Spent the day with CJ (Lead Makerspace Facilitator) and Max (Chemistry), remodeling the Spider Shed (site of our picobrewery) and assembling our new 15 gallon Spike+ System. Lots and lots of tri-clamps.
We also finished up one of two new fermenters.
So much gleaming stainless steel.
The electricians should be by this week to finish up the power, and we hope to get our first brew day over the break!
Jason Pittman (Geosciences), Max Mahoney (Chemistry) and I took the new quadcopter out to Lava Cap Winery to do a test flight.
Dronedeploy (the system we use for flight planning and analysis) offers some interesting post-flight map creation and analysis. Here are the Plant Health and Elevation views.
We were stoked to see the Model view for the first time.
We’re still figuring out what it all means, but we’re excited about the preliminary results!
Following our first successful public pour, we have committed to a quarterly brew, to be served at a series of “Art of Wine” events for Harris Center for the Arts members. The first of these will be in late August, so we gathered in the Innovation Center to brew another batch of our Kveik Pale Ale, and a Dry Irish Stout. As it happens, our hops were ready for harvest, so we started the day up in the bines, gathering flowers from our Cascade and Willamette plants.
We weighed and measured these, reserving some to be added “wet” to the pale ale, and the rest we put in the dehydrator to use in some future brew. 564 grams in total.
The water built – we start with DI water, and Max adds salts and things to create the ideal water for the particular recipe – we set about brewing. Brewing beer is a lot of waiting around, and a lot of cleaning and sanitizing. We got a chance to try out the new keg washer, which works a treat.
We were joined this brew day by Nicole and John, both students and Innovation Center staff.
Each of them had sparging duties.
Here are the hops in their natural habitat.
Of all the gear we’ve been able to acquire, the counterflow chiller – the black coil below, just left of the Robobrew, which is used to bring the hot wort down to pitching temperature – has done the most to improve efficiency, and to reduce the amount of water required as part of the brewing process. An absolutely essential tool!
With the beer into the fermenters, and safely housed in the Spider Shed, and with all the brewing gear clean and stowed, Max and Nicole took samples of our prior batch of lavender kombucha and beer…
after which Max entombed them in glass.
We’ll do this for each of our brews, and put them in a yet-to-be-designed UV-resistant display case.
We reached a big milestone in our FermSci efforts this evening, pouring for the public for the first time a Kveik Pale Ale and a Lavender Kombucha that we brewed in the Innovation Center and the Spider Shed (the brew house we’re developing on campus).
The event was reported to have something close to 400 attendees, and while we didn’t pour for all of them – it was mostly a wine sort of thing – those who were able to sample our wares seemed genuinely pleased, and we were able to tell the story about how Fermentation Science has the potential to connect a lot of students from a lot of different disciplines.
We have plans to brew and pour quarterly for events at the Harris Center in the coming year, and will be scaling up our brewing operation as soon as the plumbing and other improvements to the Spider Shed are completed. Stay tuned!
Another FermSci lab, this time about off flavors.
As before, students started out in the lab…
…and ended up in the Innovation Center for triangle test tasting, trying to identify off flavors…
…in spiked brews.
Student interns just wrapped up three days in the Innovation Center working in teams to solve a business challenge as part of the CCC Maker Makermatic program. Created by our friends at Sacramento City College Makerspace to meet the internship goals of the CCC Maker statewide grant, and coordinated locally by Seeta (FLC’s Innovation Center Internship Opportunities Specialist), the program was an opportunity for students to propose solutions for business challenges in partnership with Solid Ground Brewing, a local brewery and restaurant. Solid Ground also makes wine, and winemaker Scott came out to the Innovation Center to provide context and listen to student presentations.
The night before final student presentations, Max (Chemistry), CJ (student and Makerspace Facilitator) and I worked to create a gift to present to Solid Ground at the close of the event. We decided to design a beer flight sampler display, with custom-etched flight glasses. CJ fired up Safety Scissors (the name for the smaller of our two laser cutters), and we worked out a design that combined Solid Ground’s logo and Nova, our own space bunny logo/mascot/spirit guide.
Here Max is evaluating different etching parameters. We didn’t have any beer in the space, so we filled the test glass with a combination of soy sauce and water to provide a little contrast while we worked out the details.
After a few rounds of prototyping – size, placement of thumb and finger indexes, type – we cut, glued, and assembled the pieces.
The glue dry, we sanded away the laser burn marks, friendlied up the sharp edges of the plywood, and sealed everything with cutting board conditioner.
Each glass has a number etched into Nova’s (our space bunny mascot’s) faceplate, corresponding to a numbered position on the flight corral.
At the close of the Makermatic event, we took Scott over to the Spider Shed (our nascent brewhouse) to talk about ways we might work together with Solid Ground, and to sample some kombucha Max had kegged from one of our brew days.
Max has been perfecting some procedures using Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy (AAS) equipment in the Chem lab, and we talked with Scott about the potential to have students work with local breweries to provide water quality analysis as part of our larger FermSci efforts.
We like traditions in the Innovation Center (things like Builders’ Rights – see ROSTOCK MAX V3 BUILD DAY – PART TWO), and Scott became the first brewer/winemaker to sign our (nascent) keezer!
Max Mahoney (Chemistry) and I spent a long day brewing a couple of batches of beer recently. Now familiar with the process and how to execute it in the makerspace, we were able to add lots of variables and processes and gear, building on our experience with Brew Day v2.0, and our original, somewhat less-than-successful Brew Day v1.0.
One of the biggest changes to the process this time around had to do with the water. Specifically, we started with deinonized (DI) water, and Max added various salts to create ideal water, which as I understand it is a big factor in the overall success of the end product.
We brewed two batches of beer, and one of kombucha, which we’re fermenting in one of the smaller fermenters.
Testing the pH using one of the new meters.
Improvised wort chiller, until our conterflow setup arrives.
Into the fermenters.
We documented things more completely throughout the process this time. Timing notes are especially important, as we’re still working out how these brew days work as labs and activities. How many simultaneous batches make sense, and how many people can effectively work in the space at the same time.
Meanwhile, batch the second looks and tastes pretty good, with some distinct and pleasant apricot notes.
We’ve got both fermenters in The Spider Shed (a former chemical storage building that we’re repurposing as a nanobrewery) hooked up to a heating and cooling system, and they’re happily bubbling away.
We’re still learning so much, and the process is becoming even more interesting. Max is especially stoked about tweaking the water chemistry, and has lots of ideas about wrapping class activities and labs around that process. A couple more days, and we’ll cold crash these batches and keg ’em up!
With some new fermentation science gear on the ground, Max Mahoney (Professor of Chemistry and makerspace champion) and I decided to spend a day brewing a pale ale, following our first brew day some months ago. Brewing is mostly a lot of cleaning…
…and sterilizing…
…and waiting. Waiting for things to heat up. Waiting for things to cool down.
Sparging is my special gift.
After the sparge, we checked the brix with our new brix checker.
We weren’t even close, but realized that we were sampling from the top, which was largely water from the sparge. After the boil, we took another reading, and we were right where we needed to be.
Here we’re transferring from the Robobrew to the new Ss Chronical fermenter.
The Chronical has a heating element, and we’ve got a chiller on the way. Here Max is setting the fermentation temperature.
The brew complete, we set up a webcam to stream the bubbling so that we could monitor it over the long weekend. So far, so good! It’ll be maybe two weeks until we can sample the outcome.
Sometimes it seems like there are too many things happening in the Innovation Center to keep track of. This week felt like that. Here’s a recap:
Students in our new ECE course Making for Educators started working on their cardboard pinball machines, which they’ll finish up in our next class session.
Max (student and amateur mycologist) harvested and cooked some pink oyster mushrooms, and pasteurized and inoculated some oat straw, packing it into our first two 4″ pot prototypes, which we made using a 3D printer and our vacuum former.
Some snazzy new stainless steel fermenting vessels arrived, and Max Mahoney (Chemistry professor and makerspace champion) assembled one in preparation for another brewing day as part of our fermentation science efforts.
Our staff hosted a Palentine’s Day Crafternoon event.
Finally, visitors from both College of Alameda FabLab and Lichen K-8 came out to tour our space and talk about making…
A busy week, and the semester is just getting rolling.
Toward the end of last semester – after lengthy and vigorous and unflinching hacking of red tape – we offered the first workshop – Beer Science: Measuring Beer Bitterness – as part of our ongoing Fermentation Science efforts. We started the day in the Chemistry lab, where Max Mahoney (Chemistry professor and makerspace faculty champion) described the chemistry of beer, and led students through a procedure for measuring beer bitterness.
Here’s how Max describes it:
The goal of this workshop was to expose students to a quantitative and qualitative analysis of beer bitterness. The chemistry of hops and bittering compounds was presented along with a discussion of the chemical procedures involved in this analysis. The following procedure was used to quantitatively analyze beer bitterness. Three beers were selected containing different levels of the hop-derived bittering agents. Students sonicated the beer to expel carbon dioxide, performed a liquid-liquid extraction of the hop acids with iso-octane, and measured the UV and visible absorption spectrum for their sample. We used the visible absorption spectra to help classify the style of beer. The UV absorption was used to quantify the concentration of hop acids and thus the bitterness of the beer (measured in IBUs).
Chemistry students of all levels were able to learn advanced analytical methods used in the beverage industry to analyze beer bitterness. General and organic chemistry lab techniques were utilized including UV-Vis spectroscopy, usage of micropipettes, and liquid-liquid extraction of organic compounds.
The Chemistry lab portion completed, we went over to the Innovation Center for some blind taste tests. Students sampled various beers, and then used PollEverywhere to report the perceived bitterness of the sample, the results of which we compared to the lab-derived values.
The event was a terrific success, and students were engaged and enthusiastic. We’ve got additional interdisciplinary FermSci workshops and projects planned for this semester, including more beer chemistry, sauerkraut making, curriculum development, and a partnership with a local employer for integrating IOT technology into kombucha fermentation.