Recent content by porterpounder

In

The more hops you use the later in the process, the more flavor and aroma you generally get. Commerically, most of the brewers I know and breweries I've worked for add a tiny bit of hops in the whirlpool and make up the rest with dry-hopping with great results. Dry hopping under pressure, which...

Sometimes it takes a couple weeks for the spirit flavor to come forward and in my experience carbonation makes bourbon pop pretty aggressively. The beauty of homebrewing is that you can just add bourbon right to the finished beer to taste. The spirit is bottled at its perfect drinking point, so...

May be a fun experiment if that can isn't swollen, but I would toss it.

First gen lager yeast can be very lazy when it's not fresh. Your numbers and process look good, but may you just didn't get that 1.4 mil/ml/P you were aiming for in the starter. As long as it smells and tastes good, ride it out.

What was you mash temp and is you thermometer calibrated? If you let it slide too high then all the attenuative yeast in the world won't take you to a lower FG.

Do you have an inline filter on you aeration pump line and are you sanitizing that line and stone? If you're pumping unfiltered room air into your wort through unsanitized line you can easily pick up some bugs. Dry yeast doesn't lead to tart beer unless it's a yeast that is designed to so so...

Looking at your process I'd guess that unless you're pressurizing your fermenter after primary fermentation is actively finished (usually 5-7 days) then you're leaving your beer unprotected from oxygen ingress by keeping it in the fermenter for 4 weeks. Darker beers will hold up better to...

How much lactose did you use? With a lb to 5 gal I usually don't see a beer that bbi go far below 1.035. Give it a good swirl a few times a day and bump the temp up into the low/ mid 70s and check again in a week.

Rehydrate your yeast prior to pitching to make sure you get maximum viability. That will help initial fermentation and also help make sure the T58 doesn't crap out early, which I've seen it do many times. Going to 1.100 from 1.050 you can estimate that 1/2 to 3/4 of your yeast cake will be...

Just cause I can't let this sit. Skunkiness is UV photoreaction with hop compounds. Very specific cause. Nothing to do with oxidation. http://www.professorbeer.com/articles/skunked_beer.html

There really isn't a correlation between color and need to cellar. Darker, more bitter beers will resist the poor effects of aging such as oxygenation better, but do no NEED to condition longer.

Styrian Goldings. Traditional, delcious, well-balance bittering, flavor aroma characteristics. I have also done a Mosaic single-hop tripel which was fantastic.

No, you shouldn't. There is no obvious reason to adjust pre-boil pH short of kettle-souring a beer.

When lautering, you should be putting all of your water through the grain rather than adding more water to the kettle directly, unless you need to lower the gravity to adjust for efficiency surplus. One of the best ways to control final pH of the lauter/sparge is to adjust our sparge water to...