Hearty greetings from Cape Town, South Africa

Greetings from Stellenbosch - the premier wine-growing region in Subsaharan Africa.

I, however, am interested in reaping the fruits of the fermentation of a different sort of seed altogether (forgive the appalling pun!).

Having had the privilege of brewing using a fully automated, computer-controlled 50litre batch test-brewing facility at the engineering faculty of the nearby university revoked, I am now venturing into the realms of brewing in my garage with considerably more affordable equipment.

I am also learning the hard way that brewing at home oldschool style is more labour intensive and (potentially) will be more rewarding when I get it right! At this stage I am waiting patiently on the fermentation of my second batch of bitter (the first possessed the telltale band-aidy flavours of bacterial contamination), meanwhile refining the design and procedures for my particular setup (to avoid a repeat of the contamination in particular). Every brew is a learning experience.

I look forward to being able to utilise the wealth of information available through this forum and beersmith.com to help me on my homebrew journey and guide me through the making of litres and litres of the gods' own amber liquid.

Cheers!

Greetings and welcome inf15. Sounds to me like you yourself will be a major contributor to this forum! Welcome!

Welcome! What's your setup now that you're no longer brewing on the 50-litre system? Have you identified where your band aid off flavors are coming from? Beyond good sanitation practices you might look at brew your water, if it has any chlorophenol in it, or if you use a chlorine sanitizer. Other than that, the only place I'd know to look would be your sparge, if your pH is above 6.0 or if your temp is hotter than 76C.

Thanks for the welcome.

At the moment, I am mashing in a coolerbox mashtun, batch sparging, boiling in a 20l boil pot and fermenting in glass carboys. This is an interim setup and will be upscaled once I've ironed out all of the wrinkles.

The first suspect in the band aid saga is sanitation and, to be honest, there are multiple potential sources of contamination as I am brewing by myself for the first time with a jury-rigged setup and found myself violating a few very basic good brewing practices due to a shortage of arms!

I am using a combination of acidisan (a local equivalent to starsan which is only available here at great cost) and iodophor to sanitise equipment, so I don't envisage a role in the medicinalness of my beer there.

My brewing water may play a role though. The water I'm using is ground water pumped from sandstone aquifers. It comes from the same rocks and is similar in composition to the water sourced from the historic Newlands Spring, which has been used by SAB to brew in Cape Town since the 19th century. However, I only have a fairly old workup of the water chemistry and need to do some more reading into this complex topic in anycase. I suspect the total alkalinity and calcium levels are a little low, but as to the band aidy flavours, the pH of the water is around 5.4. Nevertheless, thanks for the tip on that Mofo, I will look into it in some more detail. All part of developing my home setup.

inf15 - You may, or may not, already have plans for your new brew setup.  In case you're looking for ideas, I decided to offer the flow diagram I created and used to build my system.  I got real tired of brewing in my kitchen so being a pipefitter by trade, I decided to build something that would greatly simplify my brew day.  While I still have to lug the glass carboy once its filled, all the hot liquid is moved via a pump or gravity.

Good luck with your setup!!

KellerBrauer said:

inf15 - You may, or may not, already have plans for your new brew setup.  In case you're looking for ideas, I decided to offer the flow diagram I created and used to build my system.  I got real tired of brewing in my kitchen so being a pipefitter by trade, I decided to build something that would greatly simplify my brew day.  While I still have to lug the glass carboy once its filled, all the hot liquid is moved via a pump or gravity.

Good luck with your setup!!

Click to expand...

Wow, thanks Keller.

Your schematic seems fairly comprehensive. Unfortunately my present budget does not allow for the putting together of anything like that, but I will save your pdf for the day that it does!