Recent content by brad.maynes

Important fact #1 - I brew inside, on my gas stove. Important fact #2 - I have (as yet, knock wood) had no boil-overs. Regardless of fact #2, the heat off the bottom of my large kettles causes whatever minimal amounts of invisible "gunk" are on my stove surface to burn and become nice...

Okay, so I have looked at a number of Guinness-clone type recipes and many of them suggest souring some beer and adding it back in post-boil. These tend to suggest the terrifying (to me) method of leaving beer in a bowl for a week and then freezing. This seems (to me) like a really good way...

When I acidify my sparge water, I use lactic acid, which seems to work pretty well. There's a small section in Dave Miller's old homebrewing book (The Complete Handbook of Home Brewing), so I'd guess there's probably one in his new one as well. BLM

I just recently got a Corona Mill for Christmas (like your #2), and have done two batches with it, both weighing in at about 82% efficiency, which my buddy and I are pretty happy with :) Brad

Okay, my friend and I have just converted over to Star San, but once we got it home, we were terrified by the bottle warnings. Is Star San safe to touch with a naked (e.g. ungloved) hand when in its properly diluted form?

Success! Brewed today with the first crush from the new Corona. From my back of the envelope math, looks like about 80% efficiency! A brewery high so far!

Because the water in Ann Arbor is alarmingly clean, e.g. free of salts. We're talking about halfway between Pilsn water and London water.

Okay, I will fully admit that I am being an overly-anal retentive ex-chemistry major here, but ... when you pre-boil your liquor, does that remove all chlorine such that when I am considering salt (generally, not NaCl) additions, I can assume that Cl is at 0? Not sure if this is the right...

Just got a new Corona Mill for Christmas, and wanted to pass along my experiences so far. Brewing first batch with it on Saturday. I don't have any fancy pictures because I'm, you know, lazy. My initial look at the grinding surfaces on the fully assembled mill made me think that the gap was...

According to Dave Miller's book, at the beginning of lautering, you should recirculate your runoff until "crystal clear". After an hour and a half of recirculating on last Saturday (don't ask - bad job sparging last time, nuff said), my buddy and I were never able to hit "crystal clear" to our...

I'm in A2 as well, but have only done two AG batches here so far. I agree that I am concerned about brewing stouts and porters (my favs!) due to the too-clean water profile :) BLM

Thanks for the quick responses! I usually (i.e. almost always) use a secondary, carboy fermenter before bottling. In the past, I've always done it for about a week, but I've more recently read that two weeks is the recommended minimum, so that's what I'm going to be trying on this batch. BLM

I used to use a funnel with strainer for this purpose, but found that it gets blocked/slow flow in a HURRY. On my last batch of beer (admittedly all-grain, but the principle is the same), I used a simply kitchen collander to remove the hops from the finished wort. As long as you throroughly...

Hi there, first time poster. I have brewed several batches of all-grain brews before, but this is the first time I've had a fermentation issue. Here's the relevant stats: Original gravity - 1.037 Yeast - Dry Nottingham, 1 packet Fermentation temp - between 63F and 61F Wort was made and...