Recent content by catnip1970

It's good for you for alot of different reasons as well. I heard a report the other day on the radio discussing the healt BENEFITS of having beer. Quite the turn around for a beverage that was much maligned for decades as being evil, sinful, detrimental to your health and so on. Like...

My first was a Brewers Best irish stout. My wife had the same reaction to it that your husband had to yours. Brewers Best seem to be good kits and even as many mistakes as I made with my first batch my homebrew came out better than what I'd buy at the store. 'Course it could be that I just...

So, the higher the OG the longer it should generally take to complete fermentation?

I sometimes think that homebrewers could easily fall into the same trap that alot of pro atheletes fall into...superstition. The pro ball player who has to wear the same pair of socks all season without washing them or has to wear his underwear inside out because THAT'S the trick to winning...

Really? How accurate are most hydrometers? Mine is one of the ones with the gravity.balling.abv scales on it.

Will the gravity reading change any in secondary? I'm doing my second batch right now. It's an oktoberfest and the recipe called for a FG of 1.015. I wound up with a FG of 1.018 when I racked into secondary just a few minutes ago. The original was supposed to be 1.055 and I got a 1.054 at 68...

Thanks Jezter! Simply subtract the final from the original and multiply by 131 and there you have it. Great info.

The right ingredient for priming doesn't always have to be corn sugar though, right? If I were to use something else, like honey, how would I figure out how much to use? A five gallon batch uses 5 oz of corn sugar for priming...how does that five ounces of sugar translate for other types of...

Can you post the formula for getting the 4.6 from the 1.048 sg/1.012 fg? Math was never a good thing for me.:confused: My first batch had a SG of 1.051 and a FG of 1.020 and I would have thought that would give me a ABV of 3.1% by simple math but I guess I may be missing something.

Thanks for that info. I'm only on my second batch. My first one I left in primary for 8 days and then bottled...hey, I was impatient.:) Now that I actually have a secondary I'll rack to it after 7 days for the oktoberfest that's in there now and leave it in for another 7 before priming and...

You could always do what I did and move away from the big city, find a quiet little mountain side home and get your water from a cold mountain well.:D I'll take what comes straight from my tap over what I can buy at a store anyday.

Hobby? Yeah, it starts out as a hobby and then before you know it you're thinking about beer all the time. You're sneaking online at work to look at brewing sites, the house has homebrew equipment in every room, you catch yourself calling out different beer types while making love...er...

Ah, you've been caught in the same trap that I was. The first batch came out great and now you're stoked to keep going. For homebrewers it's not the alchohol that you get addicted to it's the creating that you get hooked on. Hoppy b-day and congrats on your first batch going well.

Is secondary absolutely needed? Or is it simply a way to get the beer to clarify a bit before racking to the bottle for conditioning?

Not trying to hijack the thread but my question runs along the hops idea anyway. What's the difference between bittering hops and finishing hops? I understand boiling the bittering hops for 55 minutes to get them well incorporated in the wort but why only five minutes for the finishing...