Paper

Each time I make a batch of beer (23 litres), I use between 3.5 and 5.5 kilograms of grain. Think how much spent grain a commercial brewery has to deal with. That's a lot of livestock that get fed.

M'verygoodfriend Cameron returned from Tasmania recently and gave me this:

From Other Beer Stuff

So, Boags have found a way to do something with what is clearly less than their total spent grain output. Not too many cows will go hungry, but I would be interested to understand if it is a more or less effective use than feeding cows and chopping down trees for unsolicited advertising material.

The crowd who made the paper look cool too.

Magnetic Stir Plate

I've always used dried yeast. It's quick and easy and good enough if you are happy with the range of yeasts available. Recently I made a clone of Chimay's Grande Reserve - the blue one. For this, no dried yeast was going to cut it. So, I bought me a Wyeast Activator 1214 Belgian Ale Yeast, which I just smacked, pitched and stirred.

I want to do the funky liquid yeast thing again, but this time, I am going to do what all the cool kids are doing and make a starter.

I can think of no better way to make a yeast starter than with powerful magnets, so built a magnetic stir plate along the lines of this.

Mine's a bit different. Here's a pic of it with the lid off:

From Beer Equipments

Rather than faff about with trying to get the magnets centred on the fan by trial and error, I cut a piece of Veroboard (matrix PC board) to size and centred it on the fan. I then determined the optimum magnet spacing for my stirbar by letting the magnets stick to the stirbar wherever they wanted and transposing this to the Veroboard. I made a little wire jig to hold the magnets in place while glueing them.


It's a wee ripper! Here it is demonstrating how it can stir the last 1.5 litres of Melbourne's potable water supply:

From Beer Equipments