Recent content by HairyDogBrewing

This is SWMBO's favorite beer. Brewed at Brasserie Val de Sambre in Gozee, Belgium. It is also sold as Abbaye dAulne Blonde. I'm going to brew a Wit for baseline and try a side-by-side tasting to see what's missing. Has anyone else tried to imitiate this beer?

Copper was the metal of choice before stainless steel was available. Stainless steel is about 18% chromium and 10% nickel. So there's no problem with the elements in the cupronickel alloys. Stainless steel is much more popular now because copper is so expensive. Also, stainless steel is...

The Brix scale was developed for solutions of sucrose. Each degree of Brix is one percent sucrose, by mass. So you can check your refractometer at 15 Brix by dissolving 15 grams of table sugar in 100 grams of distilled water. This should have a specific gravity of 1.061 at 20 degrees Celsius...

I always mix StarSan with distilled water. It's possible that I screwed up that day, but as i remember those hoses were filled with diluted StarSan/distilled water for 6-8 weeks and had something growing in there when I went to use them.

Most malt used in beer is grown at higher latitudes - North Dakota, Canada, Scotland. Maybe it makes better beer or it's more profitable or both. The beer style American Pilsner was developed as a way to use 6-row barley and corn. All 6-row is too grainy or husky. Corn is used because it...

I've had keg lines get moldy when filled with StarSan for several weeks. Now I blow out as much liquid as possible after cleaning and store them in the refrigerator.

When I was bottling: Not nearly enough Now that I'm kegging: Far too many (10 cases)

Depends on the temperature. Eight coke bottles will get 80F wort down to 60F in four or five hours. If the room is the right temperature, I use one 20oz bottle every eight hours during peak fermentation.

I just swap soda bottles every 8 hours or so.

Follow up: In BeerSmith it's called "Wort Calibration Value". For instance, if the refract reads 15.0 Brix and the hydro reads 1.059 (after temperature correction); then the WCV would be 1.04.

One Brix is 4 gravity points - for sucrose. The refractometer is off a little bit for wort, so there is a small correction factor. So if you take OG with both hydro and refract you'll see what correction is needed and put that number in BeerSmith's refractometer tool. I think Yooper helped...

I'm going to bump this because I'm sure that at least one of us has broken a carboy with the neck handle. Speak up! In the name of safer brewing!

I use mine to measure each running of the batch sparge. So I'll have some data when I decide to do some partigyle batches. Then I get a reading for boil gravity, if it's lower than expected I can add extract. These are all hot wort and I don't have to wait 10-15 min for a hydrometer sample to...

I've always wondered about this too. I know that hundreds of organic compounds are created and consumed during fermentation. But, except for sugars and ethanol, I haven't seen anywhere that compound A has x ppm to start and y ppm after a certain amount of time. It's even more complicated for...

I have one of those, and used it a few times. When I heard that the neck could break I stopped using it. Now I carry the carboy in a milk crate.