Recent content by 924RACR

Personally I much prefer using whole chiles to chili powder; same goes for my chili! Likewise, I'd rather have 'em in the boil for 5 minutes... and would tend towards ancho, chipotle, guajillo and the like vs. cayenne - much deeper flavor, less focus on heat, seems more in character for this brew.

Interesting comment re: the ghost pepper; just tried "Crime" from Stone Brewing... a mix of various Bastards, barrel aged and a whole mess of peppers including Scotch Bonnet and ghost. Impressively tasty heat; smells more like a hot sauce than a beer in the glass, but the malty sweetness of the...

We used dried ancho... don't think fresh would get you any better flavor, perhaps less. Roasting or smoking could get you more towards smokey flavor, but not sure that's what you're going for. We didn't use vodka, but rather we went for the 10min steep in 160F water. Didn't lose anything by...

Damn straight; we've made lots of great beer at around 60F. Many don't believe the ABV levels we've gotten with just a basic SA-05; I believe it's due to a cooler, slower fermentation, very low final gravities. I'd say at least 1, preferably 2 weeks on the chiles... but YMMV! ;)

I've not done a cinnamon addition, so can't speak there. When we've soaked in water, we just pitch it, but any booze we'll throw in too, gotta save all that lovely flavor! ;) Water, we don't need that in our beer... :D Yeah, the extra LME shouldn't really matter much to the flavor of the beer...

Subscribed for the great ideas... I am toying with the idea of doing basically the above - 10gal Left-Hand Milk Stout clone, split into 2 carboys... one half gets cocoa nibs and cold-brewed coffee (which we did already once, loved it), the other half to get some mix of chipotles (we like our...

Yeah, honestly since it's a pretty simple mash, it shouldn't be hard at all to convert to extract. Just a matter of swapping in pale and maybe a half a pound or so of Munich, then rebalancing. That's a lot easier to figure out than some of the more complex beers. All the fun and games with this...

We kicked out a second round of barleywine mid-year, to prep for the winter... since the first was so sweet, we dialed back the Munich malt and added in some roasted barley. Also tried some with more straight sugar, to go eve further with the dryness. Both did a nice job of drying it out and...

'Cause nothin' gets you hotter, quicker, than a blown headgasket! Yeah, we're all major gearheads. OK, here's the premise... we'll be making a 10gal mash-in, then splitting it (50/50, not partigyle) between two beers. Since they're both experimental recipes, I wanna hedge my bets and get more...

Ours (at something well above 10 ABV) was bottle-carbed on SA05. Took a while, and now it's over-carbed! Of course, there's only one 22oz after 10 months... but our SA05 never stops putting out, it seems! We've had it bottle carb as high as 12.5% beers... just takes a while.

Yeah, give it a year... we made an Old Curmudgeon clone which was absolutely atrocious right away. Horrendously syrupy. After 6 months it was pretty respectable. After nearly a year, it's out-freakin'-standing. So put it in the back of a cool closet and forget about it... ;)

Update on this... did another ale Sunday, this time a Chocolate RyePA... of course not the same recipe, but similar mash and setup. No issues this time, despite being a bit low on mash temp (overestimated the temp of the grain and tun). Efficiency was back dead-nuts on 80%. Only difference...

We make some ginger beers, but none as an IPA... when we're throwing in all that ginger, we prefer not to let it fight it out with a mess of hops. As such, ours is more a pale ale than an IPA... we've been using Cascade and Centennial, but the focus as mentioned is more on the ginger and...

LOL... We've always added our peppers either in the boil or secondary. When we've done chipotle and ancho (for a Theobroma clone), they were sliced into strips, steeped in hot water to sanitize, then in the secondary. Plenty of flavor that way, definitely worth the trouble. Or throw in some...

Thanks... definitely sure there were no dough balls on this batch; we add the grain to the water in the mash tun with extensive stirring... I can personally vouch it was good... Likely will take 1gal of water out of the next round, see where that puts us...