Stainless Steel Growler Review – Keg King’s Ultimate Growler

Keg King sent me their Ultimate stainless steel growler to review. I spent some time on a Saturday logging data to see how it holds up.

Why a Stainless Steel Growler?

Keg King’s Ultimate Growler is a 64-ounce stainless growler for transporting beer from a tap to somewhere you want to drink that beer. Many growlers are made of glass, but this one is made out of 304 stainless steel. Many pools, beaches, and other public locations do not allow glass containers for safety reasons; this is a good alternative package to avoid that problem.

Since this is a stainless steel growler, you do not need to be concerned about it breaking inadvertently. The constructions feels solid, and the heft feels nice in my hand. The brushed stainless provides a good grip, even when it is wet.

The neck of the growler is a comfortable diameter and allows for easy pouring.

This Seal Barks, not Growls

One story of the growler’s origin states that the original tin containers emitted a growling sound because the lid could not form a tight seal. This caused the lid to vibrate, emitting a low growling noise. The Ultimate Growler has a tight bale-top lid with a food-grade silicone gasket to form a tight seal that barked loud when the top was flipped open.

You won’t need to worry about your beer going flat as long as the lid is closed.

Who, me? I’m just Chillin’

Chilled Growler — Initial Temperature 40 F / 4.4 C

To test the vacuum insulation, I filled the growler with iced water. The temperature settled at 40 degrees.

The growler rested on the counter in a 60-degree F room. I monitored the temperature every few hours.

4 hours later, the temperature was 42 F / 5.5 C

8 Hours Later — Checking after 8.5 hours, the temp had risen to 44 F / 6.6 C

18 Hour Temperature rose 10 F — After 18 hours, the temperature rose to 50 F / 10 C

Temperatures in the growler rose 10 degrees F / 5.6 C over the course of 18 hours.

I am happy with this growler, and think it’s a good option to transport your beer without taking a full keg.

Shorten Your Brew Day (Part 1)

Why I Want to Shorten Your Brew Day

If you’re like me, homebrewing beer is an activity you love. But you’re probably looking for ways to shorten your brew day. With a family, other hobbies, and a job, taking six to eight hours to brew a batch of beer can feel like you’re stealing time you should be using for other things.

Weekends are the two days when I have to squeeze in time with my wife and kids, since I don’t usually have to put in hours at the office on those days. The more time I can free up for fun and family, the easier it is to spend times on the things that are just for me.

Here are a few ways I found to shorten my brew day:

1. Shrink Your Batch Size

One of the common philosophies in homebrewing is that it doesn’t add that much time to brew a larger batch of beer. And this is true, to a point. The day you are brewing may only take 30 minutes to one hour longer to go from making five gallons of beer to making a ten gallons of beer, as long as you have the equipment. However, jumping from five to ten gallons doubles the length of your bottling or kegging day; it potentially gives you twice as many fermenters to clean; and if you’re bottling, that’s twice as many bottles to clean and sanitize.
I only made three five gallon batches when I started brewing and jumped straight to ten gallon batches. At the time, it seemed like a great idea. With two small kids, I got twice as much beer for about the same time investment on my brew days. But I found myself avoiding bottling day, and started brewing less frequently.

Also, a large batch is a much larger investment in ingredients. If you’re making a ten gallon batch, you need twice as much ingredients.

2. Decide on Your Recipe Ahead of Time

One of the things that can are really freeing about homebrewing is that you can adjust your recipe on the fly. I usually run into something unexpected on my brew days, but it doesn’t need to mean you are making things up the day of brewing. Decide on the recipe ahead of time, that way you can make sure all your ingredients are in place.

3. Measure and Prepare Your Ingredients

Speaking of ingredients: by planning your recipe ahead of time, you can make sure all your grains are weighed and crushed the day before. If you don’t have bulk grain on-hand, this allows you to visit your homebrew shop before your brew day. This is vital, at least for me. I love talking to Doug(the owner) at my local homebrew shop, so it is pretty much impossible for me to get out of the shop in less than an hour.

When I know what I need ahead of time, I can stop in and have a leisurely chat with Doug while I get my stuff. It makes for a more relaxed morning on brew day, plus I don’t feel guilty if it takes me longer than an hour because Doug and I strike an interesting topic.

But seriously, weigh and crush your grains. You could even weigh out your hop additions the night before.

4. Set Up Your Gear (and Get It Together)

I really appreciate this tip from Andrew from Not on Sundays Brewing:
Getting everything in place the day before, or even having dedicated storage so your gear can always be together would significantly shorten the setup time.

One of the things that takes a lot of time for me is just getting everything set up for brew day. Since I brew in the garage, I have to move the car, get my stands set up, get the burners and mash tun in place. This is lengthened by the fact some of my gear is stored in the basement at the other end of our house. So, each trip forces me to go through the kitchen, dining room, down two flights of stairs, and through the basement rec room to get my gear. Then I have to reverse the journey. And I always have to make more than one trip.

I make sure my fermenters are clean before my brew day starts. That way I don’t have to worry about how to get dried-on krausen off the inside of my fermenter when I should be focused on my brewing process.

I have a few more tips to shorten your brew day I’ll be sharing with you soon.

Brew up and adventure!

Is Automation the Future of Homebrewing?

A Cool (and Hot) Appliance

The Picobrew Zymatic is a device for making beer it home. It sprang onto the scene in 2013 as the first “beer-making appliance.” It has been compared to a bread machine since it controls the brewing process for you after you add the ingredients and select the recipe you want it to make.

Once everything is set up, the Zymatic goes through the steps programmed into your selected recipe. This means you, as a brewer, do not have to handle hot hoses, risk getting splashed with scalding water or worry about forgetting a hop addition.

After telling the device to start brewing, the brewing process takes about four hours. This includes mashing the grain for starch conversion to fermentable sugars to make wort, isomerization of alpha acids into bitterness, and adding hops for flavor and aroma.

Once the brewing process is done, all you have to do is cool the wort, add (pitch) your yeast, wait for fermentation to complete, and carbonate the beer as normal.

I Can Make Beer in Four Hours?!

Unfortunately, no. You can’t make beer in four hours. This device technically makes wort, not beer. Just like with un-automated homebrewing, you have to ferment the wort in order to produce beer. The fermentation process takes anywhere from five days to several weeks, depending on the strength of the beer, type of yeast and temperature at which the beer is fermented.

Is Fermentation Really Needed?

Fermentation is the process that produces alcohol from the sugars in the wort. After pitching the yeast, they ferment most of the sugars dissolved in the wort to produce alcohol, yeast esters (flavors and aromas), and carbon dioxide. The fermentation process also brings the flavors into balance with each other.

Unfermented wort is extremely sweet, and drinking more than a few ounces becomes unpleasant due to that overpowering sweetness. Through fermentation, the sweetness fades as the yeast consume the sugars in solution. This makes the bitterness and flavor from the hops more pronounced, and beer more refreshing. Since not all sugars from the barley (and other grains) are fermentable, there is always some degree of sweetness left in the beer. This contributes to the body and mouthfeel of the beer, and allows the bitterness to be enjoyable to the beer drinker at the end.

What’s the Difference?

You may wonder how the process differs from the setup many home brewers use to make beer. The main difference is that the process is controlled by a computer built into the Zymatic, rather than handled manually by a human separating the liquid from the grains and adding hops at specific times.

This can give the brewer a greater degree of control and consistency in the beer they make, since it doesn’t matter if the brewer gets distracted in the middle of the brew. The computer monitors the whole process, freeing you up to do other things, like sample the last batch you made.

There are some technical differences in the process.

The wort never reaches a boil, but due to the circulation process within the machine, the beer comes out tasting like it went through a full boil.
After the process completes, the beer still has to be cooled. Many home brewers have a chiller they use to cool the wort as the final step of the brewing process. Since your wort is in a sealed keg upon completion, you have many options for cooling the wort quickly.
Easier cleanup. Once your brew day is complete, you can clean the tray that holds the grain quickly, and there is a “cleaning cycle” programmed into the machine to make sure you do not end up contaminating your next batch.

Is the Zymatic for you?

It depends. The cost is out of reach for many people, but is reasonable for others.

Brewers who love the manual process of managing each part of the brew day will not like this device, since it automates the process(es) they love. However, if you enjoy the process of creating recipes more than brewing, this is an ideal machine since it handles many of the technical details of the brewing process. It would also be an ideal fit for someone with limited space, since it is about the size of a bread machine, and the beer can be fermented in a smaller container than the keg delivered with the unit.

If this sounds like a solution for you, the Picobrew Zymatic can be purchased at More Beer online and delivered to your house.

If you purchase through the links on this page, I will receive a small payment which allows me to continue creating content about making beer and wine at home.