Recent content by hoserbrau

That's what I was thinking about doing, but I don't know how often I should be checking it. If it's going to take longer than a few weeks, I shouldn't be pulling samples every day (but if it will only take a week or 2, maybe I should pull more samples).

My wife surprised me with a new 5-gallon white oak barrel for my birthday. I have decided to go ahead and funk it up with a sour beer, and I will use this vessel primarily for aging sour ales. I brewed up a Sour Ginger Apricot Ale from a recipe kit that I slightly modified from AHS. I...

So my awesome wife got me a counterflow wort chiller for Christmas! The only problem is, I don't have a march pump and my brew kettle does not have a spigot. What is the recommended way to get my hot wort into the chiller? Should I drill a hole and install a spigot in the side of my kettle...

Oh, good call on the vacuum! Man, this is the best board on the interwebs!

This wasn't at DFW was it? I had the exact same experience at a TGIFridays in DFW a couple of weeks ago. I don't mind most of SA's beers. Unlike a lot of people on this board, I enjoy the Latitude 48 (though I won't go out of my way to look for it). However, the Chocolate Bock tastes too...

So I've brewed up 6 different styles of beer in 6 different kegs for a friend's party. I have all the kegs and picnic taps, but I only have 1 CO2 tank/regulator. I don't mind pushing the same PSI into each keg for the party, so I was hoping to engineer my own pressurizing system stemming from...

There's a lot of hate for the Cherry Wheat in here. I'm not a huge fan of it myself but I wouldn't pour it down the sink. For some reason I seem to recall that they had a home brewing contest among their employees, and the prize was a national distribution of that beer. It was won by some...

My brew buddy has been helping me since he was just a few weeks old. Now he's almost 6 months and he helped me brew his 6th batch last weekend!

I like to collect the hot water that first comes out of my immersion chiller in my HLT. I then use that hot water for cleaning. Once the runoff gets cool, I'll run it into a tub where I'll stick my kettle. I'll usually dump some ice in the tub as well to help cool it down. I've recently...

I suppose it's already been "crash-cooling". After I put it in the secondary fermenter (2 weeks ago), I set my fridge back to 40 degrees. I guess it does look like it's starting to clarify at the top; I'll give it another week in the secondary before I rack it to the keg. My "brew club" is...

Yes, I used two vials of yeast because I did not make a yeast starter. The fermentation seemed to go great once it got started. It fermented for almost 2 weeks straight, but it took 3 days to get started. Do you think it picked up some kind of wild yeast? I did have it fermenting right next...

Those pictures above are from this morning. I haven't tasted it since I put it into the secondary a few weeks ago, so maybe I'll sneak some out this weekend and get some tasting notes.

That first picture was taken as I was pouring the wort from the kettle into the primary fermenter. It's now a month later, and it's now uniformly cloudy. Is it worth trying the gelatin, or should I just chalk it up to my first botched batch? Here is what it looks like this morning after...

Here's a picture I took just before I added the yeast. You can see that it's clear, but it's got a milky cloud forming in the middle. I had never used whirlfloc before, so I had just assumed that the cloud was the proteins coagulating and dropping out. However, now everything is the milky...