Recent content by roymeo

Hopefully having a hopped medium that the yeast can beat mold to would be enough. That's what I did. But I was taking yeast from the great outdoors, not from my house, hvac, and critters.

Brewed up a batch on Sunday and fermented it with the descendants of the yeast I captured on Twin Peaks in San Francisco back on 2012-02-26 in an extra gallon of wort I'd brewed. Guess I should have known to put the blowoff hose in instead of just helpfully on top of the bucket...

You want wort instead of pure sugar, because you're hoping to catch something that survives best in wort. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, put out what you want them to be best at eating.

Why cover it with cotton--you WANT something to get in there. For my first capture i just put warm wort in a 1 gallon jug, let it cool, drove it to a good windy location (Twin Peaks in SF), parked, and opened the lid (thsssp, as it sucked in air) and let it sit in the wind blowing up the hill...

I saw a real bottle of Star San in the wild the other day that had BOTH caps in perfect shape. I don't think I've ever seen one with unbroken caps outside the store. Though this was a pretty new bottle and was in BrewLab SF which is a homebrewing hacker space so they go through a lot. But...

White Labs has various kits and lab services: http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/craft_test_kits.html http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/craft_lab.html I noticed some info in the microscope bit about wild yeasts being much smaller than regular beer yeast strains. roymeo

Unless you boiled the honey long enough to kill anything it in, you could end up growing whatever was in/on the honey rather than whatever was in the air. I'd put a loose fitting lid on the mason jar and put it on the kitchen counter so I could watch it, give it a shake, etc. (In fact that's...

Just discovered this thread. Here's my first experiment: Back in ~ February 2012 I made a batch of Imperial Stout. 5 gallons went into the bucket, but I'd made a bit extra so I siphoned out about 2/3rds a gallon while still pretty hot into a sanitized gallon jug (green glass, probably an...

All of those are potential ways of improving, or at least not infecting, beer. You can also take it further than your current process in some way or another (autoclave?). But just because X, Y, and Z are good practices which improve beer quality and/or reduce risk, that does not in itself...

Only way to really know: split a batch and aerate them differently then compare.

The Quinoa bitter recipe in "The Homebrewer's Garden" only calls for 6 pounds of raw quinoa with about that much in malted barley. (Extract recipe is only 1/2 pound.) They do mention several things that are in this thread, from amaranth to home malting, I'd definitely recommend it to anyone...