Trang and My Lan were out of town over the weekend. While I’ve mostly forgotten what it’s like to have the place to myself, I did manage to keep busy working on an academic manuscript and, of course, the brewery. Between the broken cabinet fan, the conversion from thermoelectric chips to a tube mounted water heater, and the conical installation,
I finally pressure tested my fermentor!Several brewers have made conical fermenters using plastic tanks. These tanks have the benefit of a valve at the very bottom. This allows the removal of trub (dead yeast) without transferring to a whole new vessel. The disadvantage is setting up a conical fermenter takes a little more work. Using a simple ball valve on
My guru told me long ago that I’d find myself cutting traces on printed circuit boards to problem solve. I thought I must have been lucky to go two-for-two without any hardware problems, but I found that the FTDI problem with my valve board was electronic, not software. I neglected to include a 100 nF capacitor between the FTDI DTR