Recent content by beaker11

Thanks all!

A friend of mine just brewed his first batch (Irish Red from Midwest). A few days after putting it in his fermentation bucket, he started freaking out about no airlock activity. I told him to relax and give it another week then look inside and take a grav reading. He opened it yesterday and saw...

I always use a reusable hop bag that has a finer mesh than muslin bags and I don't end up with hop gunk in the beer. Pretty cheap, I think well worth it.

My Mother gave me an ingredient kit with White Labs liquid White Ale Yeast. However, she didn't realize that the yeast needed to be refrigerated. I put it in the fridge as soon as I opened it but it had been sitting at room temp for about 10 days before it was opened. It came with an ice pack...

I left it in the primary. I've heard mixed opinions on racking to secondary if you don't intend to dry hop or add anything else so I left it in primary to avoid unnecessary chance for contamination. Also, I only have one fermenter so I didn't have much of a choice!

Thanks! I'll try it out.

I actually just bottled this same kit from Midwest Yesterday. I let it ferment for 2 weeks before bottling and everything looked fine. I agree with everyone else, give it some more time and a little more heat.

I'm about to move on to my second 5 gal PG batch. After seeing some of my troubles with the first batch, my amazing wife upgraded me to a 20 qt SS kettle (thanks babe!). I figured that with leaving head space to prevent a boil over the kettle could hold around 3.5-4 gal but I'm not sure if our...