Bayside Brewers Oktoberfest

I am a member of the Bayside Brewers home brew club which covers the South Eastern bayside suburbs of Melbourne. Every year in October we have our Oktoberfest at Hickinbotham Winery in Dromana.
The Saturday is the judging day for competition entries then on Saturday night many of our members camp in the horse paddock behind the winery.
Sunday is the family day. All the beers in the competition are served and there are German foods available and an Oompah band.
I brewed a Munich dunkel for the competition. I had set my grain mill too fine so ended up getting a stuck sparge on numerous occasions during my stepped mash.The result was I didnt hit my mash temps properly and the beer didnt attenuate out resulting in a slightly watery beer.
So I didnt place in the judging, however I had a number of fellow members tell me that they enjoyed my beer. So I might have to put this one down to brew again.

It was a good day with a huge turn out. I enjoyed the beer on offer with a Hefewiezen being my favourite. It had a nice bubblegum after taste, and Im certainly going to add this to my brew schedule.



Authentic German barman..or not.

More authentic Germans..

 


Ok well at least this was an authentic German Oompah band.

My latest Brew Rig

And finally on my quick tour through the brew rigs and setups Ive used since starting this hobby we come to my current setup.
I started with an old steel framed bench they were throwing out at work and turned this..

Into this..

The brewery controller swings out parallel with the stand on brew day, then folds back away as shown in the picture when not needed. My HLT is on the left, Mash tun in the middle and boil kettle goes on the right where the Mash tun lid is sitting. My pump is mounted to the bottom shelf and I have room for the storage of leads etc either side of the pump.

Its a great rig to brew on and I love the castors as I can move it in to the middle of the garage on brew day, which means any spills can be hosed out the garage and down the driveway.

New House..New Brew Rig Design

I moved house in November 2012 and the new house had a double garage, which meant more room for an upgraded brew rig setup. So I decided to give a 2 tier setup a go.
My HLT was on the first tier with my MLT and boil kettle on the second tier, and a pump below this.

Heres a panoramic shot of my setup. (Note the brew controller box that I was building at the time I took the photo...details on the build will follow in another post)

My first brewery

If I had started this blog when I first started brewing I would have a nice chronological order of my brew rigs as I updated them and added or improved them. Instead Im going to just do some catch up posts here outlining my brew rig setups since I first started.

My first adventure into all grain brewing was using the old faithfull Big W 20 litre pot and a Swiss voile bag. This method is called Brew in a bag or BIAB and is a great and cheap way for new or K&K brewers to get started in "All Grain" brewing.
My first brew was a Stone and Wood Pacific Ale clone and it turned out fantastic. I was immediately hooked on All grain.

I was then given an 18 litre urn so started doing BIAB in that. Eventually after reading about various systems such as RIMS and HERMS, 2V 3V etc etc I decided to build a simple herms system and setup a 3V brewery. This used my small 18 litre urn as a Hot Liquor Tank or HLT, an esky for my Mash tun MLT and a new 40 litre urn I had brought as my boil kettle.



Brew rig on stand showing my HLT bottom left, herms vessel bottom right, and mash tun and boil kettle on top shelf.

Upgrade to Beersmith

Well after a few years of using trusty old Brewmate as my brewing software of choice I have finally bit the bullet, lashed out and brought Beersmith and Beersmith mobile for my iPad.

My original hesitation was due to the fact that Brewmate was free. However it does lack some features that I like in Beersmith. Such as the inventory and stepped mashing. And also now that Beersmith mobile is available I like the idea of being able to run my brew day from my iPad.
So I've spent the night setting up my equipment profile and adding my hops and grains stock to Beersmith and played around with the recipe cloud account swapping between my iPad and PC. Beersmith is certainly a lot harder to use than Brewmate which I would certainly recommend for beginners.
But I think once the equipment profiles are all setup and the basics are grasped that Beersmith will be a much better program for the real beer nerd like myself.