I have chosen recipe ALE 11° Lemondrop from "Pivotéky Tábor". My goal is to brew mainly lagers, but it needs to brew something bit easier for the start.
It was saturday 8.5.2021 and i tried so hard to prepare everything. I was in hurry. At 13h my friend, which is experienced homebrewer, has arrived to help me. So we began. We have finished at 21h.
The plan was to use 2 pots - one for hot water and copper spiral, second for manifold.
With use of peristaltic pump version 1, i will be able to recirculate wort through spiral - heating it without risk of burning (HERMS).
Problem no.1
I started to heat up water. Regulation was done by quick&dirty written PI regulator in ESP8266(NodeMCU). One of the sensors (DS18B20) was reporting error suddenly. After some time and lot of rude words i figured out, that i have tightened the cable bushing of thermowell too much, so it broke the cable. On the notebook i had problems with compilation in arduinoIDE because of missing libraries & they couldn't be found in library manager... So i couldn't change sensor - So there was only one option - move with the cable in that way, that it could communicate...
Problem no.2
After approx 1hour the pump broke. One of the wheels in planetary gearbox cracked. I have not printed any spare ones.... nice. We had to improvise. We were heating up water just in one pot.
Problem no.3
The FI circuit breaker of the house tripped. There is 30mA one and the heating elements has quite large current leaks + devices in the house has also some, so his could be predicted. So i have disconnected the ground... (Do not do that if you don't know exactly what you're doing! It is very dangerous. )
Problem no.4
We start to heat up the sparging water in second pot. That was operated by 3 ON/OFF switches manually. When we turned ON all of them and PI regulator of the other one switched two of elements, 20A circuit breaker tripped this time.
Continuation
After that hell, things went good.
Mashing was good and lautering was so fast, that we had to choke the tubing to slow down the flowrate.
Then boiling and cooling with copper spiral. We have transferred the wort into plastic container with fermentation airlock. Then i moved it in the bedroom, there was lowest temperature in the house.
Fermentation
Temperature outside was just hitting high values (30°C) so i had to try hard to reach 18°C at the bedroom. During the day i put around the container PET bottles with ice and cover it with blanket. During the night i was ventilating a lot. The temperature was around 19-21°C.
This was very hectic and lot of unprepared and untested things took their part. My nerves suffered, but i've gained a lot of experience and i hope, that next time, the brewday will be better!
Beer did not ferment as expected, according to calculation there was approx. 1-2%ABV. (I drank 4 pcs and i've felt nothing, then i drank 1 pcs of commercial 12° and that i felt immediately :D ) There is no surprise, because our mashing temperatures were way off and unstable.
Despite that, it was nice beer and it received lot of praise as very tasty bitter non-alco.
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