Recent content by kkuczma

"How I Hurt My Lower Back": The Homebrewers Story. Carrying kettles, buckets, fermenters, and kegs filled with water and wort has not been kind to my body.

Started my American Pale Ale just a bit ago. First time brewing a Pale Ale from scratch. 90% pale malt, 10% crystal, rolling with citra and cascade on the hops. 5 gallon batch. But also my first time brewing with two 8 gallon kettles and I'm coming to the realizing I do not have a big enough...

made a recipe for a dark lager, received my Porter ingredients, and checked the status of my fermenting hard cider, which is looking VERY active, more than my previous in September.

Nothing- I was diagnosed with acute diverticulitis on Tuesday and I'm on a liquid diet that does not include beers. From what I understand, it may be two months before I can safely resume drinking beer. Which is unfortunate because I just brewed my first hard cider using Ritter's Cider Mill...

A brief follow up on how this has all gone: I transferred to a keg over the weekend and used .2oz of sea salt and about .3oz of lime zest, adding those to the keg first and racking the beer on top. I gave it a taste the morning after to see how it all blended and the result at the moment is...

Just brewed a salt lime lager that’s now in fermentation, but my neighbor and I also just ordered the ingredients to make a west coast IPA in tribute to the bitterness of our sports fandom for our favorite baseball teams. I’m also going to look up what I can do with some of my leftover grains...

So far, we are on the way! Temps in the freezer dropped as low as 49 and came back up to 56 where I want it to sit. Came downstairs to the basement this morning to check on it and we’ve got activity!

We just started a happy hour for local artists where I live and we are keeping it purposely small for the moment to dial in a stronger sense of participation and engagement, so I completely understand. We do want to expand it (we are trying to cultivate community!) but too many participants may...

Do you think some of it is shyness about joining? I embody imposter syndrome with some of my hobbies (including painting and homebrewing) and would feel intimidated about joining a local homebrewing group for fear I was too "amateurish" and not knowledgeable enough to contribute, or that I would...

I took off from work yesterday (Thank you, abundant PTO) to brew a beer I wanted to have ready after a day of working on my yard in the summer. I thought I'd share some notes from this brew, as told from the perspective of a person who is still truly getting the hang of brewing. Salt lime lager...

I've been trying to cobble it together from different recipes, but I've had trouble coming across many examples of a salt lime lager, unfortunately. And then it seems like everyone has a different approach for the salt and lime and for every "you should do it this way," there's a counterpoint...

Hello! I'm going to brew a salt-lime lager for the summer. It will be a 5 gallon all-grain batch brewed with mostly german pils and a bit of flaked corn, Saaz for the hops. I'm uncertain of where to add the lime and salt in this and what things I should anticipate based on where to use them...

I brewed my first ever non-kit recipe yesterday- put everything together on my own after doing the research and went with 5 gallons of Vienna Lager! 7 lbs of Vienna malt 3 lbs of Munich malt 3oz of chocolate malt .5 oz of Saaz at 60 minutes .9 oz of Saaz at 5 minutes OG of 1.053 Two 11.5oz...

Thanks everyone. So far, this has been something close to disastrous in terms of the process, so if I get anything decent out of this to drink, I'll be happy. Good stories for the future when I've got a better handle on things, right?

Well, let's chalk this up to inexperience and not doing the right research. I used BIAB for a 5 gallon Vienna Lager I'm brewing today. All the kits I've previously brewed were 1 gallon all-grain kits. I sparged with the grains in a colander; when I was introduced to BIAB on a couple 1-gallon...