Recent content by ArthurDigbySellers

I'm with ptownbmac - it sounds like you inoculated before you really mashed anything. You need to perform a normal mash and then pitch your bugs to inoculate your wort. You can inoculate the mash itself (sour mash) or you can drain first and then inoculate (sour kettle) but either way you need...

Looks like Black Angel is viable. Here is the list from The Mad Fermentationist's website: http://www.themadfermentationist.com/p/dreg-list.html

I used grain to sour my first-ever BW and it worked perfectly but I think I'll try the capsule method the next time. I just seems easier. Not having to try to keep the temp at ~100 will be nice too.

I just made my first BW as well and did just that. Soured with unmilled grain until it was sour enough for me then boiled, cooled, and pitched US-05. Worked great.

I guess no one has seen this before or I didn't describe what it looked like well enough. I sampled the beer after about a week in the fermenter and it still tasted perfectly fine. So I bottled the batch on Wednesday and just to make sure I didn't siphon any of that weird stuff into my...

This weekend I started the process to brew a Berliner Weisse using grain to sour my wort. This is the first time I have ever tried to sour a beer. This was a 2.5 gallon batch using BIAB with full volume of water. I mashed in my boil kettle, cooled to 120 and then pitched the grain in a bag...

Well at least your instructions err on the side of longer fermentation than the kits which instruct you to bottle after 7 days in the fermenter!

To keep the hijack going, I laughed harder at this than I should have. Probably because I just spent 3 days at Universal doing all things Harry Potter with my daughter.

Typically you sparge with water at 168 degrees (or less than 170) to avoid extracting harsh tannins from the grain.

Hopefully the tweaks you made will solve your problem. I've had a couple stuck mashes but they were both the result of using flaked oats/barley with no rice hulls. Really frustrating when that happens.

I don't know if this has anything to do with it or not, but your manifold is basically touching the back and side wall of the cooler. In How to Brew, John Palmer suggests to keep the manifold slightly spaced from the cooler walls (about the width of your tubing) to avoid the water from...

I don't have enough room in my beer fridge to store all of my excess beer (too much store bought craft beer I guess) so I just leave my beer in the same closet that I condition in until I decide to move a 4 or 6 pack into the fridge to drink. This has probably resulted in IPAs that have tasted...

Since you are obviously in the active fermentation phase (very active since you blew your airlocks off!), you are probably ok. The co2 produced by fermentation is what blew the airlocks off and that co2 should have also blocked any oxygen from getting in while the airlocks were off. You've...

Sorry, I scanned your post like 5 times and still missed that you posted your fermentation temp! I've never fermented US-05 below 65 and have never run into the ester issue with it so meatcleaver's advice is probably good to follow.

Are you able to control your fermentation temps? Esters can be caused by fermenting at at higher than recommended temperatures. What was your fermentation temp?