Recent content by Bearto

I made my dowel with this stopper. http://morebeer.com/products/universal-stopper-solid.html I got a 1 inch oak dowel, cut out the top of this bung, sealed the bung to the dowel with aquarium silicone so the oak is the the only path for gas exchange. the stopper lets it fit nice and snug...

I set one up kind of by accident. I was aging 3 glass carboys with lambic and brett strains and got busy and they ended up 4.5 yrs old. I did not notice a difference between the brett with the oak dowel vs the brett with the airlock, though the airlock did dry out occasionally. The 3rd was a...

As ghpeel states above, Extract can in fact be helped to achieve higher attentions (lower f.g.) by simply adding some base malt to the extract in the mash. Extract is essentially the result of malting at about 155 deg F to be a jack of all trades with modest body and sweetness. This is too high...

I do something similar with carboys and my conical. I have different blends of Sacc and Brett strains that I use continuously. When I brew, I bottle, and pour the fresh beer on top of the old secondary cake. Typically I throw out the primary sludge. You could do the same thing but pull out only...

MY first thought is keep it clean and minimize the wine getting into your brew. My second thought is that you are not going to get much "oak" flavor from used chips...Good luck.

I recommend Orval. Its a trappist with wild Brettanomyces yeast. Basically a very bitter pale ale with incredible yeast flavor. Big fan of the Lindemans Cuvee Rene and glad to see it getting such good reviews here. It is a very sour beer but not like vinegar. Keep the stuff away from your wine...

I agree that a DIY 50 foot coil with messy bends is better than a pretty ready made 25 foot. The cooling capacity is significant. Its simple surface area for heat transfer. I have used both 25 and 50 foot copper tube for hundreds of gallons of brewing. I am now a zealot for flat plate...