Recent content by Shoegaze99

I'd prefer to use glass across the board, however, I know myself. I'm NOT careful, I have a few beers when I brew, and I'm a small enough guy that handling full glass carboys is a sketchy proposition. So for me personally, I skip glass except in the case of secondaries. Best way to prevent...

Good to know others do this and get good results. Thanks. I've done it for my last dozen or so batches and have generally had good beer, but wanted to be sure I wasn't missing something or shortchanging my beer. Thanks!

There is nothing stupid about discussing the pros and cons of various pieces of equipment, nor is there anything stupid about homebrewers discussing why they chose one piece of equipment over another.

Yes, very thorough aeration. I'm a shaker. In this case that sucker got a good 10-15 minutes of shaking. Pitched yesterday at around 3 pm, by the top I got up to go to work it was gurgling along nicely.

Don't have the full recipe here in front of me. IIRC, it was 4.5 quarts (or 13.5 pounds) of LME, dark and pale, and roughly three pounds of specialty grains (black, chocolate, aromatic, caramunic). The off OG may be from the slight top not being fully stirred into the wort. Had to top off about...

Extract brewer here. As I bring my boil kettle up to temperature, I steep my specialty grains in a separate pot. I then transfer the resulting grain "tea" over to the boil kettle. I started doing this to save time. Since my stove was very slow to get the water up to temp, doing this side-by-side...

So a quick update. Took a reading today to be sure the yeast had pushed through okay. Had two days of strong activity and then nothing. Not a big deal, some beers ferment fast, just wanted to be sure it actually fermented rather than stalled. Got down to 1.018. Sounds good to me. I expect a...

A little worried about infection, but it got off to a quick start, fermentation looks healthy, and smells good ... so I think I dodged that bullet.

Brewed a barleywine yesterday. First chance to try my new burner & larger kettle. Brewing went fine. Near the end of chilling, however, I discovered that my wort chiller had developed a slow leak where the hose connects with the chiller. Not enough to squirt water, but enough so that it...

I've done this. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone done with 3 gallons of water instead of 5. Did a little extra dry-hopping, too, just because. Came out great.

This is probably my second biggest hurdle to climb in improving my brewing (moving to full boils being the other). I started going with swamp coolers, which helps me keep temps cooler than they were before, but I'm still having a hard time keeping them as cool and stable as I'd like, and I've...

You can, but all you'd be doing is adding another step and increasing your chances of infection. If it's important to you that your beer is very clear go ahead and rack to secondary, but I wouldn't say it's vital. Even racking to secondary, your beer will have sediment. Homebrew virtually always...

Cascade, Centennial, Citra, and Sorachi Ace are all hops I've used to dry-hop, and to great effect. While I haven't used them for dry-hopping, I suspect Warrior and Simcoe would also be great.

I'll echo what others have said. It's only been a week. No reason you can't leave it in primary. Two, three weeks in the primary ... not only not a big deal, it's arguably better for your beer. (I don't secondary at all unless I'm doing post-ferment additions or dry-hopping, and three weeks in...

Even a good soak in scalding hot soapy water will do the trick for many bottles, if not most. You'll have to do more scubbing than you would with Oxyclean, and it's unlikely the labels will slide off perfectly intact like they do with Ovy, but it'll get the job done. Do 30 minutes to an hour...