Recent content by MC_McMic

I brewed this recipe this past weekend. It's the first beer I've made in about 2.5 years. I had a kid and some of my hobbies just fell off a cliff, unfortunately. I did make the adjustments jbags suggested... extra cinnamon and ancho chiles (and I'm going to use an extra vanilla bean in the...

Sorry for the late reply. It's been a crazy week. I actually did try to run some additional (heated) water through my grain bed, but by that time, it was too late. You have to add quite a bit of water to your grain after you've drained it to get it going again. The 1/2 - 3/4 gallon I poured...

I moved to my secondary today. With my unexpectedly low volume to start out, I decided to use a 5.5 gallon secondary fermenter. This is also my first time using whole hops. I just barely squeezed the beer and hops in there! :o Shortly after my initial brew day I realized many things I did...

I think I'm gonna do a boil-off test with my new pot with a precise measurement of water. That way, I can at least nail that down for the future. I did a similar test with my previous pot. Next time, I was also planning on using a larger quantity of water in my mash. I basically want to...

So, I just made my third attempt at all-grain brewing. My first two attempts were 5-gallon batches that were prepared recipes from AHBS. I did them a day apart and nailed my numbers across the board on both beers. It's important to note that this was around 8 months ago, and I basically...

I made this yesterday... only my second attempt at all grain with about 8 months between attempts. Man, practice does make perfect. My numbers were all over the place. My yield from my mash/sparge were well under what I expected by at least half a gallon. So, I made up for that with...

I believe the fuss is due to the fact that they're ubiquitous, reasonably priced and of good quality overall. It's like BMC for people that enjoy drinking real beer.

In Ecuador they basically have two beers: Club and Pilsener... both made by the same company. I went there on my honeymoon, and occasionally I would ask locals if they wished that they had more options. Nobody even thought about it. It's probably not unlike the fact that they don't lament not...

Unless those people were behind an actual blast wall or in full protective gear, that was amazingly stupid. That shard of glass could have ended up in someone's throat. They sounded pretty young. So, not entirely surprising they would do something that idiotic.

Jester King is a brewery, not a beer. Care to be more specific? The fact that you didn't name a particular beer and, instead, seem to dislike an entire brewery (which makes really good beer) is curious. As someone suggested earlier, you likely don't like sours and farmhouse ales. In that...

I used to cover my boil when I brewed outdoors before I knew better, at least as far as I was able to cover the pot with my stirring spoon in there. Another issue you run into besides DMS is that all of the hop matter in the wort will very quickly end up on the sides of your kettle and not in...

Very good point. I already have some silicon tubing for my MLT in the same diameter as my other tubing. I'll just use that going forward. Also, thanks to everyone from the reassurances. One less thing I need to worry about.

I transferred my first all-grain beer to a secondary fermenter for dry-hopping this past weekend. The hose on my racking cane is very curly at the moment (I plan to straighten it out under some hot water before using it again), so I was having a hard time getting it to lie at the bottom of the...

I did my first two all-grain batches last weekend. I aaaaaaalmost poured the mash water into the MLT with the ball valve open. The MLT was up on a table at the time, and I was standing right in front of it. So... you can imagine where the spigot was pointing. :p

OP, I did my first couple all-grain batches this past weekend, and I can't recommend enough actually testing your boil-off rate. I boiled 5 gallons of water the night before I brewed my first beer, and by factoring the results of that in, along with an expected 0.1 gallons of mash water lost...