Search results

with my new wort chiller! Brother in law gave me a gift certificate to our LHBS. After a year of saying "I'll just make a chiller" I finally broke down and bought one. Oh sweet heaven! It cut my brew time by a good 30 minutes. No more standing over the sink replenishing ice for an hour to...

I love BIAB, but it tends to produce less than clear wort. Tonight I changed things up a bit, and the result was wort that was substantially more clear than I'm used to with much less trub in the pot. I usually grind pretty fine, and my grind tonight was no different. I usually grind, put the...

Tell me where I've gone wrong... I just finished up a brew day (BIAB) for a porter (Grant's Perfect Porter). My efficiency going into the boil was 83%. What's got me wondering where I should improve is the outcome going into the primary. My final gravity was 1.043, though it was expected...

I'm getting ready to brew a porter (Grant's Perfect Porter) and a caramel amber ale. I've got a number of types of hops in the freezer that I'd like to use, but not the types called for in the recipes. I don't know enough about how hops affect the beer to confidently mix and match, but I'd...

I've got a number of AG (BIAB) batches under my belt now, and at least to my palate, they've all turned out quite good. I'm really curious about how water affects beer though. In other words, my beer is good, but would it be even better with a change to water? I just don't know. I still...

I'm only a few batches into brewing (BIAB) and up until this point haven't paid much attention to my OG. I had enough other things on my mind and just didn't get the importance of it yet. Now I think I get it.:o I just bottled a batch of strawberry blonde the other day, tasted it, and thought...

I just got into AG brewing (BIAB - love it!) a few months ago. On my first two batches I got pretty lousy efficiency, but chalked that up to inexperience. On my third batch I got even worse efficiency! In preparing for my next batch I went to the LHBS and bought my grain, ran it through their...

I was going to bottle a strawberry blonde today, but upon opening the secondary saw that it was incredibly hazy. So I figured it was as good of a time as any to try out gelatin and see if it would clear it. I got a pan sanitized to bloom the gelatin in, but then got distracted talking to...

I've got 3 batches in bottles right now, and am drinking my first attempt at brewing, which was just a simple extract amber ale. I learned a lot from that batch, one thing being that I need to mix my priming sugar better when I bottle. I just poured the sugar water into the bottom of the...

I brewed an all grain caramel amber ale 3 weeks ago. It's been in the primary ever since at around 60-63 degrees. Unfortunately, I broke my hydrometer a few days ago and haven't been able to get another one yet. I was going to bottle today, since after 3 weeks I figured fermentation was over...

I brewed a dead simple extract recipe as my first batch in late December. It's been in the bottles for 3 weeks now. I'm curious if what I'm seeing in my bottles is normal or if I did something wrong with my priming sugar. I used corn sugar, dissolved in water and poured in the bottom of my...

I did my second all grain batch today (BIAB). Everything went great, but I learned a little something about cheap hydrometers that come with kits! My hydrometer came in a light plastic tube with a cap on the bottom. It worked well up until today. I decided I would take a sample of the wort...

I understand the rationale behind taking hydrometer readings up to the point of getting the beer in the primary. What I'm curious about is what utility it provides after that fact if you tend to leave the beer in the primary for 2-3+ weeks (like many people suggest). Most fermentation finishes...

Made a dumb mistake today - I just wasn't thinking and activated a smack pack of Wyeast Kolsch yeast instead of the other yeast I was intending to use. The pack is well on its way to swelling up. I have one more batch to brew using this yeast, but won't be able to get to it until next weekend...

I broke down and got enough grain and "stuff" to do a couple different half batches (wife wanted to try a few different recipes instead of having one big batch next - who am I to argue?). The down side to doing this is that the recipes called for different hops, yeasts, grains, etc. I didn't...

At my wife's request, I am going to make a couple of smaller batches (2.5 gallons each) of my next few beers instead of full batches. She wants to be able to try a wider variety of beer without being "stuck" with 2 cases of a kind she ends up not liking. I would never call having beer around...

On the advice of a few people I've tasted my first beer at various stages of the brewing process to get an idea for how it changes. By the time I bottled (after 3 weeks in the primary - this was a very simple extract amber ale), the taste had changed from very sweet to...well, beer! I'm...

I just got a couple of cases of old bottles from a local guy. Most of these bottles are 10+ years old. They've had their labels removed, but whoever did it didn't care to remove any of the glue. So now they've got 10 year old glue that looks like it's been baked on with age. It's rock hard...

Not sure if this is kosher in the classifieds section. Feel free to remove if it's not. Anybody around Madison have bottles they want to get rid of? I bought a few cases from someone recently and they were so old and nasty that I had to throw about half of them back into the recycling bin.

I just bottled my first batch (Amber Ale)!!:ban: It smells great, but is pretty "sharp" right now. I'm assuming that'll probably mellow out after a few weeks in the bottle. Anyway, what I'm curious about is clean-up. I sprayed my primary out (bucket) and wiped it down with a towel, but I...