Building a Stir Plate / Beer Updates

After years of hearing and reading about the importance of pitching a sufficient amount of healthy yeast in order to allow for a clean fermentation, I've finally gotten around to building a stir plate in order to stir starters a few days prior to brewday.

Thanks to John Glidden, headbrewer and owner of Squam Brewery, I realized you can build a stirplate fairly easily from scratch. Using a few recycled computer parts and a few electronic pieces purchased from Radio Shack, I put my stirplate together over a few hours of tinkering.

I salvaged rare earth magnets from an old hard drive as well as a cooling fan from the same CPU. I mounted the fan into the bottom cover of the project box I purchased from Radio Shack using 2 1/2 inch 8/32 bolts, washers, and nuts. Since there is a nice finished aluminum cover for the bottom of the project box, I was able to mount the bolts into the plastic that will be covered by the finished aluminum piece.

I ordered the electronic hardware I needed from Radio Shack; a potentiometer to control the spin speed of the fan, a rocker switch to turn the stir plate on and off, and quick disconnects in order to avoid soldering. Using the wiring from the computer fan, it took very little time to wire it all together. Once I purchase a magnetic stir bar and a 2 L erlenmeyer flask, I'll mount the rare earth magnet on the fan in the correct place in order to ensure a consistent spin of the stir bar.

Using a starter to propagate yeast will  be a great way of producing a large amount of healthy, active yeast as opposed to starter packs or dry yeast packets of yeast that contain less than the optimal cell count of relatively inactive yeast. I'll be able to save a few bucks as well and buy yeast packets intended to be pitched and propagated in starters rather than packets that are pitched directly into wort.

The Belgian Dubbel is conditioning and will continue to condition close to cellar temperature at around 58 F for another week. I should get around to bottling it by next weekend, and I'll bottle in either 22 oz. bombers, or if I can find the correct corks and wire cages, I'll cork and cage the beer in 22 oz. Belgian beer bottles to withstand a high level of carbonation. 

The Alt built up another head of krausen after transferring into a corny keg and I'll let that ferment/condition for the next 5 weeks. 

The Kolsch has been going steady at 60 F for the past few days. I've never seen such a huge head of krausen on a fermenting beer before, so I hope it's a good sign of a clean, healthy fermentation. The Kolsch, like the Alt, should ferment for the next week and a half and then condition for at least a month in the keg.