Recent content by cactussam

You should be fine without the secondary unless you plan to dry hop or add fruit or something later into the mix. Once fermentation is complete, just cold crash, siphon into your corny, then carbonate and drink :mug:

If it was only three days into fermentation you'll be fine. In the future, another option for your airlock is cheap vodka. Helps to kill anything that gets in there, and if any of it gets shocked back into the brew it'll just be a welcome addition of alcohol to your ABV :mug:

I let it sit for another week before bottling and when I did my taste test it did seem to have gained a sourness to it. It was somewhat underwhelming, but it is noticeable in the flavor profile. I'll definitely be doing starters from now on to hopefully prevent this sort of thing from happening...

Yeah, I generally only do a primary as well, but that doesn't work as well for me because I often brew a couple brews at once and my carboys only hold 5 GAL. This brew in particular occupied over 6 GAL in the primary before straining out all the pumpkin meat. I've also had issues with autolysis...

I'm glad you brought this up as no one else seemed to have made any mention of it in other posts that I've read about re using yeasts. I'll be more diligent about this in the future.

I was hoping that worst case scenario it would just sour the beer. So far that seems to be the general consensus of what I have to look forward to. As far as brews go, I think this is my 10th or 11th batch that I've done, and this is the first time anything like this has shown up. This batch...

Look a little more closely at the second and third pictures, you can actually see where it's bubbled up at the edge. It's some really funky looking stuff.

So, my first attempt at reusing yeast resulted in a really weird film at the top of the beer during fermentation. My guess is that this may result in some sour beer, so I plan on tasting when I move to my bottling bucket, but I wanted some feedback from you guys to see if I should bother trying...

Had my first taste today, and to describe it in a word... Delicious. It might even be the best beer I've brewed so far. Recipe coming soon :-)

This is my second batch ;-) waiting for the first one to finish bottle conditioning before I throw up the recipe, just to be sure. From wort taste tests to testing right before bottling (I always sip on my gravity readings), this brew has a lot of potential.

Great success! I came home tonight to a happily bubbling air lock and all is right again with the world :D I'll be posting my recipe soon for this pumpkin ale, it's really gonna rock your world ;-)

Another question for you, when you get ready to pitch your yeast into your brew/starter, what's it smell like? Mine had a bid of an acrid smell to it, not like the doughy smell I am used to out of the smack packs and what not. I'm a little worried that the yeast went bad, but I'm trying to...

That's pretty much the reason why I decided to start re capturing yeast. For the most part, my LHBS only sells liquid yeasts, so I'm gonna be saving around $8 per batch. From what I'm reading, it's OK to just warm it up and pitch, but starters really guarantee good yeast health and faster...

This is my first time attempting to reuse yeast so at this point all if mine is only a few days old in the fridge. Before that, it's probably sat in secondary for around 2 weeks andva week in primary before that. However, I've heard of refrigerated yeast being up to 6 months old and still being...

Hey guys, so I followed the wiki on recapturing yeast out of the trub left in the carboy after primary/secondary fermentation (found HERE) and I wanted to know what to do with that yeast before I'm ready to brew my next batch. So, the idea here is that I had a brew that turned out great, and...