Recent content by captaineriv

All good points. Didn't even think about the corn sugar altering the taste/mouthfeel, but it would. Still deciding whether I want to add the MD and taste or just take my best guess and add it all at once. Afterall, it hasn't been carbonated yet and my perception of the body before and after...

The plan was to just dissolve the stuff in the saucepan along with the corn sugar for priming only using the amount of water I'd normally use for the priming solution. May need to add a little extra water but hopefully not by much. Thanks for the thoughts everyone. captaineriv

I started out at 1.056 and ended up at 1.009. According to the recipe I was following, should have been closer to FG 1.013. Maybe my mash temp got a little lower than expected. Who knows. Tasted it when I racked it to secondary and sure enough, good flavor but thinner than I would have...

I got higher than expected attenuation with my IPA and it is tasting dryer than I would have liked. Since maltodextrin is supposedly unfermentable, is there any harm in boiling some (maybe 4-6 oz.) along with the priming sugar and adding it at bottling to add a little body to the final...

Sounds pretty fool proof then. As far as the first infusion, I doubt I'll be able to add enough near-boiling water to the 150 degree sweet wort already in the tun to bring the temp inside up to 168 without overshooting my first runoff volume. I presume this is to be expected and I should just...

Figured I'd try batch sparging for the first time on my California Common. It will be about 10.5 lbs of grain. For the first infusion of the sparge, just going to add some boiling top-up water after the mash to get as close to 170 degrees as possible for the first 3.25 gallons of runoff...

I was hoping this would be the case. Thanks guys. captaineriv

The 90 minutes definitely seemed completely unnecessary to me as well. I'm also wondering how important that protein rest is with well-modified 2-row. Think he recommends it just to reduce haze? Anchor Steam does tend to be brilliantly clear. I'm sure the super high floc yeast aids in that...

I was looking in Szamatulski's Clone Brews book at an Anchor Steam clone that uses 9 lbs. US 2-row and 14 oz of crystal malt for the grainbill. What gets me is that the book recommends a protein rest at 122 for 30 minutes and conversion at 150 for 90 minutes. Seems like this would make a...

Awesome. Expensive, yes. But it is good to know there is somewhere out there who has it if I get a wild hair... or have a few too many and decide to go on an online beer raid. captaineriv

I understand (hopefully, incorrectly) that Westvleteren does not distribute to the US. Does anyone know the most economical way that one would go about getting Westy brews or any other extremely rare brews, for that matter? Surely, there is a trusted source somewhere in the States that keeps...

david_42, your hopwine looks like suicide in a bottle. If we stop seeing any posts from you, how long should we wait before sending the coroner your way? captaineriv

I'm getting ready to make my first draft beer and I decided to brew an English brown for the occasion. I'm not following any particular recipe, so I thought I'd run the one I pulled out of nowhere by everyone. 9 lbs. English Pale malt .5 lbs. Crystal (75L) .75 lbs. Briess Special Roast (50L)...

That was actually one of the regulators I was looking at. I was thinking about replacing the 3/8 OD barbed fitting on the regulator with this: http://www.northernbrewer.com/pics/fullsize/check-valve.jpg and also buying threaded ball-lock disconnects and then using a hose with threaded...

Sorry to hijack my own thread, but I noticed that a lot of CO2 regulators use the larger 3/8 inch barbed fitting to hook the gas line to. How easy is it to change that to a 1/4 inch fitting since it seems that that's what most of the ball-lock gas-in disconnects are. Does that piece on the...