Recent content by ursa_minor

It's almost time for me to bottle my annual christmas beer, and I took a gravity reading today for the first time in a few months (it's a spiced quad that I brew over the summer and age). The last time I took a gravity reading I just used the refracto and I was getting a reading in the 1.050...

I'd imagine that using the spigot will result in dramatically more sediment in the bottling bucket. One of the advantages of siphoning is that you can be reasonably precise about avoiding all of the settled stuff at the bottom of the fermentor - siphoning clarifies. I'd worry that using the...

Hi folks, I have a sour beer that I've been aging for about 7 months now, and I'd like to bottle it. I'm wondering if I'll need to add some fresh yeast during bottling along with the priming sugar. Or is there enough dormant saccharomyces still lurking around that this will be unnecessary...

I have a small test batch (around 1.5 gallons) of beer that I'm looking to bottle soon. My usual method for racking 5 gallons of beer is to use an auto-siphon, which likely won't be able to get started in such a small volume. In theory, of course, the solution is simple: manually start a siphon...

I've got a batch of beer that I bottled about 6 weeks ago at a FG of 1.014. I made the newbie mistake of not taking hydro readings on consecutive days and instead just trusting the calendar as for when to bottle. I've since been drinking this batch and haven't noticed anything awry until this...

I'm sure this must be a common problem around here - I can make homebrew much faster than I can get rid of it! I've started brewing 5 gallon batches at a rate of approximately once a month. I like brewing at this frequency because I'm new to the game and want to get in enough of a rhythm to...