Recent content by Radegast

I know Cooper's Ale Yeast has a pretty terrible reputation, and I just wanted to report my own experience. Last year, I received a Cooper's Stout extract kit as a gift. The kit was fresh and made great beer, and I saved the yeast packet in the fridge because I was fermenting the stout on a...

The yeast escaped containment. No signs of survivors. The yeast have taken over the whole facility.

I used Beano and amylase powder while cereal mashing oatmeal. The amylase ate the starch, and the Beano cut down the big sugars. It was extract, so I had no barley enzymes. It turned out real well. Efficiency-wise, it's better than my AG mashes. I wanted a highly fermentable extract out of...

Yeah, that's a good point. I was wondering if a check valve could prevent that?

Long story short: Bought a nice used fridge, old fridge got cleaned up and is heading to retirement as a lagerator. This particular fridge has a freezer on top with a separate door and auto-defrost, which means both the freezer and refrigerator compartments have drain holes. The bottom drain...

I can't anyone who sells ProMalic on a homebrew scale, but you can get schizosaccaromyces pombe from scientific supply companies. I wonder how close we could get to homemade ProMalic. The cider maker in my homebrew club would do a backflip if we could cure his malic woes.

Thank you, marsav. This is more than I could have hoped for.

Thanks for the info, everyone! I've barely scratched the surface of water chemistry, so I wasn't sure what to make of this.

From Ward Labs: pH 7.3 Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) Est, ppm 179 Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm 0.30 Cations / Anions, me/L 2.7/2.8 ppm Sodium, Na 7 Potassium, K 2 Calcium, Ca 37 Magnesium, Mg 6 Total Hardness, CaCO3 118 Nitrate, NO3-N 8.2 (SAFE) Sulfate, SO4-S < 1 Chloride...

So homebrewers like to throw in neat little adjuncts, like nuts or baked goods or coconut, that are unfortunately filled with fat, leading to some kind of rancidity. Since lipase is readily available as a cheese-making enzyme, has anyone tried using it to destroy the fat content of beer...

I was thinking about taking some slurry from a fully attenuated beer, killing it, and tossing into the beer when there isn't so much activity so it won't all get cleaned up. I was just wondering how the "meaty" flavor would go with a rauchbier which, famously, frequently taste like bacon anyway.

I was wondering what kind of accent a very, very small amount would bring to a smoked beer.

That "meaty" taste from autolysis...Has anyone tried getting that on purpose? If I threw a couple tablespoons of yeast slurry into the boil, would that give me a slight vegemite taste, or would the living yeast clean it up after I pitched them?

Hi, I'm making a pumpkin beer (yes, just getting around to it). The guy at the LHBS told me that pumpkin rind would add an unpleasant flavor, but I was thinking it would help with all of the mashing problems I've heard go with pumpkin beer. Does anyone have any experience with pumpkin rind...

Great chart! What's the max size for a no-sparge batch relative to these max batch sizes?