Recent content by mtags

I built something similar to KiltedCorpse. I used a heat lamp (big red bulb) and a computer fan blowing on it. And it is controlled by a line level thermostat. I don't think you need to worry about shielding your beer from the light. The lamp is only on for a few minutes a day, I'm sure I...

Good to know. Thanks. What about Paulaner HefeWeizen?

I'm trying to harvest some yeast from a bottle of Hacker Pschorr HefeWeizen. I stirred up the sediment from the bottom of the bottle and put it in a small starter (1 cup with yeast nutrients) 4 days ago and haven't see anything happen. This is my first time trying to harvest yeast from a...

check into washing/rinsing yeast. It basically gets rid of the beer and hops from the cake and leaves you with just the yeast. After this you may want to create a starter to get the yeast going but not required.

Sorry, yes, I was thinking sieve. My mash tun is elevated and drains through a valve, down a hose into my brew pot.

I batch sparge. I have a braided steel hose inside the mash tun that connects to the drain of my cooler, which is then connected to a valve. The braided hose does the siphoning. I suppose the flow would pretty much stop once the wort level went below the drain. I think I have always just...

So I assume this is involves no tipping of the mash tun. Correct? So if there is no tipping when calculating my dead space, I shouldn't tip when draining my wort. And then just stop draining when i reach my preboil volume. Does that sound right?

I'm referring to my sparge. My drain runs great, the hose from my drain is flowing as fast a possible. But after I've gotten a large portion of my wort out, the flow goes down to a trickle. I think I could let this trickle go on for a long time until the grains are completely dry and every...

When should I stop draining my mash tun? My mash tun is a 10 gal rectangular cooler with a stainless steel braid going to the drain. The drain is the coolers drain. If I leave the tun flat on the counter, there will be a lot of wort left in the bottom. The more of an angle I tip, the...

I'm planning to start a yeast bank this weekend from a smack pack of wyeast. Should I extract the yeast from the smack pack and put it directly into my yeast bank jars, or should I create a starter first, extract the yeast from the starter, and put that into the yeast bank jars? I'm...

I'm in Calgary and you can buy swing-top bottles at all the home brew stores I've been too. New EZ-CAP are somewhere around $3 a bottle, but some will sell used ones too and Grolsh bottles. For my first batch of beer I found 80 Grolsh bottles on Kijiji for $1 each. And i have seen them pop up...

Thanks for telling me about the Yeast Wranglers. I'll try to get to the next meeting. And an extra bonus that the meet at the WR brewery. WR has great beer. I got myself a turkey boiler, and was getting psyched up to make some beer without a kit, but then had some problems finding the...

So are most people getting their ingredients shipped to them?

I thought I would try to grow some hops, even though I'm very new to brewing. I found two different hop plant types at a local greenhouse. One was called Common and the other was Comet. I haven't been able to find any info about them online in regards to brewing. Does anyone know anything...

I'm pretty new to making beer and would like to get out of the 'kit' stage. So i found a recipe for an IPA in the 'Homebrewing for Dummies' book, and took it to a home brewing store in calgary. They were very helpful in trying to track down what I needed, but in the end they said that the...