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I haven't visited in awhile. Since evacuating Libya I have been bouncing around. I was holding out some hope that I would eventually be able to get my household belongings back from Tripoli but the places were either looted and/or burned. So it is all gone. But that is OK! My family is...

Ahhhhhhh, back in the US. I evacuated out of Libya about a week ago. I was the last person out of the embassy. I spent the last week in Germany getting my brain picked. And now I am back in the good ol' US of A. I have to say, I was a bit disappointed in the beer in Germany. Don't get me...

I am always living in countries where you have to be extra careful eating produce. I usually disinfect them with a diluted bleach solution and then rinse them off. But I got to thinking. I always have a bucket or spray bottle of Starsan on hand for my brewing needs. Could I disinfect my...

I am on vacation in Cambodia and have found a pub that has canned Guinness Draught with the widget. I like Guinness Draught a lot. It isn't my favorite, but I enjoy it. Most beers, even those low in alcohol, eventually wear on my palate over the course of the night. The delicious hops and...

I am back in Cambodia for vacation and the beer scene here has really picked up. Beers like Guinness Foreign Extra Stout are now available and a new brewery opened up here called Kingdom that, to my surprise, makes a pilsener that isn't half bad. In a couple bars, though, I have had both the...

I have now brewed 4 batches: an APA, a Scottish Ale, an oatmeal stout, and now I have a blond ale in the fermenter. The next beers I will be making are a Texas bock, a vanilla porter, and a Bavarian hefeweizen. And even though all the beers I have made so far have been outstanding and I...

I am a military attache and my entire career is spent going from embassy to embassy. I still have 1 1/2 years to go here in Libya but I have just received my list of possible follow on assignments. I have to put them in order from most favorite to least favorite. So these are the countries I...

Every now and then a thread pops up here by someone trying to figure out a way to profit from there homebrew without having to register with the TTB. The poster is usually shot down pretty quick and told he can’t get around the law. And then everyone goes back to posting about how much there...

Alright, this might be a unique spin on a common question here. I am searching online and can’t find anything concrete (maybe because there isn’t anything?) Hoping you guys can help out. Are there any US FEDERAL laws regulating the production and selling of homebrew? Because I am stationed...

I currently do extract brewing and I have gotten to the point where my brew day is about 3 ½ hours, including cleaning/sanitizing. I am also trying to get to where I brew every weekend and have about four fermenters going at a time. I primary for a month and do no secondary. As you know, much...

So I passed out samples of my first brew to folks at the embassy on Thursday so they could try it over the weekend (weekends here are Friday-Saturday). I did a little self selecting in that I asked people what kind of beer they like before deciding to give them a sample. If they said something...

Not to start a grammar war or anything but I realized I have been popping back and forth between the two. Is it one word or two words? And does it make a difference if you are using it as a noun or a verb? It isn't something that keeps me up at night or anything. Just curious what the...

I currently am only doing extract brewing and while I know award winning beers can be made with extract I also fully understand that there is much more flexibility with all grain over extract with regards to the malt profile. That seems fairly indisputable. My question is does the same hold...

In a previous post I explained that the only glass beer bottles I can get my hands on here in Libya are the Beck’s non-alcoholic beer bottles. I used some on my first batch and they seem to be doing well. It is just a pale ale primed with the standard bag of priming sugar that came with...

So here in Libya there are no home brew shops or paintball gun stores. None of the restaurants have soda fountains so I can’t ask them where they get theirs. I’d like to get into kegging in the near future but I don’t want to buy the gear if I can’t find a source of CO2. So while I know you...

I have seen many threads on temperature control here but I am wondering what you all would recommend for my current setup. Let me explain what I have, what I am planning to do, and then see what method of control you think would be best. I have a room that is pretty much dedicated to...

I just got my hands on a fridge that I can dedicate totally to brewing. I am very happy, especially since I didn’t have to pay for it. I can fit three fermenter buckets in it which means I have room for two lagers to ferment and a space left over for cold crashing my ales. Now, I enjoy a...

Now that I have brewed and bottled my first batch I am preparing for my next one. So of course I am going over my process in my head to see where I can improve things. When I had my kettle on the stove and I was steeping my specialty grains I realized I couldn’t step away without dropping...

So here is the deal. Right now I use my office as my fermentation room as well. It is great for doing ales because I can keep the temp in there down to the low 60s. But in the future I want to try my hand at some lagers. The embassy equiped our house with a traditional fridge with a...

Last night I bottled my first batch of beer. I had just enough bottles to do it. I am not permitted to have glass bottles shipped to me but a case worth of brown glass bottles made it to me through the mail anyway, but the rest were rejected so I won't be doing that again. I made up the...