Recent content by cwb124

A homebrew guy I know says he dumps his wort in a the primary that already ice cubes in it bought from the store. So I dumped 2 8lb bags of ice in the primary and poured my boiling wort over it. Well...the temperature got down to ~52 degrees almost immediately. I know a cold break is good...

Curious if it matters if doing a partial boil, you boil say 2 gallons or 4 gallsons, will the end result be any different? If so, why? At the end the day, you hope to ferment ~5 gallons, so I don't get how boiled amount would matter at all, no matter what you boil, it will be dilluted to 5...

I snagged a case of Grolsch bottles off Craigslist this weekend and was washing them up to be used...and one had a label on it from a homebrew from 1992, so the bottle is either 15 years old or a little older. Can these types of bottles be used indefinately? Do they weaken and eventually...

I hit my FG of 1.012 - 1.015 in the primary fermenter (1.014), and let it sit in a clearing tank for 16 days and bottled on saturday. My gravity again was exactly 1.014. I would have thought there would be some change to it, but there wasn't any. Is this normal?

Why are you cracking the beer before putting it in the fridge? I'm confused.

You know you can just buy those beers cheaper than you can brew them? Why waste your time and money making the same swill you can buy at every beer store in town?

GREAT NEWS!!! Out of pure curiosity, I cracked another beer from a different six pack to test temperature and see if it was as bad as the first one, and there's CARBONATION AND TASTE!!! It's warm, but by God is it's good, it tastes like beer, and good beer. I'm amazed that two bottles could...

Yeah 5oz of priming sugar came with the kit. I'm a little concerned it wasn't stirred properly. I did the boil, and added it to about a gallon of wort in the bottling bucket, and then continued to siphon from secondary bottling bucket. Another thing I didn't do was let the boiled sugar...

I am down for that. Might as well utilitze my skills. I did think of one thing though, my mother gave me the LD Carlson brewer's kit for Xmas along with the Red Ale kit. Knowing my mother, she bought it in August and it sat around since January until I brewed it so the ingredients were old...

I opened my first ever brew tonight as I was racking my second batch (Brewer's Best Oktoberfest) to the secondary. I made the Brewer's Best Red Ale kit. My steps were primary for one week, secondary for two weeks, and now it's a week in the bottles and I cracked my first one to taste...

I got a vile of White Labs ale yeast. I read their FAQ, and it looks like you only need a starter if the yeast is past it's expiration date, or your SG is over 1.070. Otherwise I think I'm fine bringing it up to room temperature and pitching it.

What the hell is a starter and how do I do it? (Yes I need to read some books)

I have brewed two Brewer's best kits so far, none finished yet. They come with a pouch of dry yeast. Last night I was surfing some homebrew stores looking for some ingredients and decided to grab some liquid yeast to try something different along with the ingredients I got to make my first...

I just bought my first sixer of Rogue beer the other day. Never heard of them, but my first batch of home brew is a red ale, and I saw the Rogue red ale so I snagged it to see what mine will hopefully sort of taste like. I hope my beer is half as good as Rogue's, I'll be happy. Reusable...

Women and beer are just a complete mystery to me. My wife will ONLY drinking rolling rock light, or natural light/ICE. It's horrid. She just plain doesn't like beer and won't drink it unless she's hammered already.