Aarkon

As my latest batch is already quite the experiment, I decided to even go a little further and not use a traditional bubbler to vent off CO2 from my bucket this time, but opt for a keg to do that.

The rubber seal in the hole of the bucket‘s lid takes a 9.5 mm hose snugly, which connects to the gas intake of a keg filled with a good 5 litres of disinfectant. The keg’s liquid out has a line attached to go into the depicted 5 litre can.
This way, at the end of fermentation, I’ll have a sanitised keg & can, and the keg is already full of CO2. Also, should I experience suckback from changing temperatures (mind you, my setup lives in my garage), there is a buffer of CO2 in the keg for that, and the line into the can is the one I use to package from the bucket, so it’s nice that it gets sanitised along the way too.

What do you think? So far, my only concern is how much pressure buildup is required to displace the disinfectant from the keg and if the bucket's lid with the attached hosing is tight enough for that.

First off: Sorry for the link, apparently I can't upload images at the moment.

This is my first ride with a wireless hydrometer, so maybe this is just me not being used to having access to gravity readings all the time, having become a bit obsessed with the numbers. Looking at Brewfather on the other hand though, my gravity really hasn't changed for like 36 hours now, before reaching its estimated final value. Now I'm afraid that my fermentation has stalled, and as the gravity was never really high to begin with, I fear being stuck with something not only low in low in alcohol but also tasting thin & weak. This is supposed to be a "Klosterbier" (not a real beer style, but closest described as some sort of brown ale), with which I'd have preferred to err on the stronger side rather than on the weaker.

The main reason for the low initial gravity I believe is too little boil off: While pre-boil gravity was OK (Brewfather predicted 1.039, refractometer gave me 1.037, might even be considered to be within measuring tolerance), the post boil reading should have been 1.051 but was only 1.041.

After boiling, I took around half a liter of wort, chilled it down in a mason jar and added dry yeast, agitating it every now and then. The next day, I pitched now very agile yeast into the main bucket and fermentation started out perfectly. The ups and downs in the graph may just be results of krausen and/or condensate dripping back onto the RAPT pill or creating ripples in the wort surface.
Now, I'm really asking myself what went wrong. I don't think I caught myself any infection, the bucket was properly sanitized as well as the collection vessel & I was very careful handling all of it. The yeast also very happily ripped through the major parts of the sugars, so I don't think it's a yeast issue either. My grain bill looks as follows:

• 2.25 kg (50%) — BESTMALZ BEST Munich — Grain — 15 EBC
• 2.21 kg (49.1%) — The Swaen Swaen Vienna — Grain — 10 EBC
• 40 g (0.9%) — Weyermann Carafa Special II — Grain — 1100 EBC

The performed mashing steps:

• Mash In — 38 °C
• Protein Rest — 50 °C — 40 min
• Beta Rest — 63 °C — 30 min
• Alpha Rest — 72 °C — 30 min
• Mash Out — 78 °C

I'm not sure what to do, or if I should do anything at all. I can live with the beer having 3.5% ABV like it has now probably. My storage is dark and reasonably hygienic, so I don't think I have to elongate the beer's shelf life that way. The alcohol might then even overpower the taste of the grains if I added table sugar or anything for another percent of alcohol.
What I'm slightly concerned with though is overwhelming hop aroma because there apparently is not that much dissolved sugar to counteract the bitterness.
Any suggestions?

I was reading GitLab's documentation (see link) on how to write to a repository from within the CI pipeline and noticed something: The described Docker executor is able to authenticate e.g. against the Git repository with only a private SSH key, being told absolutely nothing about the user's name it is associated with.
If I'm correct, that would mean that technically, I could authenticate to an SSH server without supplying my name if I use a private key?

I know that when I don't supply a user explicitly like ssh user@server or via .ssh/config, the active environment's user is used automatically, that's not what I'm asking.

The public key contains a user name/email address string, I'm aware, is the same information also encoded into the private key as well? If yes, I don't see the need to hand that info to an SSH call. If no, how does the SSH server know which public key it's supposed to use to challenge my private key ownership? It would have to iterate over all saved keys, which sounds rather inefficient to me and potentially unsafe (timing attacks etc.).

I hope I'm somewhat clear, for some reason I find it really hard to phrase this question.

Being a total newbie in kegging, I recently bought some used soda kegs for cheap. Not knowing what to look for, these kegs later turned out to be of the CC variety. While this is not a bad thing per se, most accessories like the cheap Kegland spunding valves etc. only come with NC fittings, leaving me with the question of whether I should convert my kegs to Jolly kegs (from what I've read, that's basically a CC keg retrofitted with NC style gas & liquid posts).

Apparently, you can't just buy the cheap posts from Ali Express, as they have slightly different threads and/or shaft lengths, so I have to go with more expensive ones. These particular ones were recommended in a forum elsewhere and are reported to work. I'm willing to pay that price if need be, even though the cost for the modification is now about 50% of what I payed for the kegs.

One thing still bothers me though: On a CC keg, the PRV is integrated into the gas post, so it doesn't have one in the lid. Do I have to buy new lids (with PRVs) now as well? That would make the whole conversion completely uneconomical. Also, I'm rather unwilling to test my luck by pressurizing one of the kegs so much that the PRV should be triggered.

Happy to hear if anybody ever did something similar.

In the past, I only ever did top fermenting styles. I had to depressurise my bottles sometimes even more than once (using swing top bottles, luckily, this is not too awful). Now I made a Vienna Lager and even though I can‘t even really cold crash the bottles (I have them sit outside at maybe 10°C instead due to a lack in fridge space), my secondary fermentation is way slower than I’m used to. Is that to be expected?

With ales, I opened the bottles the day after starting secondary, and it sometimes was a deafening bang already. Now, I waited maybe even two days and haven‘t got more than a shy little pop.

I used powdered sugar (mixed with sterile water 1:1) to feed the yeast in secondary fermentation because I didn‘t have anything else in the house when I found the time to bottle. Is that maybe an issue?

A friend of mine dumped me a bag of malts he had lying around for like five years. It’s a kit for a Klosterbier which was stored in a plastic bag sealed with a clip, sitting on a shelf in a typical household storage room, so neither totally dark nor in bright sunlight, and slightly below average room temperature.

I’m hesitant now to heat up water and waste energy, time, hop and maybe yeast on these malts because I’m skeptic about how many enzymes are left in there. Have you ever used grains that old? Maybe I should mix them with fresh stuff?

To save money and flavour, I got myself a grain mill. I thought this would be simple, but setting the grind/crush size seems to be even more difficult than in the world of coffee 🙈

So far I’ve learned that AIOs like my Brewzilla (Gen 4) like the crush a little coarser because the grain basket and overall construction restrict the flow of the wort already. Can anyone here confirm or refute that? Does anybody have that exact same system and care to share their preferred setting (or settings/tendencies, as different malts can be milled to different sizes)?

Last time I brewed at home, I had my fermentation bucket in my flat, where the heating pretty much took care about all thermal regulation I needed back then. As I now have kids, I don't feel comfortable doing that anymore for various reasons.

I have freed up some space in my garage now for brewing & fermenting, but I have no heating there. I'm OK though to go with the seasons, brewing beer styles where the yeast's preferred temperature roughly matches the weather. But now, my mind is occupied with the question of how to keep the temperature as constant as possible for fermentation: While a weather forecast of e.g. 15°C doesn't sound too bad for lager beers, it may easily get as cold as 5° at night, giving the yeast probably a rather bad time. As I also don't want to spend a fortune on a temperature regulated fermenter, I'd like to even out those mins & maxes passively.
My thoughts so far circle around insulation (obviously) and thermal mass. Insulating the bucket itself seems like a nobrainer. But I think it also might work to build some cheap wooden enclosure, insulate that with Styrofoam, make everything somewhat airtight and add water bottles, rocks & bricks to fill up as much space as possible. That will of course do little should the weather change drastically, but so far, I think I'd stay way below max and above min temperature in there at all times. This way, I believe I could get a decent fermentation when the average outside temperature of night & day is right for a couple of days.

Is anybody here doing something like that or has experiences worth sharing otherwise?

P.S.: Addressing the elephant in the room: For now, fermenting under pressure is no road I want to go down. Buying a new fermenter, kegs, valves, fittings, hoses, CO2 bottles and either a counter pressure bottling system or even switching to drafting entirely is just too much right now.

My significant other doesn’t care nearly as much about coffee as I do, so we always have pre-ground supermarket coffee at home. Tastewise, it’s usually rather dull and bitter because apparently, that‘s what people expect coffee to taste like around here.

I wonder if there is a method/recipe that can compensate for those flaws. The Aeropress is pretty versatile, so going for lower temperatures and/or shorter extraction times comes to me as a natural first step in this investigation. Doing a pour over with this stuff feels like I‘m wasting precious V60 filter papers though tbh 😄

Any further suggestions? I own a V60, an Aeropress, a cheap drip coffee machine and the (in-) famous IKEA french press. My kettle only allows for adjustments in 10°C steps, but features a temperature display, so I can go reasonably precise on that end.

Cheers! ✌️

My grinder (Timemore Chestnut) isn’t of the super fancy kind that won’t ever produce any fines. So after some initial skepticism about the video’s topic, I was intrigued and gave it a try. And oh boy, does it make for a change in the result: Where I would normally set the grinder to 14 clicks, now I’m at 9 (where lesser is finer) and the coffee is still more on the sour side.

With the Aeropress, I’m experimenting with longer brew times, no big deal. Overall, I think I’m getting a more even, more efficient extraction with more strength per gram of coffee without the harshness you get when grinding too fine.
But for pour over, I’m unsure if I should really go any finer. The bed already was sort of muddy the last time. Do you have any experience on the topic you’d like to share? Have you tried slow feeding, and if yes, are you still doing it, and are you doing it for everything or only certain brew methods?

I've got a reoccurring issue with all of the home servers I've ever had and because it happened again just today, now the pain is big enough to ask publicly about it.
As of now, I'm running some Intel NUC ripoff with a JBOD attatched via USB 3, spinning a ZFS sort of-RAID. It's nothing that special tbh. In the past I had several other configurations with external drives, wired via fstab to Raspberry Pis and the like. All of those shared a similar issue: I can't recall exactly when, but I figure most of the time after updates to the kernel or docker, the computer(s) become stuck at boot. I had to unplug the external drives just to get the respective machine up, after which varying issues occurred with drives not being recognized anymore and such.

With my current setup, I run several docker containers which have their volumes on subdirectories/datasets on the /tank mountpoint, and when booting the machine without the drives, some of the containers create new directories at that destination, which now lives on my main drive /dev/sda.
It's not only painful to go through the manual process with the drives, I only have access the machine when I'm home, which I'm not all the time. Also, it's kind of time consuming as I'm backup up data that I fear might become inconsistent along the way. Every time I see a big kernel update, I fear that the computer will get stuck in such a situation once again and I'm reluctant to do a proper reboot.

I know that external drives are not best practice when it comes to handling "critical" data, but I don't want to run another machine just in order to provide access to the disks via network. Any ideas where these issues stem from and how to avoid them in the future?