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It’s time again for yet another review. This time it’s on iBrew’s Fermenter Cooling Box! No idea what it is? Well, I am pretty sure by now that you guys know that I am really into beer brewing, right? However, I am living in Singapore and in Singapore, the weather is warm whole year round! I kid you not. From January to December, we get sunny days throughout. It’s just amazing to live near the equator isn’t it? The problem with people like me brewing beer in Singapore is of course the weather. Brewing beer requires fermentation of the sugars in the wort (which is actually malted barley or/and sugars as well as hops) by the brewing yeast into alcohol and for the yeast to do it’s work well, it has to be a certain temperature. If it is too high, then it may create fusal alcohol which can taste pretty bad. Hence, we brewers need to maintain a good cool temperature to make good beer. For those who would like to brew lagers, then the temperature needed for proper fermentation are even lower.

So unless you have a room purposely built for keeping a cold enough temperature (like an air-conditioned room running continously) or you have a fridge, then you will be in trouble when you are doing brewing. Well have no fear, potential brewers, iBrew comes to your rescue. They have created a Cool Box for your fermenter! Hmmm…..well, actually it’s just a foam box with hole in the center for your fermenter. And it’s build for the Cooper’s Fermenter and may not work for other fermenters if they are of a different size and shape. However, it does it’s job very well. I have achieved temperatures of 13 °C before with minimum effort.

The Fermenter Cooling Box built by iBrew! Simple and effective. The hole in the middle fits exactly the fermenter. Of course, you must align the fermenter in the correct position first before it can fit. It may take a few tries but in the end, I am sure it will go in. There is also a temperature sensor, located at the bottom of the cooling box where you place you fermenter. Not very sure how accurate is it since the bottom of the Cooper’s fermenter is pretty thick, but it should be pretty close.

The temperature display conveniently placed outside of the fermenter so you don’t have to open the fermenter to check the temperature. Smart guys these iBrew people. If only I was smart enough not to drop water on the digital display and let it rust. All you need to do is to press one of the buttons on the display and it will tell you two things, the temperature and the time. The two other buttons you use to play Tertis.

See the temperature displayed? If you have this temperature, it is still too high. Depending on the type of yeast you are using, it should be around 16-21°C for ales and 8-15°C for lagers. You can’t get those kind of temperatures naturally in Singapore unless you somehow angered your wife/girlfriend/mummy. They are known to be frosty ice queens.

You can see the temperature sensor which is covered up by tape. I think a better alternative is to change the insulation tape to a metallic one, which would conduct “heat” better.

Yes, it comes with 4 Coleman Brite Ice packs, large ones. No, it’s not Linux, the Open Source Operating System. Anyway, these are good solid stuff these ice packs I must say. But the problem with them is that they are big and if your freezer isn’t large enough (like mine), then it could be a major problem. Not all of us have large freezers, thus it is going to be difficult to put 8 of these ice packs into your freezer! I prefer my small juice bottles with water. Smaller and more flexible to store. Remember, you need the bottles to be thicker than the soda pop bottles, so it’s better to look for juice bottles. Thin bottles lost their coldness too fast for them to be effective.

Anyways, for you to figure out how many ice packs you need, you will need to experiment. For me, to get a temperature of 22°C, I have 2 Coleman Ice Packs which I change every morning and evening when I get back from work.

And note that these stuff are about two months old and I am have been them often to do my brewing, so they could be slightly worn from my rough use. They will look nice and sparkly when you purchase them.

Yes, it comes with a cover without a hole as well. You can keep your bottles in the cooling box after you are done with them or when you are conditioning them. From the shots above, the hole looks a bit like a shit hole doesn’t it?

That’s my fermenter (nope, not infection but it’s the Malto-Dextrin that is causing the weird looking things floating on my beer) and two ice packs. If you need a colder temperature, then add more ice packs! You can see the wire (covered by insulation tape) from the temperature sensor to the digital display outside the fermenter.

If you are not doing any fermenting, then use it to store beer like what you see in the above photo. Or you can always sleep inside the box if your wife is pissed with you for spending more time brewing beer than with her. More comfortable than the floor I guess. And you can always hug a Frozen Coleman Ice Pack to ward off Singapore’s oppressive heat.

Seriously, if you are brewing in Singapore, this piece of equipment you should not be missing. It’s just as important as getting a proper fermenter. I find it simple, effective and it just does what it is supposed to do. No maintenance required, no difficult instructions to follow, no cleanup or sanitizing needed and no expensive electricity bill to worry about. It’s just a foam box anyway. Best of all, it helps you maintain a fairly constant temperature which is another important aspect for good tasting beer. The insulation foam box protects your wort from rapid changes in ambient temperatures during the day and the night. Of course, you do need to change the ice packs every 24 hours, but that takes all but 5 minutes of your time per day. I think this is a very worthwhile investment.

And if you would like to build the foam box yourself, you should. Just get a foam box which can fit your fermenter and you are done. Cut a hole in the cover for your fermenter cover and go purchase some ice packs. But if you don’t want to spend hours building this or you just ain’t good with tools, then iBrew’s cooling box is what you need without the hassle or the cutters. It’s not that expensive either. I bought it for S$80 (with the 4 Coleman Ice Packs) with free delivery by iBrew!

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Wuhahaha!!!! I can already smell some very aromatic smells coming from my study. Yes, that’s the place where I keep my fermenter (for my beer brew) and it’s airlock has been bubbling for a few days now. The smell has improved a lot since it started. In the beginning, I could smell the harshness of the alcohol, probably because I had pitched the yeast at a slightly higher temperature than what I should but after the 2nd day, it was much better. I had lowered the temperature to about 20°C and everything looks good. However, the harshness at the beginning may not be caused by the slightly higher termperatures of my wort, but it could be due to not enough aeration before I pitch the yeast. Not too sure which, but both needs to be corrected in my future brews. I am thinking of getting a air pump and air stone from my local pet fish shop conveniently located right below my block.

It’s been 5 days now and although the airlock is still bubbling, I am sure it’s about done. But I won’t be bottling it anytime soon. I think I will let it ferment 2 or 3 weeks more in the fermenter. I had read that it’s going to taste much better if I condition them longer, since the yeast in the fermenter will start to create a more complex flavour after it has eaten all the simple sugars. Bottling the beer too soon and I will lose a lot of yeast, thus it will take longer to condition my beer. For my previous batch, I had left the beer in the fermenter for 2 weeks. This time, I will try 4 weeks and see how much the flavours have improved. However, if the beer is left too long with the yeast, the yeast may start to die and this will definitely created off-flavours in my beer. The recommended time to condition in the primary fermenter at most is 4 weeks, from what I have read.

I know, it’s very difficult to wait. But hey, my patience will be rewarded soon! Good beers usually requires a time for it to mellow and 2 more weeks won’t kill. Well, it won’t kill me outright, but it is surely killing me slowly.

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Hello guys, this is my first attempt to brew without any beer kits and it’s going to be a simple one. Basically what this means is that I won’t be using some beer kit like Cooper’s Australian Pale Ale (which I used last time) Beer Concentrate but I will be using malt extracts and hops and boil them. Those Beer Kits usually come pre-boiled with hops and then it is packed for your convenience. You don’t need to do anything but to add some boiling water and perhaps some brewing sugars. The receipe is as below.

Skinny Man’s Beer -

1. 2kg of light Dry Malt Extract
2. 500g of Rice Maltose
3. 1 tablespoon of Irish Moss
4. 50g of Malto-Dextrin
5. 1/2oz of Super Alpha Bittering Hops for 30mins
6. 1 oz of Cascade Hops for 15 mins
7. 1/2oz of Cascade Hops for 5 mins
8. Some bread yeast in boil as yeast nutrients
9. Nottingham Yeast (reused from my previous batch)

As I said, this extract brewing will be a simple one because this is my first time brewing without kits. It’s better not to get ahead of myself. However, I think it is a good experience for me. So what I will be using is Light Dry Malt Extract (2kg), Rice Maltose (500g), Malto-dextrin (50g), Super Alpha Bittering Hops, Cascade Hops for both aroma and flavourings and Nottingham yeast (reused from my previous batch). I gathered a few grams of yeast cake from the bottom of my fermenter in my previous batch and stored it in a sanitized jar. After letting it rest in the fridge for a while, the yeast settled at the bottom and the beer on top. So I just carefully pour out as much beer as possible, keeping only the yeast cake. It’s a good way to save some money considering that each Nottingham Yeast pack cost about S$6.50. However, note that you should only reuse the yeast at most 3 times due to mutation of the yeast.

Here are the stuff. Light Dry Malt Extract (the pale coloured stuff), Hops, Malto-Dextrin(the white stuff) and Irish Moss. Malto-Dextrin adds more body to the beer, I don’t want a very watery beer and it also helps to create a good head. You can see that I have used Malto-Dextrin in my last brew as well. Really does help create the head but it makes the beer slightly cloudy because of the little bubbles. The bottle at the bottom is actually Irish Moss, it is to help clear the proteins in the beer wort. We don’t want hazy beer now do we?

Ha, that’s the rice maltose I bought from Sheng Siong. Some China brand stuff. About S$1.50 for the 500g pack. Pretty cheap considering that the Light Malt Extract costs like S$16 for 1 kg. And this stuff is very sticky and hard to get out of the plastic can. I had to boil the plastic can in order for the rice maltose to soften before I can use it. This is to add some more alcoholic stuff into our beer. Hope that this will turn out okay for my beer. Keep all my fingers cross!

My hops are in hop bags! A lot of brewers don’t use hop bags because they are just plain traditional. Hop bags make taking out hops so much easier. You don’t need to strain your wort, just remove the hop bags once you are done with them. Looks a lot like tea bags don’t they? Well, they are tea bags which I have stolen from Coffee Bean. And I tied a string across the top of the bags so that the hops won’t fall out. Smart right?

This is a handy little stuff. It’s a timer for me to time when I add the hops into the wort. A must have for any brewer. You don’t want to over-boil your hops. Yes, it is egg shaped. All you have to do is to turn the top of the egg to the timing you want and let it rip. Once it hits the time, it will automatically crack open.

This is the result after I added water to the Light Dry Malt Extract. Perhaps it was a mistake to throw the Malt Extract in first before adding water. It sort of foam up and it became very very difficult to dissolve. A better method of adding dry malt extract is to actually warm up the water a little first before adding the Dry Malt Extract. This way, you can slowly dissolve the Malt Extract before it boils. Remember, never add Dry Malt Extract into on-flame boiling water, it will clamp up real fast and you will have a lot of problems dissolving it. This is the reason why a lot of brewers don’t use Dry Malt Extract. However, Liquid Malt Extract is very prone to environment conditions, so if they are not kept in the proper condition, they tend to “spoil” real fast. I decided not to take the risk and went with the dried stuff.

After spending 10 minutes getting rid of the foam, I managed to make it look presentable enough for a photoshoot. Here it is, in all it’s glory.

Hoooray, the wort is boiling! You can see the hop bag I have added in. This is for the bittering of the beer. I will add 2 more hop bags into my wort. One is for the flavouring which I have added 15 minutes before the end of the boil, while the last is for aroma, which I have added 5 minutes before the end of the boil. Actually, looking at the photos of the wort, it doesn’t look at appealing doesn’t it? However, I can assure you that when it turns to beer, it is very appealing! And I have added my Irish Moss into the wort at the same time I added the flavouring hops.

Anyway, this is the end of my pictorial for this beer brewing session.The rest should be pretty standard. After finishing boiling, I added my malto-dextrin into the wort and then crash cooled the wort. After cooling the wort, I poured the wort into the fermenter. After which I add cool water to the fermenter to make sure the temperature is about 22°C and start to aerate the wort. After doing that for 15 minutes, I pitched the yeast into the wort, closed the cover and added my airlock. That’s it. Again, as you can see it is not a very difficult process, the main thing is being clean and ensuring at everything is sanitized properly. If you do that, I am sure that all your brews should be fine.

I am not sure what I am going to do for my next brew. I think I will go back to kits and see what other types of beer these kits offer. And I would really like to taste what this current batch will be. If it turns out great, maybe I will stick to extract brewing for a while and perhaps even start improving on the current recipe.

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Ahhh…it’s been two weeks since I have starting my latest beer brew and it’s now time to bottle. It’s been a busy 2 weeks for me as I have to change the ice packs in my cooler box to maintain a relatively low temperature for my pale ale. But anyway, that’s over and now I am very eager to bottle my beer. I guess when you are doing the bottling, the hard part of the entire brew is over. After this, all you have to do is to wait….again. But this is the final stage. After this, you can drink your beer and get drunk like mad. Remember drinking and driving is freaking dumb. Drink at home and then sleep it off. Perhaps this is one of the best reasons why home brewing is good. Idiots won’t be drinking at pubs and driving home after that.

Bottling in beer talk is all about adding sugars into the bottle and creating carbonation while adding very little alcohol or taste. Everyone loves a gassy beer and most people will not appreciate a flat beer.

First I do a gravity reading. Pretty simple, just fill up the long test jar with the beer and then gently lower the tube thing into the jar. Spin the tube thing a few rounds first and then get a reading. It tells you how much alcohol is in your beer. They have this formula where you measure both the starting gravity and final gravity and you can calculate the amount of alcohol in your beer. For me, I just take this opportunity to have a drink. Realized that this is a pretty dry beer, which is fine by me. Not sure about the rest of my friends though. Not everyone appreciates a dry beer. They need some sweetness. But I think this will be a perfect thirst quencher on a warm day, which by the way happens most of the time in sunny Singapore.

Don’t worry about the cloudiness of the beer. That’s just malto-dextrin. It’s suppose to create more head in the beer. Hopefully, it will start to clear up a bit more when they are in the bottles.

I had arranged the bottles this way so that it looks neat when I do the washing. Everything I do need to be extremely neat or I will freak out. It’s some sort of compulsive behaviour that I was diagnose with. Na, I am just kidding. I am arranging them so that they can all fit into my small washing area and I can wash them in one shot with dishwashing detergent and a hose. Too lazy to wash them individually. Washing is not sanitizing. Washing get rids of all dirt, particles and whatever from the bottles. Sanitizing kills all the germs and bacteria. Oh by the way, these are all amber PET bottles which were provided with the Cooper’s Microbrew Kit.

PET bottles are good enough if you don’t plan to age your beers for very long. They can last up to 1 year in those bottles. If you plan to keep them longer, then you will need to use glass bottles.

A little spray bottler with some sanitizing solution in it. Don’t know why I went and bought a yellow spray bottler though. Yellow is not even my favourite colour. Pink is. Previously, I would soak the bottles in a tub of sanitizing solution. However, I realize that it is a big waste of sanitizing solution since I need a big big tub to hold a number of bottles. Remember, these are 740ml bottles and unless you are planning to sanitize one by one (which would take a long time – we have 30 bottles!), you really need a big tub. With the spray bottler, I just arrange the bottles and spray them thoroughly, ensuring that it reaches every internal surface of the bottle. After letting them soak in sanitizing solution for about 5-10 minutes, rinse them off with warm water!

That’s me sanitizing the opening of the 740ml PET bottles. Make sure every surface is sanitized. Our home brewing process is about to finish, so there is no point in rushing the work now. If you do, you could end up like me, wasting a perfectly good batch of beer because I forgot to do something important. But you must forgive elder folks like me.

Of course, let’s not forget the bottle caps. They must be washed and sanitized as well. Check out the oxygen working (we see them as bubbles) to sanitize the bottles so that there is no bacteria or germs which may spolit my beer. What I would do is to cover the jar and shake the living daylights out of the caps. Then let it rest. Again, wash off the sanitizing solution before use, okay?

All ready for bottling. There is the “Little Bottler” and the carbonation drops which will be our priming sugar. Using carbonation drops makes life so easy, just 2 drops per 740ml bottle. No need to measure the sugar (you know, how many tablespoon), no need to make sure that there is no sugar stuck at the screw top and no need to worry about exploding beer bottles.

Cough drops if you have a bad throat. Or you can use them for priming. Yes, to get the fizzy feeling in your beer.

That’s me adding the carbonation drops into the bottles before bottling. The carbonation drops really do look like cough drops. Just drop 2 per 740ml bottle. You can see that I use gloves because I am a clean person.

I have attached the little bottler to the spigot of my fermenter. All I need to do is to turn on the spigot but there will be nothing flowing. The little bottler works by allowing liquid to flow if the tip is depressed. So, you need to push the bottle up to the little bottler’s tip in order for your beer to flow into the bottles. “Those are not the CDs you are looking for.”

There you go. Do you see the urine coloured liquid in the little bottler? Well, they are going into my bottles and in a few weeks time, I will be drinking them with my friends! That’s what life is all about isn’t it? Drinking yeast urine and sharing them with your friends.

Ahhh…..the finest homebrew beer! And Scott’s Cod Liver oil capsules, for that fishy aftertaste which everyone likes. The best combination. And if you look carefully at the picture, you can see my legs and my bed. You are lucky, once I took a photo naked and it spread like wildfire on the Internet.

View and weep. That’s 28 bottles of beer and in a few weeks time, they will be carbonated and will have mellowed a little, hopefully it will be delicious enough for my friends to ask for more. It will inspire me to make more beer and to improve my beers. All in all, it took about 1-2 hours to bottle all the beer. However, the bulk of the time is stuck with cleaning and sanitizing the equipment as well as washing the fermenter.

I will post pictures of me opening and pouring out the beer. Perhaps that will inspire more people to go and brew their own beer. Truth be told, it’s not difficult. Butof course, if you want it to be difficult, you can. However, relax, don’t worry, have a home brew.

My next brew will be an all-extract brew! Take a look here.

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