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.
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.
Finally got around to prototyping the first of what will hopefully be a variety of useful objects created from waste materials, knitted together with mycelium, part of our larger efforts with biofabrication, bioprinting, and fermentation science. As our first mycelium project, we’re trying to make a 4″ planting pot that can be composted. We’ve got oyster mushroom jars rolling, ready to inoculate a variety of materials, including straw, rice hulls, coffee grounds (we worked out a deal with the coffee cart on campus to gather their grounds), waste cardboard, and hopefully various combinations of those things.
The sample mushroom packaging material arrived last week, so we’ve gotten to touch and feel and get a sense of a commercial version of the material.
I created a model of the pot using Tinkercad, with the goal of 3D printing it in PLA and then using that model to create the form using the Formech Compaq Mini. The vacuum former tends to hold onto objects, so I designed the inside and outside walls to slope slightly, the outsides toward the middle – / \ – and the insides away from the middle – \ /, which I thought might make the plastic mold more likely to let go of the model. It didn’t quite work out that way, but more on that later. I also included a hole in the center, partly for drainage, and partly because I thought it would aid in the vacuum forming process.
Hayes (student and Innovation Center staff) was kind enough to print the model to my specifications, which turned out to be wrong. More on that later. Anyhow, I asked for minimum infill, as the pot itself is 4″ at the base, and at least that tall, and I was interested in a quick print, rather than a durable one.
The model was ready this morning, so we set it up on the vacuum former.
It took a few rounds of heating, because we didn’t realize that the frame that holds the plastic down and creates the seal that allows the vacuum to form was out of alignment. Once we solved that problem, the process seemed to work really well, except…
The repeated heating, coupled with my desire for a fast print rather than a strong one, added up to a mistake. Specifically, the PLA model melted and warped – you can see the jankiness above – and as a consequence, the model stuck in the deformed plastic sheet, and I had to pull it apart layer by layer to get it release.
Even with the less than perfect walls, the form is more or less usable, but we’re going to print a much more solid version in PLA on the Ultimakers, and a more solid version using the Form2 and maybe the tough resin. We learned a lot from the process, which is the beauty of prototyping!
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.
The new semester has started, and things seem to be happening at a furious pace.
As part of professional development days preceding the semester, we invited faculty and staff for a makerspace update, and facilitated a prototyping workshop, solving problems having to do with babies and robots.
Our staff did some outreach to invite students to participate in our community.
Also on the community front, we participated (for the third time) in the third annual Georgetown School Family Tinker Night, an event coordinated by our sister lab at Georgetown School. We brought out a 3D bioprinter and a plotter, and the ever popular Nova (our space bunny mascot) fresnel lens family face distorters.
Meanwhile, back in the lab…
The jars we inoculated with mushroom spawn earlier in the month are thriving, and we’ll be scaling that project up soon.
The Science Fish have returned from the library, as we plan and implement whatever v2.0 of our aquaponics efforts will look like. Yes, those are the same three fish – Phoebe, Phinley, and Phreud – still with us after more than two years, and yes, the water cleared up quickly and it’s crystal clear now.
As part of the CCC Maker grant, we’re able to pay interns to do makerspace-related projects, and some of them are working on a large-scale, interactive periodic table of the elements, to be installed in our large lecture hall. Here Max Mahoney (Chemistry) and Nicole (makerspace facilitator extraordinaire) review some prototypes.
We’re looking forward to starting the semester with a Grand Opening next week, and to continuing to advance various efforts, including FermSci and biotinkering, some salon-type events in the planning stages, and a million other things I’m probably forgetting. Onward and upward.