Tighting Down the Rig

After our first brew session we reviewed what needed to be addressed on the rig so our next would be even better.  In general there were more things dripping than we would like to have seen.  Some of which were easily addressed by tightening down fittings, others had to be completely removed and taped again with Teflon, then tightened back down.  The other drips were coming from the disconnects themselves.

We are using quick disconnects on our system.  They basically look like this:

Inside these disconnects are o-rings that can cause a leak if they are damaged or simply old.  I went ahead and ordered about 10 replacements o-rings to ensure no issues.  They arrived on Wednesday, so we decided to do a hot water run of the entire system to test out.  We knocked out basically every leak but one, looks like one of the male quick disconnects is problematic that will need to be replaced as well.  For now we moved that to the HLT input as only water goes through there.

This also gave us an opportunity to clean everything out with a deep clean, another process to get familiar with.  We use PBW cleaning solution to clean the kettles.  We let them set in each kettle for 30 minutes, and cycled it through our pumps and wort chiller.  Afterwards we rinsed everything completely.

Part of the reason we did this too is we saw what we felt was machine oil on the HERMS coil.  We thought this deep clean would clean that off, however we realized the solution did not take off that stuff, so we went at it with paper towels.

After cleaning everything we spent the rest of the evening bottling up the remaining Not So Banana Ale, or NSBA for short, to free up a keg.  There were probably only 12 bottles worth left.  Once the keg was free, we sanitized our two open kegs and then kegged our Saison.

In tasting the Saison, the first one we tasted did not taste that good.  It had a slight soapy taste to it, and a very bitter bite at the end.  That batch was using a White Labs Saison yeast that we fermented at around 76 degrees.  In later researching we thing we either let it stay in primary too long, keeping it in contact with its sediment.  Or possibly the temp was too high, however that yeast strain should be ok there.  The other tank which used a Belgian White yeast strain tasted better, but a little too sweet maybe.

We shot both kegs up with CO2 to carbonate, however we only put one in the fridge, and left the off taste one at room temp for a while in hopes it would settle down.  The one in the fridge should have enough carbonation by next weekend to drink.

We still have a keg of British Brown Ale that we need to bottle half of for our friends Rose and Joe.

It was a full night testing, cleaning, bottling, and kegging, but we are ready to go!