The Grainfather – in photos

As I mentioned in my previous post, my mate Andy from the newly named Prince Albert Ales has splashed out on a Grainfather brewing system. You can read my initial description of the system in this post (to save me typing it again).

The brew day started with cleaning the system, especially because it was brand new so the recommendation was to run cleaner through it for a reasonable time to remove any factory grime (I’m sure they didn’t use those exact words in the manual).

Recipe and grains were prepared in advance (today it was a German wheat beer):

Once rinsed, the Grainfather was filled with strike water and set at the target temperature to heat up:

Once at temperature in go the grains:

Then on goes a mesh to prevent the top of the grain bed being disturbed by recirculated mash liquor and later sparge water:

Then the mash recirculation pipe is fitted and the pump turned on so the mash liquor at the bottom is pumped up and onto the top of the mash:

Wait an hour and have some lunch…

At the end of the mash, there’s a foam on top of the mash:

Here’s the clever bit – lift the inner cylinder up and lock it in place so the wort can drain out of the grains into the boiler below:

Commence sparging – simply pour the sparge water onto the top mesh above the grain bed:

Once finished, remove the mesh, and indeed the whole grains cylinder:

In go the hops and the boil commences:

At this point I left Andy to it. But at the end of the boil the counterflow wort chiller is used to recirculate the wort until chilled to the required temperature, whereupon it is pumped into the fermenting vessel.

That’s it! In all we were very impressed. There were a couple of learning points:

1. The handle for the inner grain cylinder can easily come away when you are tipping the grain out of the cylinder. As a result Andy managed to drop it as he was tipping into the compost bin. Minimal damage fortunately.
2. Pumping out into the FV took forever because of the hops clogging up the outlet. Looks like a hop bag is essential.

On the brighter side, the OG was 1.060 when the recipe had said 1.050, so it’s clear the system is very efficient. That’ll be the mash recirculation I guess.

Now, I just need to find £600…

Beer Engine maintenance

My beer engine is the best impulse purchase I have ever made. It changes good home-made beer into great home-made beer and allows me to serve beer to my guests that is pretty close to what they’d get in a British (northern) pub. I love it.

Last Wednesday it was giving me a bit of jip though. I did manage to get beer out of it, but is was hugely foamed up, so you only got about half a pint of froth.

This weekend Andy and I took it apart to see if some TLC would sort out the problem.

At this point it may be worth you having a look back at my previous post called Anatomy of a Beer Engine. This shows the insides of my beer engine last time I took it apart. This post is, incidentally, the most popular post on this blog!

So Andy and I took it apart on Friday and cleaned everything and put it back together. At this stage it became apparent that we’d made it worse – there was absolutely no draw at all. Andy’s calm and unflappable nature prevailed… so rather than getting stressed for the whole evening over it we put it back together and sat down and had a beer (bottled of course) to think it over.

Today I had another go at it and it seems to be working OK now. The problem? Well, there is a non-return valve at the bottom of the cylinder which I think had seized up. It’s the fat white cylinder with the input nozzle shown below:

It comes apart like this:

The beer is drawn in through the nozzle, through the valve inside, and out through the hole in the white plastic unit and thence into the bottom of the pump cylinder (the stainless steel bit).

Last time I took the engine apart I didn’t disassemble the non-return valve. Today, in desperation, I took it all apart.

Like everything about this beer engine, it’s elegant in its simplicity.

In the back of the nozzle section (the bit that is unscrewed) is a small movable piece (with the red ring) that is pushed in place by a long spring.

As you pull the beer engine handle it draws the piston up the cylinder, which reduces the pressure in the lower part of the cylinder. This pulls the moveable piece out a bit, allowing beer to be drawn into the engine cylinder. When you stop pulling, the spring pushes the piece back in to prevent beer returning back up the pipe. Dead simple.

As you can see, it was a bit dirty. I think grime on the red seal had caused it to stick in place.

Once it was all taken apart, cleaned with a toothbrush and then put back together the beer engine seems to be back to full working order.

I’ve not actually tried it with beer yet, but it now draws water just fine.

In other news: Remember I posted recently about The Grainfather? Well on seeing my post my mate Andy (the other Andy, not the Cheshire Peaks Andy) went straight out and ordered one. I’ll be very interested to hear how he gets on with it. If I can get some photos it may make an interesting post for the future.