I am a big Asterix fan, so it was inevitable that when I did the labels for the Blue Boar this time that the boar would come from those excellent books.
I also checked on the Sadlers Sav – the chitosan has had a marked effect on the wine, and I guess I should (very carefully) rack it off in to new demijohns some time soon <sigh>. I think I need a more efficient syphoning technique.
I’ve not done a lager kit, so whilst trying to sort the Saddlers Sav, I purchased this kit. I am playing it by the book, with no additional sugar (apparently some people do this to make the beer more continental. Or something.)
I did all the usual things but at the end I decided to put the bucket in to the cellar with the arduino temperature control. After a long chat with a friend, who works with similar controllers, and also reading some threads on the web, I tweaked the settings, nd what a difference it made. The temperature is now spot on target at all times. I have arbitrarily selected 20°C. According to some of my reading, it is a constant temperature that matters with lager, and I am certainly getting that. The cellar is pretty constant at 16 degrees – despite it being 25°C outside (my office would be way higher than that now given passive solar heating).
The main problem with the arduino is the aesthetics – it is a cardboard box (sound proofing) with wires coming out in all directions. Not ideal, but I am very happy with the laptop that is powering it – mum and dad’s old mini10 running lubuntu. The current state of play can be seen on the head up display.
The Sadlers Sav was still cloudy, though improving. I wonder if part of the problem was the filter not working properly?
So I went to the excellent May and Brett and described my problems. The guy at the shop immediately rang Sadlers, they talked through the problem and the next day some new chitosan arrived in the post. I stirred it in to the demijohns, and they went cloudy, as predicted. We’ll see how it turns out. I pushed the bungs in, but the next day when in the cellar for something completely unrelated I noticed that one of the bungs had popped off! I pushed it back and checked the next day, but it had popped off again. I suspect I had filled it a little full so the air pressure was against me. Since that demijohn was a blend of the Californian and the Sadlers, who knows whether it has made a massive difference. I popped in a campden tablet just in case.
Lubuntu looks perfect for old hardware. It runs brilliantly on my old inspiron 1300 but there was no network applet at all so I was pretty frustrated getting it on wifi.
There is lots of help on the internet, but it took me a while to realise that the missing network applet was a bug and the fix was easy.
http://www.webupd8.org/2014/04/fix-lubuntu-1404-network-manager.html
Bottled the blue boar today. 85g of sugar stirred in then syphoned in to new bottles bought from eBay. As usual I made a massive mess syphoning. I think I should have bitten the bullet and put it back in to the other container (that has a tap). Hey ho. All a learning experience.
It should be ready to drink in three weeks.
I have nothing brewing for the first time since Christmas!