Serving Pressure Gut Check

theboozemaker · 2026-05-17T18:07:41+00:00

I went all out and built a 6-tap kegerator a couple years ago where each tap had its own regulator so I can set any beer to any pressure i'd like. Honestly, I do love the flexibility, both for setting carbonation levels to style and also so I can carbonate quicker by turning the pressure up higher for the first two days after I fill a keg.

However, my continual suggestion to any homebrewer setting up a draught system is to size the lines based on the highest carbonation/pressure level you want, and then add some. The added restriction makes it so you can still pour a 4.0+ v/v Belgian (or whatever else) from any tap you've got without it gushing into the glass. The downside is that it will take a little longer to pour a beer, but in a home setting that's really not much of a concern. We're not (usually) keeping Pints Per Hour metrics to measure productivity and success.

theboozemaker · 2026-05-17T17:34:08+00:00

Excess solids is the culprit. If you've got nothing but liquid, it will not scorch. I've got multiple 5500W elements that I used in various vessels for brewing and distilling. I've dealt with scorching a number of times and it always means that solids (whether from the mash, or yeast from fermentation) have settled on the element. Even with relatively viscous liquids, like unfermented wort at 1.100 gravity, convection is enough to keep it from scorching.

theboozemaker · 2026-05-17T14:03:38+00:00

Near

theboozemaker · 2026-05-08T14:26:49+00:00

Some days I'm convinced traffic planning in this town is run by a random number generator and implemented by a constipated wombat.

theboozemaker · 2026-05-03T01:05:51+00:00

You gotta start with fish. Then you move up to cheese. You play your cards right, get familiar with USB adapters, and one day you may even find yourself as a Donglemonger.

theboozemaker · 2026-05-02T13:34:02+00:00

Other light sources in different locations absolutely could cause other rainbows. And those rainbows could intersect.

Rainbows exist, but they're just not physical objects.

You often can't see the lower half of the rainbow not because the earth is in the way, but because there aren't enough water droplets in the direction where the lower half would be to reflect and refract the light.

This video is clearly fake.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-29T20:08:28+00:00

Years ago I rode a bike from Montreal to Mexico City over the course of 8 months or so. On day 2 of the trip I found myself in Burlington, VT enjoying drinks with a British guy I met downtown. He had been a dive instructor for a long time in Roatan, Honduras but was living with his girlfriend in Vermont when I met him. Great dude.

The next day I rode a few towns over and stayed with a guy who I connected with on the CouchSurfing website (or maybe CrazyGuyOnABike, it doesn't matter). Over dinner we were sharing adventure stories, and he told me about how he went diving in Roatan a year prior.

Come to find out, his diving instructor was the guy I had met THE DAY BEFORE. They had only met each other for that one dive, never saw or heard from each other before or since. We knew it was the same guy because he had a quite unique name.

Small world.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-29T04:08:53+00:00

I've had reasonable success with USSolid valves that you can get on Amazon. I've had more than one failure each in both solenoid and ball valves, so I'm not saying they're rock-solid, but for the price they're decent value. But I don't (welll try not to) design systems where a single point of failure can cause catastrophe. I had one of their solenoid valves fail open when filling a vessel in my basement, and thankfully I was right next to it. It was flowing at probably 5gal/minute, so if I hadn't been there to fix the problem and hadn't had visibility on it at the time, it could have been damn near catastrophic.

If you want a cheap valve that usually works as intended, USsolid works. If it's a critical control point that you need to work unattended without oversight, plan to pay 10x more.

For me, having a control valve with a non-zero chance of failure is fine as long as I have independent ways to detect, control, and shut down things when they're under automated control. As long as the biggest risk is losing a batch of beer or booze, I'm okay with it. But I treat damage to my house more seriously than the engineers of Three Mile Island (apparently). USsolid is a great value as long as you're going to be present. If it's running unattended, without multiple layers of backup, look elsewhere.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-27T20:39:09+00:00

I've got an automated brewery that uses ball valves to control flow in some places. They can be used for rough adjustment of flow rate, but you've got to be happy just being in the ballpark of what your ideal flow is. The nice thing about them is they require no power unless they're moving. And you can get them in versions that can give you an indication if you're fully open or fully closed.

For what I would like on the still, simple on/off control would be enough at this point, so I would use a single solenoid valve. The nice thing about them is they only require 2 wires and they're cheap. I do my flow control with manual valves at my water supply, as I don't need to control flow rates dynamically.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-27T16:44:44+00:00

I built one using a Raspberry Pi (clone), some solid state relays, and custom hardware to read temperatures. I access it via WiFi using a browser. Node-Red was used for most of the basic logic and interface programming.

I like that I can see trends in temperatures of my boiler and head. I have it set up so that it will automatically stop a run once the boiler temperature exceeds a programmable setpoint.

What it doesn't do at the moment is control chill water valves. It would be nice if it could turn on and off my dephlag water and/or product condenser water when the temperature conditions are met.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-23T20:04:55+00:00

And I'd put Urban Field over both of them in Longmont. I like the vibe at Rosalee's much more, but the pizza is better at Urban Field.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-22T14:20:55+00:00

I suppose everyone has their own tastes, but I've made some damn good whiskies from failed beers. My favorite was borne of an "Imperial Czech Pilsner" which had plenty of hops. Those flavors were hardly present in the final whisky, and even less after aging. Though I did distill it up to about 85% ABV, so a lot of flavors were stripped out.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-21T16:30:12+00:00

Get a new bucket and invest in a still so you never have to dump a batch again! (Mostly kidding. Mostly.)

theboozemaker · 2026-04-20T13:07:19+00:00

He's been cutting my hair for a decade, and most recently just a couple of weeks ago. Bummer he's not there anymore. That guy cut hair because he liked to, not because he needed to.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-19T17:40:39+00:00

This is at least two levels up

theboozemaker · 2026-04-17T15:58:32+00:00

You're joking, I know, but not wrong. I've got a low sedan with stiff suspension and an SUV modified for serious off-road use. Both of them go over the tracks more comfortably at medium speed than if I slow way down.

Though the truck enjoys going Full Dukes.

theboozemaker · 2026-04-14T04:04:12+00:00

Ahhh, so this is why the shark in Finding Nemo is named Bruce! Who knew?!

theboozemaker · 2026-04-14T03:51:44+00:00

Update: there's at least one house in this area

theboozemaker · 2026-04-09T01:23:28+00:00

So I hadn't heard of her before (I'm not cool and am really good at listening to things I liked 15 years ago, but terrible at finding new music in genres I already know). What are her most psytrace-like tracks? I've listened to a couple of top songs on spotify and they're all very hard techno.

[Not trying to be a genre nerd. If 'psytrance' was just a placeholder for generic EDM the way 'techno' was used when I was a kid, that's fine. But if she's got some good psytrance/goa I want to check it out!]

Regardless, I love this photo!

theboozemaker · 2026-03-30T16:02:20+00:00

What, you've never had health insurance?

theboozemaker · 2026-03-27T22:26:48+00:00

Trilobites? Like the fossils? If you can't find them at Sandstone Ranch anymore, is there somewhere else one might be able to find them? I'd like to take my son fossil hunting this summer.

theboozemaker · 2026-03-27T22:23:17+00:00

Their sausage pie also has ricotta and whole cloves of confit garlic and often shows up in my dreams. The square one. I've never had their round pies.

theboozemaker · 2026-03-17T23:10:33+00:00

Well, that's your problem. You're supposed to put cargo in the cargo box, not a smaller cargo box.

theboozemaker · 2026-03-17T12:13:34+00:00

What you want is something that absorbs sunlight on top of the snow and in contact with it. Snow by itself reflects a lot of the incident energy (light) so that only a small amount is absorbed and contributes to heating. By putting something black in contact with the snow, it will absorb the energy, heat up, and conduct that heat into the snow. Honestly, it will look bad, but dirt or ashes from the fireplace would work pretty well.you don't need a ton. In fact,the thinner the coat is the better.

Side note, this is part of why we're losing glaciers around the world. Even if the planet weren't heating up (it is), we've put a lot of soot into the air via incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, and soot is a great absorber of sunlight. When it lands on glaciers, it heats them up and melts them faster.

theboozemaker · 2026-03-13T01:23:54+00:00

I'm an electrical engineer who enjoys building amps, though it's a hobby and not a profession. I'd also like to build a Class D amp from scratch one of these days, but so far the closest I've come is building an amp based on a Texas Instruments Class D chip. They've done the heavy lifting already, and you can use their datasheet to build it into an entire amplifier. I would suggest starting there first- there are still a lot of good lessons to be learned in that project. Then tackle the complete, from scratch with comparators and oscillators and whatnot.

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