Vic Secret

The least smooth brew day(s) ever.

• 1st problem.... I started writing unit tests for the code, at work I'm now in a team which means not testing code is a crime punishable by death. In some cases unit tests are over the top and integration tests are often more suitable. The flaw with unit tests is often the input can become arbitrary if there is a fixation of getting coverage - quality over quantity has never been so applicable. This meant that the relays *never* fired.
• 2nd problem... the heavy duty (40A) relay that switched one of the zones from HLT to Boil stopped firing - this appeared to have been fixed previously - but actually turns out it's the low current (10A) relay is sticking. Even though the double relays has caused the problem I much prefer the headroom of this arrangement that pushing the limits of the 10A relay.
• 3rd problem... the DS18B20 probes completely failed - the wiring with the XLR leads has been problematic. I think this is because some of the leads are wired incorrectly. Instead I've hard wired a single DS18B20 probe. A further problem is that I don't have any spare 4.7K resistors to have more than 1 probe running at once (I've learnt more about 1 Wire protocol as a result).
• 4th problem.. getting the replacement pump running was harder than it should have been... it turn out the socket in the powersupply and been pushed into the chassis so no power was delivered to the pump :-(
• 5th problem... rather stupid, whilst vac-packing the dry-hops turned the bag upside down when failing to seal - spilling 20% of the dry-hops of the floor :-(
• 6th problem.... the raspberry pi that runs the governor failed - it broadcast details for everything else - so even though the temperature and relay for the fridge/heating run on a separate raspberry pi the refused to do anything because they didn't have a target temperature.... impotu coding - needless to say without unit tests to get things up and running.

All in all a much longer brewday (which turned out to be prep) and then real brewday.... hopefully this means the brewgods will reward the efforts.

I ended up using 33gm Vic Secret @ 30min, 33gm Vic Secret @ 15min and 33gm Vic Secret @ Flameout rather than putting 100gm in @15min. Because of problem #5 the dry hop will only be 40gm :-(

The mash temp for this was 65 deg not 68 deg