Today I made my annual pumpkin beer and I took the easy way out by using some butternut squash for the vegetable portion. They’re a lot easier to find than pie pumpkins, and are cheap. The flavor after roasting wasn’t all that different from pumpkins of years past so I didn’t feel too bad about cheating.
I grabbed four of them at a local farmer’s market for $3.50, split & cleaned then, and roasted them @ 375 for 2:15.
For the past 5 years or so I’ve mashed using my 10-gallon Gott cooler with one of Northern Brewer’s bulkhead kits. I never was perfectly happy with the bulkhead as it would occasionally leak and it is insecure/wobbly by nature because it’s trying to sandwich two pieces of plastic separated by foam. And you if think about a leak on this bulkhead design your wort is going in between the cooler walls, gross.
So today I cut out the outer shell leaving just the inner liner, and I redid the bulkhead to only sandwich that inner liner. It’s much sturdier now. Photos and descriptions follow.
Here is how much shell I dremel’d away. In retrospective I should have cut away some more to make getting my fingers around the locknut easier.
Shell Cutaway
I’m using a fully-close nipple instead of the almost-closed nipple that came with the original kit. That slight reduction in length lets me clamp down on the inner shell.
Closed Nipples
Here is a chunk of the wort-soaked foam from in between the cooler walls. Thankfully the expanding foam they use forms a good seal along the walls so my wort leaks didn’t seep very far in.
Moldy Foam
To be able to get a better clamp on the wall I’m using a big 1/2″ silicone washer.
Big Silicone Washer
And the finished product. The ball valve had enough thread to get a good seal and a leak test passed.
Bulkhead Exterior
So I was feeling a little spendy a few months back so I sprung for MoreBeer’s $70 carbonating keg lid. I’ve used it to carb two kegs and by golly it does work. Each batch has been ready in about 3 days total, a big improvement over the week of shaking and waiting I’d do before. It’s nice how this piece of kit prevents me from overcarbing my beer, something I’d usually do when attempting to force-carb.
I’ve been approximately following their instructions:
What a great recipe. Lovely mix of smooth smoked malt with a not-too-bitter dark backbone. The wood adds a nice charred, bourbon element to the beer which may or may not be desirable to you. I really enjoyed my hydrometer sample before racking to secondary along with the wood pack and now I’m wishing I had split some of the beer off just to enjoy the smoke by itself, not encumbered by the wood.
I put the wood cubes in a nylon bag and suspended it from the keg lid. 6 days later the beer had what I felt was an appropriate level of wood/char flavor and I removed the bag. This sure didn’t take long, but then again they do give you a generous amount of wood in the kit as seen below.
I just got the 8-cup Yama stovetop vacuum brewer, and immediately noted the large amount of water left in the carafe. I typically brew 20 oz at a time so this wasn’t going to work out because that water would dilute my coffee too much. As I had done with my Cory brewer I extended the dip tube with a piece of rubber hose.
This tube I used silicone rubber hose as it’s resistance to high temperatures and is food-safe. I happened to have some 1/2″ ID, 3/4″ OD firm tubing from McMaster Carr (51135K86) which worked well. I had to immerse the tube in boiling water to get it over the tube, but once on it’s a snug fit so no worm clam was needed. I started with more hose than I needed and whittled it down until the carafe was left with a thin layer of water across the entire bottom. As you can see this wound up being about 7mm of tube extension.
Yama Tip Tube with Hose
Here’s a short video showing the amount of water left: