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.

Wow, it has been ages since the last posting about things brewing here. Apart from Easter being a very busy time for me, most of the energy in this household has been spent looking at houses. We don't own the house we are living in, so we have been doing lots of research with the ultimate aim of finding a suitable place to call home. If all goes well it will be a great place to grow hops, and if we get acreage then we might even be able to grow some grains ...

To the project at hand: I've not turned celiac, but have a friend who has recently discovered she has this unfortunate condition. After lamenting the inability to drink beer, I couldn't help but want to provide some relief. So tomorrow we will brew our first gluten-free beer. It will be very simple to start with - simply using malted sorghum with no adjuncts, in a style approaching a hefeweissen.

The HERMAN brewing machine is ready to make beer with the replacement laptop, but Revolution Education have just released their X2 series of chips which could make a significant difference to operational speed and capacity of the machine. I'm yet to think through the possibilities, but I like to push the envelope of what is possible.

We are also in dire need to replenish beer stocks. With the house distraction a couple of parties, and a keg of Belgian wheat scoffed in an hour at a recent farewell party, stocks are seriously low. It may not be the best time to brew the gluten-free recipe, but I'm already quite late on this promise. The good thing is that Autumn has well and truly arrived which makes for much easier fermentation control. It is a good thing I have lots of fermenting vessels.

December is my busiest month - which has been frustrating because I'd put the pieces together for a working bar for our New Year's Eve party, only to run into problem after problem.

In the last entry I mentioned the ongoing saga of freezers. I finally found a freezer that was good, but just as I'd committed to buy it on ebay I found an ice bank available for what seemed a reasonable price. Thanks to support from Ani, I couldn't help but buy it.

The ice bank arrived a week before Christmas, and it took a while to find the time to connect everything up. When it seemed that all was good, I discovered that one of the beer coils had a leak in it! The supplier was quick to respond, but I then had trouble with the freighting company and the replacement did not arrive until after New Year .

Anyway, the New Year's Eve party was a hit. The bar had beer flowing from one of the three fonts and all the planning and construction was worth it.

The ice bank itself is tiny. It stands about half a metre tall which means it is ideal for sitting under the counter of the next piece I'll be adding to the bar. The three fridges (fermenting - lagering - serving) have now walked out the door, along with all the freezers I've been collecting over the last month. This has helped clean up the garage a lot, which means the bar now has space in the corner.

When WindowsLive first went live it was a great opportunity to start blogging about HERMAN. I was frustrated, though, with some of the limitations - like only being able to upload small pictures which meant that schematic drawings were never legible.

I've just discovered a couple of big improvements. I can now upload a file and keep its original size intact (great for schematics) and I can now upload any kind of file for sharing.

The HERMAN blog site now includes a files section and to begin with I've added a couple of picaxeVSM files that I've been working on. If you don't have picaxeVSM you can still download the code files that match the circuits and have a look at the bitmap files of the circuit diagram.

The circuits uploaded are:

• sea of keys encoder - this is a resistive ladder and switch combination that allows you to put many switches onto one ADC picaxe input.
• 3x 7 segment LED display - this is a two part circuit. The sender picaxe reads a temperature probe and sends the data to a bus which can have potentially many receivers. If the ID code matches the receiving picaxe, the 3 digit LED display shows the resulting information. In this example it is a temperature reading to one decimal place, but it could be anything at all.

Also uploaded is the corel draw file and a bitmap of same of the current design for the new HERMAN control panel. This is the thing to replace the gaffer taped version . You can find that under the HERMAN 6 folder. The switches are pushbuttons with a circular LED built into them. The green rectangle with black border at the top of the drawing is a 40x2 LCD screen. There is a mock-up below of information that might be shown on the screen. The values in brackets are set points. The Hot Liquor Tun (HLT) has a set point of 80 degrees C and is showing it's actual temperature as 80.2 degrees. The 22% under the word MASH shows the amount of power being applied by the PID algorithm to the heat chamber. The timer is capable of a maximum timer of 99 minutes and 59 seconds.

If things go to plan, next week I'll post some more information on the design of HERMAN 6.

cheers, Arnie