Recent content by thrashandburn

Gelatin works best when the beer is very cold. I don't know if you cold crash, but if you do, dry hop it, cold crash it for a couple days, transfer the cold beer to the keg and add gelatin right to it in the keg. All of the haze should fall out to the bottom of the keg. Your first pint might...

I rarely make beers with spices, however, when I do, I typically use a tincture method. Just soak your spices in vodka or any strong neutral flavored spirit for a week or two. The vodka absorbs the flavor of the spices and you will have basically made a flavor extract of the spice. Then you can...

I brew small batches occasionally. I do them biab and I have a few recommendations for holding temperature. Traditionally biab brewing requires using your full water volume for the mash, removing the bag and going right into the boil. However, because the mash is so thin, it has less thermal...

While I too have this problem and have yet to remedy it, I've read that this occurs as a result of imbalance between air and propane as they flow through the burner. My understanding of it is that too much of one or the other causes the propane to burn with high inefficiency leading to unburnt...

Why not wash your kolsch yeast and save it for subsequent batches? You can probably get somewhere around 8 batches to one smack pack as long as you sanitize well and pitch the washed yeast into a healthy starter.

Well if you're achieving higher than expected O.G. then your efficiency is higher than your recipes are calculated for. This can be a great thing because it can save you a couple bucks per batch in grain. So, calculate your efficiency. Use an online calculator or do the math yourself. You can...

Use it to experiment with a couple gallons of hard apple cider if you haven't before. That much yeast should be enough to ferment 2 to 2.5 gallons. Just pick up some apple juice the next time you're at the grocery store. You can use Motts or the store brand as long as it doesn't contain any...

After your d rest you could just bottle it and let them carbonate at room temperature then put them in the fridge and lager in the bottle.

For an ale fermentation 60 should be ok, from my experience, however, the specific yeast strain your using is important to note to determine what it's tolerance is for temperature. Should you decide to heat the fermenter, I've had success wrapping the fermenter in a heating pad if you have one.

Saison. I'd also like to point this out http://home.roadrunner.com/~brewbeer/chiller/chiller.PDF I don't know if you've seen this before but the link has plans for a relatively cheap and easy to build fermentation chamber that uses frozen water jugs to keep the temperature low and doesn't take...

I would say cold crashing, if you can will always be better than not in this case, even if you have to move the fermentor. Just do it gently, i'm sure you'll still benefit from it greatly. I've dry hopped in the primary a few times and haven't had a problems just dumping the pellets in. But if...

Obviously many use the burst carb method successfully with relative ease, however, I thought I would contribute how I do things. I use the "set it and forget it" method. to do this, set the regulator at the psi needed for the carbonation level desired, let it sit for a week or two to carb, then...

A lot of people like to make tinctures or tea out of spices and other ingredients. You could dice the pears into small pieces and then put them in a container and pour in vodka or another neutral spirit with high alcohol until the top of the pears are covered. Then cover the container and let it...

I hate to be the skeptic but I don't think is gonna work out like you're hoping. When I do high gravity brews I typically sparge a little extra and boil about 2 gallons on the stove while my main boil goes outside on the turkey fryer. The first time I did this, the stove boil got away from me...

I use about a liter of water to 1/2 a cup of dme. According to beersmith that's around 1.040 wort which is where you want it to be. It has a lot of sugar to keep the yeast busy but not too many to stress them out. when you go to pitch, it is acceptable to just dump the whole starter in. I've...