It always seems like there are way too many projects to work on in the home brewery.

I'd love to have built that counter-pressure bottle filler and I have the parts to do it but ...

And I still haven't finished my LPG tank conversion into a stainless fermenter, nor have I sorted out the conical shell I have for another fermenter...

And I've now done enough on the bar to allow myself to be distracted by other things ...

There are many loose ends on the BrewTroller sculpture that need sorting out. The solenoid valves need a bit of work so that I can effectively fill both mash tun and hot liquor tun and also provide a system drain point for storage, so liquor does not stay in pipes and stale.

I continue to have problems with the BrewTroller dropping out with back emf spikes from the solenoid switching. I'd really like to sort this out so that I can concentrate on brewing rather than getting back to a restore point on the BT. There are at least two things to do here - put some filter capacitors on the rotary encoder switch, and put in some filtering on the one-wire bus.

Then the pressure sensors need some attention. I suspect I am getting some pressure leaking but I also need to add some filter capacitors to the sensor. I'd then like to do some solid testing of temperatures and levels so that we can improve the level readings for the BT community.

But right now I'm not even doing work on the sculpture but rather I'm engrossed in coding for BTremote. Now that the program can load data from a ProMash file, it is close to getting recipe data uploaded to the BT without the need to use the rotary encoder for data entry. Being able to do this will be satisfying personally but will also probably please a lot of other BT users. And then after that it will be adding support for BeerSmith, and then enabling more robust control of the BT via BTremote and eventually the web.

The source code and latest build versions of BTremote are available at Google code and the wiki and forum at brewtroller.com are also a great source of information.

So many things and so little time ...

I've not had much time of late to work on brewing things but the last week I've begun to develop phase II of the bar and cellar.

Phase I was an insulated box with my three tap flooded font mounted on it. It was primarily a fermenting chamber although during the summer it was needed to house the serving kegs. The cooling unit was external as was the gas bottle. The gas manifold for serving kegs was mounted inside the chamber which was less than ideal. Also the condensation from the flooded font meant the inside was always quite damp.

The fermenting chamber maintains temperatures well. In effect it is a fancy 'son of fermentation' chiller. There is no need to change out ice bottles as the cooling comes from the ice bank. I pump ice water through a PC cooling radiator which then blows cold air into the chamber.

I've been wanting to have two parts to this arrangement for a while. The opportunity to make a bar and have the existing chamber solely for fermenting and conditioning came when Leah's brew sculpture was given back to me. A while ago she decided she couldn't brew on her own, so after some negotiating I ended up with a solid base for a new bar.

One of the main condensation problems with the old arrangement came from the flooded font. With the new bar the font is directly above the ice bank which means the condensation ends back into the ice water reservoir. I've now got this part on the bar running well. The next issue I needed to resolve was getting the cellar temperature right for serving English Ales through my beer engine. I didn't want to use the fermentation chamber for this because I would again have issues about gas lines and manifold access. Additionally, last summer I needed to keep the kegs in a temperature controlled environment when the summer was at its hottest. The mercury hit 48C here in January! The new bar allows enough room for serving kegs and gas bottle and creating a mini cool room around the kegs. This means I can run it like an English pub cellar and also keep the beer engine cool at the same time.

The beer engine is designed to sit on the serving side of a bar and so it needed a bit of dressing up to look nice. It took a bit of cutting and adjusting but I now have the engine mounted in a box like structure that I'm happy with. A lift up flap on the bar top gives access to the gas manifold, keg tops and gas bottle. Front doors will allow access to the ice bank on one side and kegs and gas bottle on the other.

Beyond that I will have some shelving to hold beer glasses and trophies. The glass storage might have to stay on the fermentation chamber.

It has been a nice break from building the BrewTroller machine but soon I will get back into that project. It will be nice to test the bar and fermenation chamber during the coming summer. It is already warming up here in Melbourne so lager season is nearly over.