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I followed the Papazian recipie but only used 15# honey as this is going to sparkle. After the cooking of those gorgeous cactus fruits, the beautiful crimson turned to yellow-brown. In the fermentor it looked just like sewage - my wife and I both just shook our heads, "I'm not drinking that."...

Brewed first lager. After pitching a big starter (WL800 Pilsner) I put it in the fridge at 60*. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion but by the end of the second day there was blowoff and good fermentation for three weeks, then I racked to secondary. It did smell like rotten eggs at first...

Thanks to all of you brewers for the good advice I've been getting the last few months. I am now bottling a 5 gallon batch about every 10 days and am getting far enough ahead that I don't even think twice about letting one sit around for a while before drinking - just makes em better...

Got me an old fridge for making lager and want to try that out in the next month. I'm thinking tempurature and conditioning of the yeast - so I am wondering if making lager starters at 70 degrees is OK? By the way, thanks to all of the advice I get from you guys I am drinking some damn...

Anyone out there ever tried growing hops in South Florida? I'm gonna try it. I've grown herbs that aren't supposed to grow to good here - I just kept em in big pots and watered em good twice a day. I was concerned about molds, blights and such with our high humidity.

Dry-hop or flamehout; which produces a nose that lasts longer?

I just sampled a bottle from my first batch since 1993. Iodine was the overwhelming flavor; real bummer. Only been in bottle 8 days (after 16 P and 20 days in Sec). This bottle was only 2/3 full (last bottle in line - maybe that's it, maybe I should chill a full one and try that?) so I...

I found something on this topic before but would feel better with some reassurance. I also make beer the way I cook so I keep a wide variety of ingredients on hand. It didn't take long to figure out that buying malt syrup in bulk would save money so I got a 33lb container. I figured that...

I live in Collier Co. FL where there is a statute requiring bars and such to recycle so I get plenty of bottles from out back of the local bar. Last week they must have discontinued two stouts; Left Hand Brewery's Milk Stout and Bell's Kalamazoo Stout, cause there were 14 bottles of em in...

When I was ordering ALL of my stuff to get back into brewing, I saw a yeast product that boasted high alcohol tolerance, Super Start, and seemed like a bargain at $7 lb; so I got two. After I received it I thought, "Man, that's a lot of yeast." I try to read as many threads as possible to...

No, it didn't come from my own palms - although I do live in Florida. I was in the oriental super store and saw this stuff, said sugar, so I bought it to use as an exotic adjunct - maybe make a carribean type beer or something. Does anyone know exactly what kind of sugar it is? It tastes...

Back in the day I used to use table sugar for bottling at 3/4 cup because the fizz was more of what I wanted compared to using corn sugar which would always come out less fizzy. Since I'm getting ready to bottle again for the first time in 12 years I'm having to decide if I should just use the...

I plan to give some beer to a buddy of mine, he's easily good for 2 qts at one sitting, so I decided, and he doesn't care, that I would use a green, ridgid, two liter pop bottle for his beer. If beer is filled to about one inch to the cap of a 12 oz bottle, should it also come to about one...

I have a lovely BGM with 48 oz POM pomagranate juice added. The mead is starting to clear out and looks great - might be ready for secondary fermentation in about a week. Maybe I could just add some more POM (flash-pasteurized) at secondary; the original color changed from vibrant red to a...

I typically make beers with 6.5 lbs of DME and an extra lb of either honey or demerara sugar and hence a great cleansing blow-off. But I made an American Ale with only 6.6 lbs of LMS and the majority of fermentation was over in a couple of days with no blow off. The green stuff is mostly...

I once heard that plastic was porous at a molecular level. So - for longer secondary fermentation, as in meads and stronger beers, I plan to use glass, but can I get by with a Better Bottle for a shorter secondary, say three weeks or less? Also - would anything bad happen if I racked a 5...

I recently put up my first Barkshack in 10 years and after reading the red star package (5 grams) figured out that Charlie's recipe calls for 28 grams of champagne yeast - no wonder the batch I made 10 years ago didn't turn out as well (we drank it flat), I only used one packet of yeast...

Couple weeks ago I thought I'd get fancy and try using secondary fermentation for the first time; I also needed to do that for a mead. At the time, I being a returning brewer after 12 years that knows what I'm doing; you know, a FNG, I must have drifted off at the part where bleach needed to...

I just brewed an IPA; 6.5 lbs dried light malt, 1 lb orange blossom honey, 1/2 lb demerara sugar, and 1 pound crystal malt steeped, and well hopped. My quandary - 1. will safale US-05 work well with this amount of sugar and 2. is there a general rule for alcohol content such as about 1% for...