Recent content by bottlenose

Can window AC units be refilled?

I built a glycol fermenter from the design given in BYO's "25 great homebrew projects" issue. The design is to put the cooling coil of a window A/C unit into a glycol bath (I used RV antifreeze), and fountain pumps to circulate the cold glycol through copper tubing surrounding two fermenters...

Been a while since I made the jump to all grain, but I don't recall much in the way of fermentation, secondary, or packaging differences from extract. That part should go just like you're used to.

Tried on the last two batches. The slow, gradual carbonation method works great. Only thing I've noticed is that the usual trick of racking to another keg by pushing with CO2 doesn't work well. I'll siphon next time.

It all depends on how close you're trying to hit the traditional process. I usually take to room temperature and then crash cool; as long as you're almost to FG before raising temperature, and have hit FG before crash cool, it should work. The problem is keeping the yeast active in a...

I've usually used 55F (13C).

I brewed an IIPA earlier this year with WLP001 and it came out great; no attenuation issues.

Thanks for the tip. Which size collar is that?

I've been using a small Bayou Classic SP10 burner for a while, but recently switched to keggles to up my batch size. If you haven't tried it, balancing a keggle on the SP10 is a bit dicey, so I picked up the larger SQ14. Tried using for the first time, and in a moderately breezy day found it...

Not a scientific study by any means but Gordon Strong claims he tasted it in some of his own beers after learning the flavor... Not a 30 year old book, and someone who is something of an authority on beer judging.

Interesting. To be honest I have never bothered cooling a sample to room temperature, and since even my ph meter is inaccurate above 115 or 120 had assumed the consistency I was seeing was due to the effects of the buffer. Could be that instead the time I've spent reading up on water chemistry...

Autolysis is not an unpleasant flavor; it's a glutamate flavor common to Asian food.

Historically, these are very different. Proper lagering means slowly cooling to near freezing so as to keep the yeast active. When I bottled lagers, I used this to good effect since I needed the yeast active for carbonation. Since I've started kegging, I'll use a generously long diacetyl rest...

Sure, it's completely plausible that I'm always pulling the beer off the yeast at approximately the same time to (incorrectly) give the indication that the act of racking caused the trub to settle. (I'm the sort of systems engineering geek that just might tune a process to produce just that...

I wouldn't go that far. Its hard to imagine yeast going 2 months without throwing off bad flavors (2-3 week ferment plus 1-2 month lager).