Building the Knucklehead: Part One, A Journey into Taking Home Brewing Too Seriously

Homebrewing is a lot like that box of drugs that Raoul Duke carried around in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Once you’re  locked into making your own beer, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. Having just moved in with a wonderful woman, the reality of this became far more apparent. Every time I would start unpacking another box of home brewing equipment, I’d see her look at it with some consternation, and then ask “Do you really need all this stuff?”

The short answer is “no, of course not.” I could get away with a cooler, a 7-gallon pot, and a glass carboy, along with a bathtub half-full of water. Hell, I started with less than that, pouring malt extract in a 5-gallon steel pot, boiling with water for an hour with some hops, and then choking down the resulting fermented beverage which approached something you might call beer.

Eventually, I got to the point a lot of home brewers get to, where you decide to “get serious.” I’m a man, dammit, and I need a hobby to assert that there are indeed a pair of pendulous testes between my legs. What better than home brewing?

As it turns out, you can pretty much sum up “getting serious” in about three interchangeable steps, presented here in the order I took them.

1) Go to an all-grain system and cease using the unreliable canned malt extract (or at the very least go to a full-wort boil, boiling the entire concoction at once instead of in concentrate).

2) Temperature control your fermentation and you can accidentally decide which off-flavors will appear in your beer.

3) Keg instead of bottle, because you’re a lazy fuck, and bottling is annoying and time-consuming.

I should note that I just took step number three after getting fed up with bottling. Bottling sucks in all respects. It would suck less if I had friends who liked to hang around during bottling, but usually when cleaning supplies and chemicals show up, everyone suddenly has to be somewhere. Go figure. This means when I bottle (or when I used to bottle) it’s up to me to get the bottles cleaned, de-labeled, sanitized, filled and capped. It’s about a two hour ordeal on bottling day, and probably another two hours of work getting the bottles prepped for bottling day. I could buy clean, unlabeled bottles, but that would entail spending money, and I’m poor. Also, fuck bottling.

Anyways, the keggerator. That’s the whole reason I’m writing this. So here’s the deal. I bought a used chest freezer, and for a while, I used that for fermentation. I wired a dual stage temperature controller up, plugged it in, and started making some of the best beer I’ve ever made. But the bottling. Oh, christ, the bottling.

Have I mentioned I hate bottling?

So I started looking at my options. What I wanted was pretty simple. I needed something I could do temperature controlled fermentation in, as well as something I could use as a keggerator. I figured I’d use my freezer as a keggerator, and build something to do fermentation in, when I came across the Mother of All Fermenation Chillers. Go ahead, click that link. Tell me you aren’t impressed with that build. (Side note: Mylo, the guy who built the first MOAFC, actually pitched the idea to me when I was brainstorming on the BN Forums about a year ago or so. It stuck with me.)

Basically, if you’re too lazy to click the link, it’s a box that sits on top of a chest freezer. Fans pull up cold air from the chest freezer, and kegs sit on the bottom, with taps coming out the side. Fermentation chamber and keggerator, in one beautiful package.

What the Knucklehead will look like, generally speaking. Model made with Sketchup (which is absolutely worth learning to use).

“I absolutely still love mine,” Mylo told me. “The only thing that I plan on changing is the electronics. I want to modernize/upgrade to a BrewTroller based system which I will be doing this summer.” (Let me know how that goes if you read this, Mylo.)

And I thought to myself “BrewTroller? What’s a BrewTroller?”

This is a BrewTroller. Once again, for the lazy-asses, the BrewTroller is what happens when nerds start making beer. It’s basically a computer-controlled brewing device that will work from your goddamn computer/laptop/smartphone. How cool is that? Hell, if you had sufficient automation, you wouldn’t even have to be in the same state as your brewing setup. But the same device can also be rigged up to control fermentation, allowing you control of your fermentation chamber from essentially anywhere.

And there’s like a billion of these projects. BrewPi is a recent one that has gotten some attention, it runs on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, and is the progression from the UberFridge, which used an Arduino. There’s the WebControl board, which has been co-opted by home brewers. This one at Brewgeek.com uses X-10 home automation hardware, which sends commands through the existing power wire. Just search for “automated fermentation chamber.” You’re going to find a ton of stuff, like an entire sub-board on Homebrewtalk.com.

What I decided on was the TeensyPi. I’m still batting around ideas, but I like the idea of using the Raspberry Pi. It’s a little bit of work, but I’m stupid and like to pretend that between a job, school, and procrastination, I have plenty of time. If I need to, I can reformat the Pi and load up any code I want, so if I ever get around to learning how to code, I can customize things to my heart’s content. Fresh out of the box, it’s not really controllable from the web, it looks like.  I’d bet that could be fixed pretty easy by buying a domain and running a web server on my outdated Linux box, which is a whole other learning experience, and something I’ll write about later.

I’m still hammering out details, but I’ve been working on this for about a year now, so I’ve got a pretty good idea of where I’m going. However, that brings to my next point.

I don’t know shit about any of this stuff. I’m not a carpenter. I’m not a programmer. I’m not an electrical engineer. I’m a student, an IT guy at the school, and a home brewer. I’m not even in school for anything computer related, I’m a business marketing student. I’m the last person who should be attempting a crazy-ass project like this, which is exactly why I thought it’d be a good idea to write about it.

See, while searching for information on this, I realized there really isn’t a place that breaks all this stuff down for the layman. Oh, sure, you can buy a bunch of books on Raspberry Pi and Arduino (my brother, a Mozilla programmer, recommends the O’Reilly books, found here and here on Amazon), read up on electrical engineering, circuit board making, and shit like that. But I think we’ve established two things in this excessively long introduction: I hate bottling because I’m lazy, and I enjoy writing to excessive length about things I enjoy.

Plus, none of my friends give a shit about this, so I’m foisting the responsibility of being my audience unto you, gentle reader.

So, stay tuned. If you’re thinking about a project like this and you’re a layman like me, I hope I can be of some help. If you’re researching your options for fermenters, I hope I’m convincing you to try this. If you’re a spammer looking for a place to put your ad for a dating site, kiss my dickhole.

Enjoy, and leave any questions, suggestions, or other communiques in the comments, and I’ll address them promptly.

In conclusion, I give you what the Knucklehead looks like in its current, entirely unfinished form. This is the second time I’ve built this base, and the first time it came out the way it was supposed to. Screwing up is part of the learning process, as you’ll soon find out!

Welcome to the Boredom-Free Zone

I’ve had something on my mind for…well, a couple of years now, and I think this might be the place to get it off my chest.

I’m pretty disappointed with most people my age. Not all, mind you. As with any group you’re bound to find some exemplary personalities. For the most part, though, the people I’ve met in their ten-year trek down the trail to being 30 are completely useless. They have no skills. They have no personalities, save what they consume and shit back out. They are, for lack of a better word, completely boring.

And I blame this on one simple affliction: they’re bored. Bored people tend to be boring people. They have nothing to do, usually, but complain about the lack of things to do.

And to that affliction, I ask this question: how the fuck is it even possible to be bored anymore?

We live at the pinnacle of human knowledge, every day for the rest of history. I’m old enough to remember the advent of the Internet, and I’m old enough to have used the proto-Internet when it was called Compuserve or America Online. Each day, there is some piece of information that has been previously undiscovered, every hour someone has some new thought or idea and turns it loose on the web, and we have the tenacity to claim there is nothing to do?

And that’s where I came up my new credo, something I will teach my children and teach them to teach their children: Boredom is not permitted. You have an infinity of things you’re probably capable of doing, and if you’re not good at some of them, there’s probably a whole other infinity of things you are good at, given enough time and practice.

Since discovering this part of myself a few years ago, I have become a home brewer and mead maker, I have learned to build just about anything I can imagine out of wood, I can do electrical work, I’m learning to program, I’m learning different languages. I’m doing literally anything else but sitting around, wasting time, when I could be learning about something.

There’s just not time to be bored anymore. You have about (at current estimate) eighty years with which to do what you can on this planet. Now is the time to decide what legacy you will leave behind. Tomorrow could be too late (if you’ll excuse the cliche). Do it now, because nobody else is going to do it for you.

Now that is out of the way, I give you my blog, designed and crafted around this philosophy. Honestly, I like to show off the stuff that I build and learn, so this is primarily my place to do so, but I’ve noticed that there is a lack of a center of knowledge on some of these subjects, places you can go to just access the table of contents. This is what I hope to achieve for you, the reader, if you are, somehow, able to stumble across this blog in one way or another. As I learn, I will pass on less what I have learned, and more how I learned it. I want to teach you to teach yourself, so you don’t have to be bored anymore either.

I hope I can achieve half of what I want to with this blog, but if I can’t than at least I wasn’t bored while I did it. In the end, that’s all that counts.