Better Bottle Hack

After listening to many, many episodes of Can You Brew It on the brewing network, the standard volumes they use are a part of my process.

For a 60 minute boil:

• Mash and sparge to 7.2 gallons
• Boil down to 6 gallons
• Transfer 5.5 to the fermentor
• Finish with 5 gallons of clear, drinkable beer

Since none of my boil kettles have a sight glass on them, I decided to do something I'd been thinking about for a while. I measured out a half gallon of water, put the better bottle on a flat, level surface and started marking. After the first half gallon, I did full gallons up to 5.5. (It's actually a bit higher up in the Better Bottle than I thought it would've been. Regardless, after the massive blow-out I had earlier this year in a Russian Imperial Stout, I've started adding fermcap to my fermentation now as well.)

Here's the end result. It made it a whole lot easier to top a partial boil extract batch up to the correct volume at the end of the process and should make it a hell of a lot easier to transfer out exactly five gallons of finished beer.

I could've gone with the fancy vinyl stickers I've seen elsewhere, but a sharpie seems to have worked just fine this time around.

Brewing and Engineering

My post from yesterday referenced the strong correlation I've noticed over time, but here are some more concrete examples of a very strong correlation between brewing and engineering. (I picked up Brewing Better Beer last week and started reading it in earnest today. Turns out Gordon Strong is a software engineer by training as well.)

Jamil Zainisheff (Software Engineering) : Author, Ninkasi Award Winner, Brewery Owner, Radio Host
John Palmer (Metallurgical Engineering) : Author, Radio Host
Gordon Strong (Software Engineering) : Author, 3x Ninkasi Award Winner, BJCP Grand Master Judge, BJCP President
Matt Brynildson (Chemistry) : The most award-winning brewmaster in America

I'm a software engineer by training, as is Jeremy and the other guy I brew with on a semi-regular basis. Anyone else out there happen to notice this or have other good examples from the commercial world?

*As an engineer I'm clearly obligated to acknowledge that this is far too small of a sample to be statistically significant. However, these are all guys who are at the absolute top of their game and all happen to have a math / science background.