Voodoo people pale ale

This brew had a few firsts for me. It was the first time I designed a recipe in Brewfather, the first time I fermented in a temperature controlled fridge, the first time to test the Plaato digital airlock, and the first time to keg the beer instead of bottle conditioning. Phew! The recipe is similar to my previous batch Baby steps pale ale, which turned out really well except for being over carbonated. For this batch I wanted to mix up the El Dorado hops with something like Azacca, but when I did my shopping the supplier was out of El Dorado. Instead of ordering from a second store and paying another shipping fee I decided to go with Mosaic, and pairing that with Azacca. Tropical fruit is the name of the game. I decided to ferment with American ale II, which is said to both boost hop flavor and impart some fruity flavors of its own.

Brew day

Even though it’s been a while since I last brewed, the brew day went smoothly. I think I’m beginning to have my process dialled in pretty well. The only unexpected detail was that cooling seemed to take forever, and it turned out our groundwater was 21°C after the unusually hot summer. In the winter cooling below the 18° I was targeting is quick and easy, but now I had to stop wasting water at 23° and did the final cooling in my new fermentation fridge instead.

The yeast seemed tired, and the smack pack didn’t swell much at all during the brew day. I also got a pretty long lag time, but after about 36 hours fermentation was clearly happening. That’s way longer than I’m comfortable with, and I’m thinking about sticking to dry yeast for a while now.

Brewfather

Brewfather is a web based tool for planning and documenting your home brewing. Previously I’ve been using the very popular BeerSmith application, but it feels really dated in so many ways that I’ve grown tired of it. The UI is horrible and the “cloud sync” feature is almost useless. I tried Brewfather out as soon as I saw it, and after this brewday I’m a happy paying customer. There are still things that could be added or improved, but the developer is very active and responsive. I hope that by paying for the premium version I’ll encourage him to stay that way!

I miss a proper step-by-step recipe to follow in Brewfather, and opted to write it out on a notepad to make sure I didn’t forget anything. Perhaps the this was the reason Brewfather felt a bit distant, whereas BeerSmith has been more of a part of my brewday. I hope that a future version of the brew day view will make the paper redundant, but I have to say I enjoyed having a big A4 notepad ready for quick notes and such. Perhaps I’ll keep using a combination of the two.

The biggest adjustments I had to make to my equiment profile after everything was finished was the efficiency (which I had set too low), and the grain absorption rate (where the default value was 2-3 times too high for me). The only thing that didn’t really add up other than that was the mash pH. I use paper strips to measure it, so the value I get is vague at best. Still, Brewfather estimated a pH of 5,39, but I ended up around 5,7. Previously I’ve been using EZ water calculator for water calculations (since that part of BeerSmith is also very difficult to work with), and entering the same information there I got an estimated pH of 5,57 which seems to be much closer to reality. I’ve let the Brewfather developer know about this, but unless I hear of any changes I’ll stick to EZ water calculator for now.

All in all I’m very happy with Brewfather, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what new features and improvements will come in the next versions. The killer features for me is the clean user interface and the fact that it’s online, making any syncing between devices unnecessary.

Plaato airlock

I don’t have a spigot on my fermentation bucket, and I’m hesistant to install one since I worry about leaks. This means I have to open the fermentation bucket and dip something into the beer to take a gravity sample, which I really don’t like. There are a few solutions to monitor fermentation, with the Tilt hydrometer being the most popular one. The problems I see with that is that it’s Bluetooth only and that it’s actually down in the beer.

The Plaato works similarly to the existing product Spiedel Gärspund Mobil, which is to count the bubbles in the airlock. One big difference between the two is that the Plaato also has a model to predict gravity based on the bubble count. This is the key feature for me, as it would at least give an estimate of how complete fermentation is without touching the beer.

The Plaato is wifi-connected, meaning it can sit at home uploading data no matter where you are. In addition to the bubbles/gravity it logs the ambient temperature around it. This isn’t too interesting to me, I would very much have liked an external probe to measure the temperature of the wort instead. There’s a basic app that lets you monitor progress of the fermentation. It works well enough, and I’m sure it will be improved in the future.

I was very interested when the Plaato was launched on Kickstarter and immediately backed it. It took nine months longer than expected until it was actually delivered, but this summer I finally got it. The Plaato worked well for me the first few days of fermentation, and it was a lot of fun to follow the progress of the beer on my phone. Then one day I started seeing scary temperature spikes on the chart. The temperature would suddenly rise to over 30°C for a few minutes and then drop down to the normal 17-19° again. After a few more days I saw an even higher spike, and then the Plaato stopped sending data. I never got it working again.

I got good support from the Plaato crew, who after receiving video evidence of all the LEDs staying lit put me on a list to receive a replacement device. Their guess is that my device has a faulty component, and that this could also be the cause for the temperature spikes I saw earlier.

So, I only got a peek at what the Plaato can offer this time, but I’m looking forward to following the fermentation of my next batch from beginning to end.