Beer With Me

My brewing system arrived yesterday, so today I’m brewing beer again!

No, I’m not. Of course I’m not. It’s never that simple.

Some poor guy had to give up brewing, so he sold me his 20-liter Speidel Braumeister for a small fraction of the original cost. It arrived yesterday. Since then, I’ve been working on getting it going.

The Braumeister line is German, so all of it runs on 220V. Guess what kind of power I have in my kitchen? Yes, 120V, not including hardwired 220V appliances. I really wanted to brew in my strangely enormous and comfortable kitchen, so I had to find a way to get 220V juice into it.

Yesterday, I bought a 14-gauge 50-foot extension cord, a NEMA 6-15R connector, and a NEMA 14-30/50P plug. I cut the ends off the cord and attached the connectors. I configured the plug for my 30-amp dryer socket.

Various online sources insist I need 12-gauge wire. Yada yada yada blah blah blah. Not listening. This is not my first rodeo. Those sources always seem to be written by lawyers and insurance companies, not engineers. I’m not paying $100 for one extension cord.

Today, I sat the machine on my counter, plugged it in, and added about 5.5 gallons of water. Right now, it’s running. It thinks it’s making beer. I wanted to make sure the electronics worked, and I wanted to see if the cord would burst into flames, so I’m running it with plain water.

The electronics are remarkable. It has wifi. I have not looked into the reasons for this. It stores beer recipes, too. You turn it on, choose your recipe, add your water and malt, and tell it to start.

Because it’s German, it has some annoying features. It keeps asking me to confirm things I’ve already chosen.

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME WHETHER YOU WISH THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “Yes.”

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “I just did.”

Braumeister: “DO YOU WANT TO INVADE POLAND?”

Me: “No.”

Braumeister: “ARE YOU SURE? POLAND VERY NICE IS THIS TIME OF YEAR.”

The manual says you have to contact the German government and let them know every time you brew beer. I am not kidding. It even has a form you can use. Obviously, this does not apply to Americans. I’m pretty sure.

There is something different about the Germans. That’s all there is to it.

I do not understand why they would pass this law. It makes no sense. They have laws that prevent Germans from making bad beer for money, and I guess that is understandable given their mistaken belief that they make the best beer on Earth, but why they need to know about some guy brewing a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone in his living room is beyond me.

I can brew whatever I want without telling anyone, and from time to time, I open my bedroom sliding door and shoot squirrels with unregistered semi-automatic weapons while still inside the house. Go, America!

While the Braumeister is somewhat controlling, it is also very well made, and it does lots of stuff automatically. It’s sort of like a BMW or a Panzer tank, except it’s not hopelessly unreliable. As far as I know.

It looks like there is no problem with the cord I made. The 14-gauge part I added stays cool when the Braumeister is running, and the original cord, which is probably 18-gauge, gets slightly warm. That’s the Germans’ fault. I may replace it with a fatter cord. The original cord is like the cord you have on your PC, except it has a different plug. The female end is called C13, and you can get C13 cords in 14-gauge.

The cord I made is rated for 13 amps, and the Braumeister’s manual says it draws 10. Not a huge margin of safety, but enough. The manual also says not to use a cord more than three meters long. Okay, sure. If you use a scrawny German cord instead of a properly-sized cord.

Well, guess what? I just learned the above paragraph is wrong. The manual says the Braumeister calls for a 10A fuse, so it draws less than 10 amps. I didn’t notice this because when I looked at the manual, which was all serious and stuff, I chose not to pay much attention. Most of the time, this pays off for me.

Anyway, more reason to buy a cheap cord.

I made a yeast starter night before last. I paid $8 for exotic liquid yeast, and I added it to a malt extract solution in an Ehrlenmeyer flask. I put the flask on my laboratory stir plate and stirred it for about 36 hours. This created a huge quantity of new yeast. Now it’s sitting on the counter, waiting for me to use it.

The flask is a bad idea. It has a narrow opening so you can put a cork in it, along with a valve that makes the CO2 bubbles go out through water. This valve, or airlock, is supposed to keep bacteria out.

The instructions for the starter kit say to heat water in the flask in the microwave. As far as I know, there is no microwave oven on Earth that will hold a 2-liter flask in an upright position. It also says to add the malt extract to the water when it gets hot.

Malt extract is almost 100% sugar, and it’s very fine and gummy. When you get it near a flask full of steaming water, it turns to gum instantly and sticks to your funnel or spoon or whatever.

I had quite a time getting MOST of the malt extract, or DME, into the flask.

I have decided it’s stupid to use a flask and airlock. It’s overkill. Bacteria are a problem, but they aren’t Navy SEAL’s. You don’t need an airlock to keep them out. Anything that covers the fermenting vessel will work. I’m going to get a beaker and cover the top with sanitized aluminum foil when I make starters.

I think I’ll be okay from here on out. I just have to brew, pour the wort into my fermenting bucket, cool the bucket in the pool, add the yeast, and put the bucket in my new fermenting freezer. Then when my new keg arrives, I’ll stick it in there and move the keg to my spare fridge.

So far, I think the Braumeister is wunderbar. I am not brewing today, but if I were, I would already have saved myself considerable aggravation, and later on, the Braumeister would have saved me a lot of work. I kid the Germans, which is something history teaches us not to do, but I think they hit a home run with this thing.

A home run is a goal. In baseball. Which is a sport. Where you hit and throw a ball. “Throwing” means you hold something in your hand and…

Oh, forget it.