Recent content by Tom Hess

A friend brewed for the first time Saturday at our local brew club's Teach A Friend To Brew session. His beer went into a glass carboy. Within 24 hours it exploded in his clothes closet. Sugary wort/beer and glass fragments over everything. He wasn't doing anything unusual. The krausen was...

I have a reservoir for the beer to be bottled. I start by putting Iodophor sanitizer in it to santize the reservoir. Then I use the bottling cane to fill 12 bottles. This takes about 3 or 4 minutes. Then I use a funnel to pour the iodophor from those 12 into another 12 bottles, which takes...

Oxyclean is very close to dishwasher detergent powder. It is a mixture of sodium carbonate and sodium percarbonate. Some of the powdered brewery sanitizers and washes are pretty much the same thing. Some add a few other chemicals.

I use a paint stirrer ($7) in a variable speed electric drill that has worn out bearings. I fix it to my boil pot using combination of 1/2" copper tubing, wood and miscellaneous hardware. Total cost of the setup, except the 20 year old drill, was about $15. To control the speed, I have a wood...

Not really. Aluminum tubing is probably more brittle than copper tubing.

Buy a carboy brush. It will reach every surface on the inside of the carboy. Bleach isn't very good for removing organic deposits. Diluted ammonia works pretty well. Do not mix bleach and ammonia!

The thermostats don't measure differential temperature, so that won't work. Go to a homebrew store and drop $55 on a Johnson Controls unit that in effect replaces the original thermostat. (Unless you know enough electronics to build one of the several designs available on the web.)

I've been using a Phil's Phalse Bottom (from Listermann, check the web) for years. It works fine. There are also SS ones for a bit more. My plastic one collapsed once, and Listermann replaced it free. It isn't worth the time to make your own, unless your time is free.

For a good comparison of different types of home made mash tuns, get the 1995 "Great Grain Issue" of [/I] Zymurgy[/I]. For $20 you can get a 5 gallon water cooler, or $40 for a ten gallon one. $20 for a Phil's Phalse Bottom, or about $10 more for SS. Add a sparge arm and you'll get higher...

You can't really sanitize your hands. Scrub them well, and don't touch anything that has been sanitized.

Listermann stands behind his products.

A two part epoxy will probably work. Clean the surfaces well before and after. Use a sand bag to hold the parts together while the glue sets.

The white/ translucent plastic cap had about a dozen tiny holes in it, that the CO2 escapes through. Believe me, that cap can't hold the CO2 in. The pressure would knock the cap off, blow the air lock out of the fermenter, lift the lid off of the fermenter, blow up a beer bottle.... And you...

At that price, there's a good chance that the keg was stolen. "Go behing a fraternity at 5AM on Sunday morning...." SS kegs are expensive. Check carefully before buying.

This is straight science.... Short: UV light breaks the central instruction list of cells, the DNA. Long: All living things have DNA and RNA in them. (some viruses have only RNA, but viruses don't really 'live'.) DNA and RNA absorb ultraviolet (UV) light, with a particularly strong...