Bottling day for the Hard Cidef

I was a little late bottling this batch but not to worried about that. After siphoning the cider from the carboy I added a small amount of priming sugar and gave it a taste. It tastes like a flat sparkling cider, so I'm thinking the carbonation from bottling will make this batch shine!

9 12oz bottles, 2 14oz bottles

Updates: After a few months on bottles, it tastes like sour apple cider. Not sure what went wrong, but an interesting experiment to say the least.

Bottling day for the Belgian Trippel

After siphoning the beer into the bottling bucket. I tried the uncarbonated brew, it's delicious. You can taste that it's a higher alcohol beer(7-8%). Then sanitized the bottles, added the priming sugar and started filling them up. The batch yielded 40 bottles of various sizes.

The brews are bubbling

Three weeks into the Belgian trippel fermentation and two weeks into the hard cider. Can definitely tell the two have slowed down on the fermentation and started the clear up. The hard cider looks like it changed colors Sewell.

Updates to Beer Brewing Computer

I had to open the case up to make some changes to the beer computer. Snapped a few pictures of the internals while I had it open.

The blue board has a ds1307 rtc on it. The green 8-soic to 8-dip board has a mosfet to control the 12v output.

Adafruit's bidirectional logic level shifter. This is used to convert the 3.3v logic level i2c lines to 5v for all the other devices on the i2c bus. 

Adafruit's i2c ADC breakout board

Raspberry PI model B with a heat sink! Has some overheating issues when the outdoor temperature was over 100 F.

The connectors mounted on the rear of the box. USB, HDMI, 3 1-wire connectors, the midi style connector providers the 5v and 12v input.

Makin some hard cider

My neighbors have an apple tree which is dropping a bunch of moldy apples all over there lawn. Didn't want to see them go to waste, so I tried juicing them. It tasted great! So my next thought was hard cider. I had a carboy available, so why not try to make some. With about a hundred small size apple's, one pound of sugar, and some beer yeast; I now have about 2 gallons of some very potent cider. 

Time to get silly.

Beer Brewing Computer

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         This is a project I have been working on for the past couple of months. I needed a way to keep my beer boiling at a certain temperature for an extended period of time. What better then to use a computer to do that for me, so I don't have to physically throttle the propane burner. This brew computer is raspberry pi controller and uses multiple ds18b20 1-wire temperature sensors to monitor the beer temperature. Then using the RPI GPIO I can toggle a mosfet to control a solenoid valve on the gas line.
   
   

   

   Prototype

   
   

   

   Laser cut front panel to identify the potentiometers. I wanted some physical interface to set the temperature. 

   
   

   

   Custom graphical interface which is done in python. These python scripts are ran on boot up, so no need for an X server.

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Bcd Clock Build

This is my BCD(binary coded decimal) clock. Built with an atmega168 mcu(like the arduino), ds1307 rtc, and 3 74hc595 shift registers. Added a cp2102 chip for the usb interface so the clock can be configured by a computer.

Bottlecap Table

Made a mancave end table from scratch. One spare plank of wood(from an old table) and some 2x2  wood from homedepot for the legs, then about $60 of resin and many hours of beer drinking :)