Brutus 10 clone progress report: I am at the point where I need to do a full boil water test, to make sure the burners and pump are all working and up to par for brewing beer. Unfortunately the excesses of the Texas daytime summer heat have stifled my motivation for performing such a test. Heat indices reaching ~120 make is miserable outside during the day.

So, instead, I will present to you a loose string of random thoughts.

The other day I had mowed the yard and become parched. It was shortly after that that I enjoyed one of life's little gifts that people take for granted: A nice tall cold glass of ice water is nearly impossible to beat. A glass of water so cold that beads of sweat glisten off its surface, eventually growing so large that gravity wins, resulting in a small puddle of condensation on your coaster. The kind of refreshment that you feel all the way to your core, and instantly you know that water, as slang would deem, is the shit.

When you are a small child, perhaps sometimes even into middle school years, you really are blissfully unaware of the behind the scenes magic that happens to produce an end result. I remember when I was very small and travelling with my dad and we arrived at stop light, he would say "Hey, watch this", and then he would snap his fingers and make the light change to green. I was always blown away by it. It was the late 70s, and I was 4 or 5 years old, I didn't really understand how he did it. This thought crossed my mind the other day when I cooked some pork shoulder. I smoked the meat all night and the next day. Between the prep the day before and the cooking process, I spent a solid 17 hours on it. That seems excessive when you consider it only takes maybe 20 minutes to eat it. When I go to a restaurant and eat a pulled pork sandwich, that means that someone spent in the neighborhood of 17 hours making it, and I suppose I have never thought about that while eating such an item, but I plan to. I may even go out of my way to do it, just so I can have those thoughts.

I was applying my deodorant this morning and noticed that is was called Right Guard 3D. THREE FUCKING D! It seems that 3D is the new thing the kids are into these days, why not spray it into your armpit as well. All I can say is I'm damn happy thing the latest fad aint peanut butter.

I know I have said this over and over again, but it is hard to beat going to Vegas. First off, I get reward points on my credit card which I use to buy gas, pay my cable bill, pay for my truck insurance, general day to day stuff that everyone has to have. I also use this card when I am going to buy things that I have cash for already. I use the card, get the points, and then pay the bill each month, so there is no interest. So I then use the points to buy airplane tickets. Generally each time I go to Vegas, I can afford either one or two tickets, one way. If I buy two tickets out there, I only have to buy tickets on the way back. For this, I have a vacation fund which my best gal and I each dump $25 per paycheck into. I don't miss the 25$ at all, and then when it is vacation time, boom, I have a nice booty from which to loot. So that pays for return tickets.

Since I go somewhat frequently, I also get free rooms at most of the hotels out there. I can stay for free practically anywhere on the strip. So I can stay a few days at an MGM property, then a few days at a Harrah's property, and it costs me virtually nothing... room service and the like comes from the previously mentioned vacation fund. Since we have been to Vegas so many times, we also know how to get around cheaply, and where to eat cheaply, and we would have to eat if we were at home, so this is not necessarily an added expense, but again, vacation fund provides.

So that only leaves gambling money which comes out of pocket, and if you win, you leave more than you came with. It seems like a lot of times we break even on gambling, or close to it, so going there for a few days and even up to a week really is incredibly inexpensive. Also, I know preach this every time I bring up Vegas, but public intoxication is legal there, so you can drink all the free drinks you want, and then go roam the streets for hours, which I find rather amusing. Anyway, I bring this up because I will be going again soon, if I cannot locate an alternative vacation in a certain price range, and I want everyone to know how awesome it is. It is awesome.

One of the last things on the brutus clone build prior to a full water test is the counterflow chiller. A counterflow chiller (or CFC) is a contraption consisting of a long copper tube inside a larger rubber tube. As water cool or ambient temperatue water flows up the rubber house surrounding the copper tube, the freshly brewed beer flows the opposite direction down the copper tube in the center, then creating a pretty massive heat exchange. The water leaves the top of the contraption having stolen the heat from the beer, and the beer flows out the bottom of the copper tube having had the heat stolen.

I decided to build my own to save on costs, and to learn another valuable skill in copper soldering (or sweating, as it is known). so I went to home depot and bought all the parts and began the build.



Sweating copper parts is rather easy as I discovered, but making it pretty can be a challenge to a newcomer. Essentially, you heat up the two copper parts you will be joining, and then lay a piece of solder on it, and the solder get sucked into the jont, thus sealing it up.

You can find plans all over the interclouds for building one of these things, so I will not bore you with the ins and outs of the design, and get straight to the pictures of the build.

After my initial test, one of my soldered joints was a leaky, which is no bueno, so I tried to fix it, but soon found that unsoldering or unsweating a joint seems very difficult, so instead I opted to go with my good old pal JB Weld. A little JB Weld on the joint, and all was well.

After the final testing of the chiller, I was able to insert near boiling water in one end, and have it come out the other end at around 80 degrees, and this is outside in the Texas heat, so imagine what it could do during the dead of winter, when the tap water is quite cold.

At this point, I think I am ready for a full water test, which involves going through the entire beer making process using only water, so as not to waste ingredients if something goes wrong.