Everything is planned out in advance, and you won’t forget to add your hops at just the right time. The Brew Timer is in beta right now, so we encourage folks to play with it but not rely on it at this point.

With the Brew Timer, no more printing out papers and no more fiddling with a clock timer. We would like to hear your suggestions on Facebook, via comments on this blog post, or through our feedback page.

What’s next:
The next release will focus on automatic calculation of Brewhouse Efficiency and ABV through the Brew page and Brew Log records.

Posted in Announcements | 18 Comments »

The Beer Tool – Cool Bottle Opener

When I saw this bottle opener I thought, dang, that is a cool idea!

Quote from the product:
Like most great ideas, the Beer Tool came out of a problem. Being tired of having to use the wife’s bottle opener to crack a cold one the decision was made to come up with something tougher, stronger, and more manlier. A few hours later the original Beer tool was born and there was much rejoicing.

The Manliest Bottle Opener You’ll Ever Own

https://www.thebeertool.com/

There is something that just feels right about it. Works effectively and people get a kick out of it!

They come in different sizes, so make sure to get the size you want. In this case I think bigger is better.
 

Disclaimer: TheBeerTool provided Brewer’s Friend with a complimentary opener.

Posted in Equipment, Fun | No Comments »