CHIP WALTON: What's going on, everybody.
We are in Northern Brewer HQ. William, Chip. Forgive the bundled,
knit cap nature of our attire, but it's April and still snowing.
WILLIAM RICHARTZ: Another storm coming this weekend, it's stupid.
CHIP: There's a line coming right now. We're not here to give you the weather report for Roseville, MN.
We're here to tell you about the new Grainfather G30 Version 3. We just got it in
this week and we put it to the test for a first brew. We want to tell you about what we think.
If you're familiar with Grainfather, what's the real quick bottom line? What's a spoiler alert?
WILLIAM: It's mostly the same unit. The grain basket and the grain plates are the big difference,
making for a much easier brew day. The grain basket has been changed quite a bit. It's got
perforated edges along the side. There's four columns that do that. That's going
to help with quicker draining. Also eliminate any kind of stuck sparge situation as well.
The rolled edge plates. If you're familiar with the old one, it used to have that
gasket seal and the center pipework through there.
That's completely eliminated, and now you just have one nice simple-to-use rolled
edge plate that you can just drop it in there and it gets right in the place.
CHIP: A lot of the upgrades of this one are,
we've decided they're things that are already in place for the G40 and
the G70. Now conglomerated into the G30 for a much more enjoyable and easy brewing day.
WILLIAM: Yeah, and quicker clean-up.
Just less parts. I didn't think of that until we were actually cleaning.
CHIP: That's true. Before we get into the thick of things,
if you like seeing equipment review and demo videos like this from Northern Brewer, please
like this video, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and be sure to share it with your friends.
WILLIAM: Can you share it with your homebrew enemies?
CHIP: You can share it with your homebrew frenemies!
WILLIAM: I have some.
CHIP: I have some homebrew enemies.
Let's look at the new features specifically. William touched on most of these, but we'll
show you again. The new basket design has got these perforated zones along the bottom of the
basket and four channels vertically inside the basket to allow for better, quicker draining
when the basket is elevated. There's also less of a chance of a stuck spare with the new design
you said. It comes with this sweet rolled edge stainless steel bottom plate. No more silicone
rings. Not to throw the silicone rings under the bus, but they were always just a thing.
WILLIAM: Yeah.
I think if you are a current user of the old G30 style, you had your tricks to get it in there.
CHIP: Yeah. People would
put malt dust around the edge or spray it with Star San. Now this plate just drops right to the
bottom. Does a great job of keeping the malt in the basket. No center pipe, another big change.
That was always a thing to work around. Like, you would knock it with the spoon.
WILLIAM: Yeah. It made mashing in
a lot easier. You just stir. You didn't have to worry about dancing around it or anything.
CHIP: And why is that pipe gone?
WILLIAM: Just the change of the grain plate itself.
Because that used to hold the upper plate as well. I think
just from years of testing, they realized that the upper plate isn't needed any more.
CHIP: Basket feet have also changed
slightly and are now part of those four vertical channels on the outside/inside of the basket. One
more thing, the reset switch used to be borderline dangerous depending on when you needed to hit it.
WILLIAM: Yeah. I mean, chances are if it went off you had a full Grainfather,
and that's pretty tricky at that point to do that. Now it's integrated, it's automatic. So,
if it thinks it's going to overheat, it flips it off for a brief second so that you don't
overheat and then flips it back on. It really leads to a smoother brew day overall, too.
CHIP: Alright. Real quick, just if you
are familiar with Grainfather, other things that are still worth pointing out. High quality, 304
stainless steel, covered by a three-year warranty. The integrated pump recirculates mash, transfers
wort with ease through the chiller at the end of the day. Hop filter, this thing is a godsend as
you will see in the video or you might be seeing in the video right now. This hop filter will block
all hop and other maybe spice addition sediment. Finally, the controller box. What up with that?
WILLIAM: Oh, that's the real beauty in the Grainfather system
across all of them, I think. Their platform,
the easibility of using it. You put your recipe in there, put the hop additions, the mash steps,
everything, and it sends alerts to your phone. For this one, it's Bluetooth. There are some
other ones, the G40 and G70 use wifi. But if you have a recipe in that app,
it will scale it for those different systems too. So, if you do have multiple systems or
upgrade to a bigger system, it's easy to scale that. There's a community of recipes in there,
too, from other users that you can use so it's pretty cool. And it actually will integrate in
with your fermentation further down the line too. If you have their conicals,
you can put that fermentation steps in there and they'll track that. And then if you have something
like the Tilt wireless hydrometer, that will also integrate with it. It's pretty amazing software.
CHIP: Pretty much set it and forget it brewing and fermenting.
WILLIAM: Just come back for the drinking part.
CHIP: Let's take this thing for a test drive.
We decided we were going to brew our Kama Citra Session IPA. It's a low lift effort. The grist is
not big, 10 pounds. We figured we wouldn't throw a barleywine at this thing the first time out.
WILLIAM: As always, before we got into
the actual brew day, we did some cleaning. Just a quick PBW through the unit, pipes,
chiller, really everything beer is going to touch, just clean it. With any new equipment
you want to do that. And then we gave it a quick rinse right after that too.
CHIP: We set the G30 up on a small sturdy table in
our Brew Cave with the chiller positioned nearby instead of putting it on top. We measured water
directly into the unit, which is calibrated in volumes, both gallons and liters. In our case, I
think we started at about four and a half gallons. This was only a portion of our overall water
because we were planning on sparging those grains as well later, instead of doing full volume. Set
your target mash temp on the controller, the heater kicks in, boom, starts coming up to temp.
WILLIAM: For mash-in, as we stated, the
Kama Citra, we went with that because it is the 10 pounds grain. Target OG of 1.050 for the final
five gallons into the fermenter. Again, without that center plate it was a lot
easier to mash in. Just don't have to really worry about hitting that center pipe at all.
You can just stir the grain into the mash real nice. Once you have the mash nice and stirred,
any dough balls broke up, then go ahead and start to hook up the recirculating arm,
which is going to help recirculate the wort by bringing it from the bottom up
over to the top of the grain and just keep that recirculating for the full mash time.
CHIP: Keeps it at an even temp.
WILLIAM: Yep, keeps it even temp. Actually helps
with better efficiency as well. You should get pretty nice efficiency You can see that we -- it
comes with a nice long piece of silicone tubing to cut to length and just have that lay into the mash
and help recirculate it. We have our own Fighter Jet Sprayer that just kind of breaks it up. It
fits in that tubing. It's a nice little addition; not needed but something we just wanted to try.
CHIP: We mashed for that typical 60 minutes.
You can see the wort go from a sort of cloudy,
doughy at the beginning to a much clearer, darker, perfected wort with all that time of settling and
recirculating over itself. Really nice mash. And then we did a 10 minute mash-out up to 168,
very handy on the Grainfather. Again, set that temp and you literally can
walk away to your desk and do some work and it lets you know when it's when it's there.
WILLIAM: My desk is out of Bluetooth range,
but I can hear that beep. I think I came running a few times.
CHIP: A couple of times William came, actually once
something else went off. I can't remember. I think maybe a microwave or something. You're like --
WILLIAM: Oh, there was a forklift backing up.
CHIP: Is it hop time? Not yet.
After the mash it's time to get the basket up. Again, this is made easy. It's a steel handle,
fits right into the grooves. Pull it up carefully, get it out of the unit,
turn it very slightly to get those feet in place on the support ring. Let the wort drain while
you're sparging the grain. The beauty is you can now kick that up to boil,
or at least to boil temp. And it's going to take while it's draining.
You can use any device. Well, first of all actually, you don't have the sparge. The
beauty of this is you could use full volume boil or full volume water, pull it out.
WILLIAM: Almost like brew in the bag.
CHIP: Right. Brew In A Basket, as I like to
call it. But if you have a sparge technique that you like, whether it's another piece of equipment,
or in our case we just hand sparged it. We had 3.5 gallons off to the side. You could
see William doing his best to pour evenly over it, and we ended up getting 6.5 gallons in our kettle,
which was our plan. Set it to boil. Takes a minute to get to boil. But again, you kind of set it and
forget it. You can go do something else. You start weighing up hops, get your fermenter sanitized,
whatever. But man, this recipe, as we mentioned, has a good amount of hops. Kama Citra, right?
WILLIAM: Yeah. We picked it for a little bit lower grain bill just to make sure it
was an easier brew that way. And then as we started adding hops, we realized that,
"Oh, this is actually quite hoppy, too." So it's really good to test that filter, which is great.
CHIP: A half ounce Centennial right off the top, an ounce at 20, another ounce at 10. And all these
hops smelled wonderful. We were like, "Yes, this beer is going to be immaculately aroma."
WILLIAM: I love when you crack the hop bag open.
You're like, "Oh my God, I want to bury my face in that."
CHIP: It's like when you pour a good beer
and you can smell it across the room.
WILLIAM: Just crack it. And then, yeah.
CHIP: So boiling, boiling, adding those hops. And
then this Kama Citra has two full ounces of Citra at flame-out. Killed the heat, poured them in,
stirred up a whirlpool, let them steep for about 10 minutes, is what the recipe calls.
WILLIAM: Yeah. I forgot to add
that as a hop stand in the software, so it didn't count that 10 minutes,
but you can set it up so it would do that. That was just user error, not, not anything else.
CHIP: Then it was time to chill.
We actually have such cold groundwater here right now -- because I mentioned,
it's still snowing in April -- that we started thermometer gunning it and we're like, "Oh,
it's like 55 degrees or 50." So we actually had to start adding hot water to our wort chilling
process. But all being said, William throttled the hot and cold, got it perfectly. Hit the numbers:
five gallons of 64 degree wort, OG 1.052. Just a titch higher but I've never heard a home brewer
complain about that. Some epic cold break. As you can see in this fermenter, it looked
like egg drop soup, and immediately like bottomed out once we got it into place.
And check this out. Look at that hop filter putting in the work. That kept
all of this hop matter out of the fermenter. William went to go peel
it off and it literally peeled away. It didn't just push away.
WILLIAM: Yeah,
and it was dry. So it really did manage to suck all that wort through there and get a
lot of it out, so you weren't wasting it in the hops. I was so impressed by that.
CHIP: Well, once again too, when we did our G40 video,
we're both like, "Dang!" The bottom plate just stops it. You pick that plate up sideways and it
was about like a profile of hops. We pitched US-05 dry yeast, cleaned the equipment, called it a day.
It was we're, both Grainfather heads. You know, we're GFers. GF for life! I had a good time
watching this new one get brewed with, because I just recently got back into brewing with mine,
which I assume is the probably Version 2 with center pipe, silicone. Everything about
just watching this on that day, I was like, "Yep, I'll be getting this at some point."
WILLIAM: It was probably six, six and a half hours from unboxing to clean-up really,
which is pretty quick, especially for unboxing included in there and cleaning.
CHIP: I don't know if you've ever shot video of
a brew day, but that in itself slows things down. There's a lot of like, "Wait, hold up, wait for me
to get there," or thinking about, "Where should I be?" Whereas usually if you're just brewing in
a basement, listening to music, like hops, hops, you don't have Chip Walton being like, "Hold up!"
I'm eager to see now that we've got it out and in place in the brew cave, clean, sanitized,
how quick the next brew day will be.
WILLIAM: I think it would be really quick. I think we could
start getting to that four hour repeatable, start to finish, and that it does include, you know,
when you have downtime, you're cleaning, you're thinking about the next step and everything.
CHIP: Any other thoughts?
I mean it's still 110V, at least the one we used, but it seemed to heat up pretty good. Kept temp.
Actually maybe here is a little user tip, news you can use, as we never officially hit 212F for
a boil. You might have seen in the video, when it's boiling it says 210F. We think that is a --
WILLIAM: Yeah, there's a temperature
offset in that box. So we just need to go in there and adjust that. I mean, all thermometers
you want to check against, classic is putting them in ice water and checking it and doing it
that way. That's why we realized we were about two degrees off, a degree off. It did tick up to
211F sometimes and then tick back down. But, it was boiling. You could see that it was boiling.
I know from years of customer experience here that a lot of people experience that as well.
Altitude can be a factor there, too, for some people. You can offset that temperature so that
you're just not thrown by seeing boiling wort, but this over here is tell you it's only 210F.
CHIP: And we can confirm upon tasting the wort sample, it was bitter.
WILLIAM: Yep, tasted bitter.
I mean, it tasted like an IPA wort.
CHIP: There was boiling, there was some hop utilization
going down. So yeah, we look forward to more brew days with the G30 Version 3. You will see more of
that. I think that might even become our more default way of brewing in the Brew Cave versus
the Top Tier three system and all that. Make it a little easier for when we're doing this R&D work.
Until then, you can buy it at northernbrewer.com or at least
come on over to the product page to learn a little bit more about it. Ask
us any questions you might have here in the comments on YouTube.
WILLIAM: And like you already said,
we use the 110V version, but it is also available in a 220V version. It's a slight upgrade to the
heating input so you get a little bit quicker heating times and shorter brew day from that.
CHIP: Yeah. Until next time, keep it G.
WILLIAM: We don't keep it G here very often. PG?
CHIP: Keep it G30!