Home brewing in Japan

Hoppy is fine. Just don't gorilla the hand capper and you should be okay.

Not sure what size of batch you're doing, but with 20 liter batches, 20k will give you 4-5 batches. I wouldn't call that huge. I call it cheap!

Hoppy is fine. Just don't gorilla the hand capper and you should be okay.

Not sure what size of batch you're doing, but with 20 liter batches, 20k will give you 4-5 batches. I wouldn't call that huge. I call it cheap!

Yeah - I'm going cheap on the fermenters by using those 8L umeshu glass jars. I figure I can get started by doing small batches so if I mess up I don't ruin a full 20 litres and I can try my hand at a few different styles in a shorter space of time. That coupled with the need for pre-crushed grain, I don't think I can use enough without it spoiling with summer just around the corner.

Thanks a lot for the info, I really appreciate it.

I have one caution about the hoppy bottles. From the ones I have seen, they get banged up a lot more in their return system, and the built up stresses in the glass may weaken them below a safe point.

The 8L umeshu jars seem to work pretty good. I put a little foil over the pouring spout (of the soft plastic "middle" lid) and then screw the hard plastic lid on very lightly. I don't think the hard plastic lid actually has an airtight seal though as my umeshu always seems to leak when I move it. I think you could make a more trustworthy airlock by drilling a hole in the soft plastic lid and using a blowoff tube.
Good Luck!

I just clipped the little cross piece in the premade hole of the soft lid part and a stopper fit in nicely.

I think that center white plastic part acts as a gasket between the glass and the harder red lid...?

I did the exact same thing, but where the soft plastic lid meets the glass doesnt seal very well. I was considering buying and sanitizing a wide rubber band and trying to position over where the seal isnt airtight. I use the umeshu jars as more of a secondary as my batches are just under 8L.

Im about to move house, but when I do, I intend to get a few of those lined up and attach a blow off tube.

If anyone is in Tokyo, and has been brewing through the summer before, do you have any tips for a fledgling like myself?

I just bought a umeshu jar from viva home over the weekend, it seams to have an airtight seal. The first one I bought is from Doit.

Headed down to Bashamichi Taproom last Sunday afternoon with 5 of my colleagues to have a beer. They have Shimaguni Stout (a smoked beer) as a regular but they currently have another smoked beer for the season so if you're into smoked beers then I'd recommend it. I haven't had it yet, I had the Shimaguni Stout which was a little weak in smokiness... the guy at the taproom says the seasonal one is more smoky.

I (we) then went down to Craft Beer Bar. The Shiga Kougen double IPA is really good! Nice fruity (nectarines/peach) aroma... a must have

That Shiga Kougen beer sounds interesting, I'd like to give it a try some time. I was actually at the Taproom the other day as well and had The Great American Stout, which is a pretty heavily hopped stout. Definitely interesting to try such a departure from the typical style.

surume said:

The Shiga Kougen double IPA is really good! Nice fruity (nectarines/peach) aroma... a must have

Click to expand...

Have a couple of batches of APA/Am IPA that I fermented with US-05 down at the lower end of the temp. range, probably a bit too low like 12 to 13 Celsius, and they both exhibit that peachy/nectarine aroma, and flavour, but it definitely goes OK with the Nugget bittering and Cascade flavour,/aroma/dry hop additions.

Heading to Shinjuku later and was wondering
if there are any Craft brew watering holes
in that area.
R/ 12oz

http://wateringhole.jp/?page_id=2

cheers

Any of you happen to be near Tsu (Mie)? I'm staying near Tsu Station until the 24th.

Hey guys, has anyone had any experience ordering either the temp controller or refractometer off Ebay from Hong Kong yet? I want to set up an account and get that done soon but have never used Ebay. How is shipping from HK? Cheap? Slow?

I will be looking for a used refrigerator to set up my temp control after I get the STC-1000, any tips on buying appliances in Japan?

Cheers!
B

OppamaBrendan said:

Hey guys, has anyone had any experience ordering either the temp controller or refractometer off Ebay from Hong Kong yet? I want to set up an account and get that done soon but have never used Ebay. How is shipping from HK? Cheap? Slow?

I will be looking for a used refrigerator to set up my temp control after I get the STC-1000, any tips on buying appliances in Japan?

Cheers!
B

Click to expand...

Im definitely gona get both of them in the next couple of months. I think shipping is included in the price, so free?

With the fridge, I was considering getting a chest freezer so I can keep at least four fermenters which would be cheaper to run than a full size fridge which would have too many nooks and crannys (useless space) to fit a fermenter, not to mention extra postage.

I did a search on yahoo auctions (Japanese) and they seemed to go for around 5000 second hand plus another 5000 postage. Not sure about the fridges.

Ill report back here when I get set up myself.

OppamaBrendan said:

Hey guys, has anyone had any experience ordering either the temp controller or refractometer off Ebay from Hong Kong yet? I want to set up an account and get that done soon but have never used Ebay. How is shipping from HK? Cheap? Slow?

I will be looking for a used refrigerator to set up my temp control after I get the STC-1000, any tips on buying appliances in Japan?

Cheers!
B

Click to expand...

I made a temp controller from the STC-1000 works great! Very easy to make. The hardest thing was making a box to house it in. There are some great tutorials here on the forum. The only downside was it took ages for it to get here from China, customs was holding it up. The controller cost me 1,800 yen on auction. Postage was free. I want to get another one though so I can have several brews going at the same time easily.

Thanks guys, I think the freezer idea is perhaps the way to go and is cheaper than I expected. the STC should be the icing on the cake! I set up the Ebay account and then realized the only way it seems to allow payment right now is through Paypal and they only ship to the paypal shipping address. I had a paypal account and thought that would be fine but turns out I can't change it from Canada to Japan. Its a real PITA, needed to delete the old account, set up a new one, then find out I can't use my Canadian credit card for a Japanese account. Now I need to find a Japanese credit card to sign up for; looks like its going to be a long while till I get that stuff at this rate.

On the plus side, I'm brewing today! Going for a dry APA with lots of later addition Falconers flight hops. I have 250gm Carared, 3750gm Pilsner 2 row, and 40 grams of chocolate (that I will add in the last 10 minutes of the mash). Trying to get it to turn more of a Red color than my last attempt.
Cheers!
B

Did a pale ale last night with Asahi ale malts and Cascade pellets. Started with 1.050 and will be fermenting for about 2 weeks before bottling.

I live alone now and don't have the luxuries of a roomy kitchen, and it really is a pain in the ass to keep a boil (It takes ages to get 2.5 gallons of water to a boil). I may scale down to a partial extract, that way I can use my 5 litre pot instead of my 14 litre. a 500g pack of DME with some base and speciality malts, and I should be able to get a pretty decent beer...



I also made some pickled sardines (Iwashi). I love pickled herring but the stuff on store shelves is too sweet for my palate, so I made some without sugar. It's really easy to make and tastes great, should be a good accompaniment with my beer or whisky

I'm Bottling a Blonde with Falconers Flight 7Cs right now (once I finish this sample). The ABV is nice and low, this is going to be gone in no time!

Surume, are you talking about getting the strike water hot? I have been using a little cheat - I crank the setting to maximum on my kitchen on-demand hot water heater and fill my pot with that. I can actually get it to boiling in the machine but that starts to make scary noises and I doubt if it is any good for the heater. It takes maybe 5 minutes to fill up the amount I need, but afterwards I am pretty much only a few minutes away from strike temperature once I put it on the stove. My bath heater has a digital display and says that it can heat the water to 60 C so I often use that instead of the kitchen heater. My brews are not of the quality yet that I need to worry about the water being unfiltered or whatever. Hope this helps!

Getting from mash/sparge temp to boil takes a bit longer, but 30 minutes on the stove should be enough for even a 20 Liter batch.

Another method (I don't know much about it) would be to mash and sparge with as little water as possible for a higher gravity. You could prepare some water the day before (boil and store it). Add the water after the boil to top up to the desired volume/gravity - it would help cool to pitching temps faster and you could boil a smaller volume of wort in less time. *Disclaimer, I have only done this once, I had prepared boiled water to top up the wort and dilute the gravity in case I had accidentally boiled off too much.

I could consider using a smaller boil, or using my electric kettle to boil the water before putting into the pot. Thanks for the advice

A smaller boil would mean less efficiency probably but I suppose time is money, and having to use more malts is better than waiting the extra few hours on a weekend.

I think I might try the smaller boil for my next brewday too. Perhaps 5 liters of sterilized water that I can cool in the fridge ahead of time. I am just playing around in the volume needed tool in Beersmith and noticed another benefit; the cooling loss for a 19L batch would be reduced by 250 ml on my equipment just by using 5 L of top up water. That should make up for a bit of the lost efficiency.

I am looking for the math to figure out how much of a chilling effect it would have. During the summer when my tapwater is 25 C that could be the biggest time consuming part of my brewday! I don't have a pre-chiller, so I would like to try cooling the wort down with the regular immersion chiller first, then when it hits the right temp (trying to figure out what that is right now) I could toss the chilled top up water in and drop it to the pitching temp.

Just goes to show limitations breed innovation or something haha!
Have a good one!
B

Front Page HBT right now is a NYC HERMS system built out of coolers and designed to take up as little space as possible when not being used. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/apartment-brewery-410238/
The little cooler contains 1500 W element and stores inside the big one!
Not sure if the guy is using the little cooler to get strike water heated or what, keeping an eye on that thread!

OppamaBrendan said:

Front Page HBT right now is a NYC HERMS system built out of coolers and designed to take up as little space as possible when not being used. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f51/apartment-brewery-410238/
The little cooler contains 1500 W element and stores inside the big one!
Not sure if the guy is using the little cooler to get strike water heated or what, keeping an eye on that thread!

Click to expand...

That is a nice setup. He doesn't show the build though. Would love to know all the parts and build.

surume said:

Headed down to Bashamichi Taproom last Sunday afternoon with 5 of my colleagues to have a beer. They have Shimaguni Stout (a smoked beer) as a regular but they currently have another smoked beer for the season so if you're into smoked beers then I'd recommend it. I haven't had it yet, I had the Shimaguni Stout which was a little weak in smokiness... the guy at the taproom says the seasonal one is more smoky.

I (we) then went down to Craft Beer Bar. The Shiga Kougen double IPA is really good! Nice fruity (nectarines/peach) aroma... a must have

Click to expand...

Next time you or anyone else is near Craft Beer Market let me know. My office is a 15 minute walk from there.

Craft Beer Market? The one in Toranomon or Jimbocho?

I work near Tsurumi so it is pretty far from my workplace

surume said:

Craft Beer Market? The one in Toranomon or Jimbocho?

I work near Tsurumi so it is pretty far from my workplace

Click to expand...

Toranomon. Too bad it is a great craft beer place.

I am trying my new refractometer out for the first time today. Just making a starter from bottle conditioned yeast and bumping up the volume a couple times over the day. This is great! I am mixing 50 ml of boiled water and DME in the microwave and I can check the gravity with just a couple drops and it only takes a few seconds! Got it on Amazon.jp instead of the Hong Kong Ebay seller but it comes with English and Japanese instructions on calibration and cleaning. For those short on time I think this is worth the expense!

Instant fermentation chamber: the deep bathtub half filled with water. I am keeping the roll-up-cover over the whole bath as well, it creates a second space filled with CO2 purged from the airlock. Slow and steady for 5 days now. I can rack to 2ndary on the 7th day when I have time off.

Anyone else start insulating from the summer heat yet?
Cheers!
B

OppamaBrendan said:

Instant fermentation chamber: the deep bathtub half filled with water. I am keeping the roll-up-cover over the whole bath as well, it creates a second space filled with CO2 purged from the airlock. Slow and steady for 5 days now. I can rack to 2ndary on the 7th day when I have time off.

Anyone else start insulating from the summer heat yet?
Cheers!
B

Click to expand...

Go get yourself an old refrigerator (often for the "price" of just hauling it away) and a Dual-Stage Temperature Controller (Control Products TC-9102D-HV on eBay [see below] or Ranco for about twice the price). Wrap your carboy up in a heating blanket (or FermWrap), plug that into the heating side of the temp controller. Plug the refrigerator into the cooling side of the temp controller, plug the temp controller into the wall and then set your desired fermentation temperature. Your fermentation temperature won't vary by more than a degree either way of ABSOLUTELY PERFECT!

No need to worry about the weather ever again - you can confidently ferment a German lager in the middle of July in Tokyo!!

http://www.amazon.com/Control-Products-TC-9102D-HV-Temperature-Controller/dp/B0057APR3I

OppamaBrendan said:

Instant fermentation chamber: the deep bathtub half filled with water. I am keeping the roll-up-cover over the whole bath as well, it creates a second space filled with CO2 purged from the airlock. Slow and steady for 5 days now. I can rack to 2ndary on the 7th day when I have time off.

Anyone else start insulating from the summer heat yet?
Cheers!
B

Click to expand...

Did that last night. I also put a insulating foam plastic sheet on top of the water to help retain the cool. Seems to work well.

Namako said:

Go get yourself an old refrigerator (often for the "price" of just hauling it away) and a Dual-Stage Temperature Controller (Control Products TC-9102D-HV on eBay [see below] or Ranco for about twice the price). Wrap your carboy up in a heating blanket (or FermWrap), plug that into the heating side of the temp controller. Plug the refrigerator into the cooling side of the temp controller, plug the temp controller into the wall and then set your desired fermentation temperature. Your fermentation temperature won't vary by more than a degree either way of ABSOLUTELY PERFECT!

No need to worry about the weather ever again - you can confidently ferment a German lager in the middle of July in Tokyo!!

http://www.amazon.com/Control-Products-TC-9102D-HV-Temperature-Controller/dp/B0057APR3I

Click to expand...

I want to do this but don't have the cash right this moment for it. I found a great small freezer for 19000 yen. That is what I would like. Haven't seen any small refrigerators that would hold a Carboy well and still be small. Space is a factor as we all know.

mpearce said:

I want to do this but don't have the cash right this moment for it. I found a great small freezer for 19000 yen. That is what I would like. Haven't seen any small refrigerators that would hold a Carboy well and still be small. Space is a factor as we all know.

Click to expand...

I'm using an old (10 years now) side-by-side fridge that I brought with me from the states, and it holds TWO 6.5-gallon carboys, stacked one on top of the other, with the top one sitting on a wooden shelf. The fridge itself sits (barely) in a storage shed in my back yard, with an extension cord running to it from an outside electrical socket - I'm down on the Miura Peninsula, south of Yokohama, so we actually have a back yard!!

But with it, I'm able to brew lagers any time of the year. And the heating blanket allows me to brew ales in the winter.

Namako said:

I'm using an old (10 years now) side-by-side fridge that I brought with me from the states, and it holds TWO 6.5-gallon carboys, stacked one on top of the other, with the top one sitting on a wooden shelf. The fridge itself sits (barely) in a storage shed in my back yard, with an extension cord running to it from an outside electrical socket - I'm down on the Miura Peninsula, south of Yokohama, so we actually have a back yard!!

But with it, I'm able to brew lagers any time of the year. And the heating blanket allows me to brew ales in the winter.

Click to expand...

Nice. Would love to have that and the space. One day I will just have a room as a brew house.

You aren't far from me then, come up to Oppama some time for a beer!

Like mpearce said, waiting on cash for the upgrade at the moment. Got the STC1000 but it didn't come with a probe so I need to figure that out before I bother with the freezer. I will probably put the chamber outside, though I might just put it up on blocks and covered in a blue sheet for weather protection - my shed is too narrow for a freezer. Rakuten has decent prices for chest freezers that include shipping but I cant say what quality they are.

I dont know if I could brew anything besides a Belgian from June through September without refrigeration. And the Belgian yeast was all sold out from AB last time I looked.

Namako said:

I'm down on the Miura Peninsula, south of Yokohama, so we actually have a back yard!!

Click to expand...

OppamaBrendan said:

You aren't far from me then, come up to Oppama some time for a beer!

Like mpearce said, waiting on cash for the upgrade at the moment. Got the STC1000 but it didn't come with a probe so I need to figure that out before I bother with the freezer. I will probably put the chamber outside, though I might just put it up on blocks and covered in a blue sheet for weather protection - my shed is too narrow for a freezer. Rakuten has decent prices for chest freezers that include shipping but I cant say what quality they are.

I dont know if I could brew anything besides a Belgian from June through September without refrigeration. And the Belgian yeast was all sold out from AB last time I looked.

Click to expand...

There is an STC-1000 temp probe for sale on eBay right now... Buy It Now for $6.49, free shipping...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Temperature-Sensor-probe-Waterproof-usa-seller-for-STC-1000-/330920878760?pt=US_Weather_Meters&hash=item4d0c6be2a8

If I could use Ebay right now I would, but from the fine print I was reading I can only pay by paypal and can only ship to a paypal billing address, and the paypal address must match my credit card billing address, and I don't have a Japanese credit card.
Long story short is I can't. Lots of good stuff on there but I am stuck at the moment.

Today I will rack the beer to secondary and have a taste.

I have a paypal account i could get it for you and send it on when i get it or we could meet for beer

I'm using my Australian credit card with a japanese address. You just have to sign up for a Japanese PayPal account

I just double checked, add a credit card to Paypal with a Japanese Paypal account gives me a roadblock. I can't enter the billing address for my card (its a Canadian address) at all, there are only options for Japanese billing addresses.

Sadamichi you have been able to set the billing address for your Aussie CC to a Japanese address? I can't do that with mine.

Drifting79, I'd appreciate that offer of help with that buy! I can Furikomi you the cost of the probe and shipping or if you want to come down to Oppama for a BBQ and bring it in person that would also be more than welcome!

Cheers!
B

I guess I used a Japanese address as my billing address.