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Decide to taste the concentrated bittering charge (1 oz @ 13.2% AA boiled for 45 in half a gallon filtered water) you whipped up for a little R&D. It is unspeakably foul and bitters your whole upper GI tract until SWMBO suggests some nice, acidic lemonade to cancel it out. Don't do that!

What kind of quantity are you talking about? A local silk screen shop should be able to turn 'em around for about that price, provided you can pick them up (saves a lot on shipping), you're happy with decent but not fancy shirts (think Hanes rather than American Apparel), and you've got just a...

You'll quickly get a feel for which ones come off easily; after a month or two (or even less time, if you ask your buddies to donate their empties to the cause), you won't even need to bother with the ones that require more than the scrubby side of a sponge.

Three and a half years in, and I'm still amazed at how good this hobby is at teaching patience, and not sweating the stuff you can't fix no matter how much you worry. Maybe not the best lesson, but certainly the best that also produces a couple cases of beer every few weeks.

Victory has this weird peanutty flavor. I mean, d'uh, right, it says right there on most malt references that it can impart a "nutty" flavor, should've been the first suspect, right? Took me until maybe my fourth batch to evict it from my grain bill. But if you like peanuts more than I do...

As long as it's a still mead, it'll at least not be dangerous. Seems somebody's always asking this question about beer, which can be dangerous, since mason jars are designed to hold a slight vacuum, rather than the positive pressure of a carbonated beverage, but as long as you're not carbing...

Get yourself a cooler and other setup for batch sparging and try it out a couple of times. If you really geek out on the process and find yourself wishing for even more fiddly bits to fiddle with after a couple batches, you can upgrade to fly sparging. Heck, you've already got the mash tun and...

You're gonna need to get it up to at least 150 or so to get starch conversion. Either of jdub's suggestions will work, but adding boiling water is better if you've got the room – boiling part of your mash will make your beer darker and more caramely, and will cook some of your enzymes to...

You're going to pick up a dry wine yeast (as in, one for making a dry wine; doesn't really matter if it's liquid or powder). It won't be picky about ABV or temperature, and it'll take that sucker down as far as it'll go. You're also going to want some honey, a gallon jug, some yeast nutrient...

Yeah, what he said; tough to get a good seal on a twist-off without pressing so hard the bottle breaks. Ideally, you want brown ones, but green or clear can be fine if you're careful to keep the beers out of the light. And, rinse them the same day you drink them, nothing is worse than having...

What was your OG? If this was a big oatmeal stout, you may have enough roast and booze and whatnot in there to counteract the extra sweetness if you just leave it be. If you do wanna fix it, the easiest thing to do would be to warm it up to 70° or 72° or so and give it a good shake to rouse the...

All the dudes on the Apfelwein thread talk about the apple flavor coming back after a few months of cellar-temp (read: forgotten about in a dark corner somewhere, not clogging your pipeline) conditioning. I sincerely hope they're right, because if not, I'm sitting on five gallons of murky...

Sorry to threadjack a bit, but, how do you use the spray adhesive without making a massive mess, @Dirt_McGirt? I've settled on the glue stick approach after milk proved to be too much of a PITA, but even with one of the large-diameter sticks (hardy har harrr), it takes me seven or eight strokes...

Awesome, thanks, guys!

I'm gonna go with simple stress – there's a lotta things you gotta keep in your head at once, a lot of stuff to think carefully about and be worried about not messing up, especially if you're relatively new and can't just do half of it on auto-pilot. Kinda like first learning to drive...

You should be able to find a bung to fit the port – I've got that same cooler, I know the port's bigger than the little bungs for putting an airlock on your bucket fermenter but smaller than a carboy neck, but, there are like four standard sizes of bungs between the bucket and carboy...

A shorter, wider pot will increase your boil-off rate... although, not by much. The keggle's inner radius is about 8"... 8" * 8" * 3.14 ≈ 201 square inches surface area. A squat 60-quart pot's inner radius is about 9"... 9" * 9" * 3.14 ≈ 254 square inches. Soooo... given boil-off...

Is there such a thing as a well-regarded and reasonably up-to-date "mead bible"? Something along the lines of @OldSock's American Sour Beers for sours, or the ever-popular Palmer for clean beers? A quick Amazon search reveals several potential candidates, a couple of which have even been...

*sigh* 2103. Dunno what it is, the one I got in my beginner's kit lasted well over three years, not sure this one even made it three months. Had it sitting upright-ish in a glass so it wouldn't roll all over the dang place as I was washing up, reached to move the glass, jerked it a bit with...

I remember when movies came in only two D's, and we were grateful for that many! I also remember when having a cell phone was weird and pretentious and a little bit *****y, at least for college kids who knew their schedules months in advance and could afford to be ten minutes late to the...