I decided recently to make another go at brewing beer with my Anova Sous Vide cooker. The first time went pretty well, but I had a few new ideas I wanted to try this time around.
Last time I found that the grain bag had a tendency to get pulled into the impeller on the sous vide cooker. It tended to happen slowly but I had to keep checking and move the bag away from the impeller. I thought trying to partition the brew pot with a stainless steel grate might fix this problem, so I got a stainless steel cooling rack and tied it into place in the brew pot.
I also found that every time I wanted to brew with the sous vide I had to do a page of hand calculations to make sure that the batch would fit in the pot and still fall between the min and max line of the sous vide cooker after adding grains. To help with this problem I created a simple javascript calculator to do all the tedious calculations for me. The calculator is available here and is free for anyone to use. Let me know if you use it and have any feedback.
The beer I brewed turned out well but the conversion efficiency was a bit low because I had too much grain in the pot. I failed to account for how little room there would be in the pot after installing the partition.
I learned alot from this batch and my new ideas worked out reasonably well. The partition system worked very well besides my failure to account for the reduced grain capacity with the partition installed. To help with this in the future I added a partition percentage option to my calculator so that I can avoid having a grist to water ratio that is too high for good conversion efficiency.
No comments:
Post a Comment