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I'm in Houston on a top floor apartment. This summer my choices were dump a couple hundred dollars into the electric bill to keep it in standard ale range or brew batches dominated by yeast flavors. My A/C was set to 75-80 and I made some pretty awesome Saisons, a dubbel, and started some sours...

"Footy" is a flavor sometimes made by Brux. (Kind of similar to barnyard/funk) Prairie Artisan Ale's "ALE", a Saison with Brux, has a particularly footy smell to me. But it's well balanced so it doesn't overpower the beer. James Spencer from Basic Brewing complained about having an extremely...

I've had a soured Scottish ale that was pretty awesome, and I've had a few good sour stouts. These were all commercially soured in barrels, FWIW.

I just noticed mine has a crack recently too. I emailed AHS to ask, and they advocated against any sort of direct heating. Basically using it just as a fermenter rather than a fermenter/pot combo like I had been. I had a homebrewing friend recommend using a comal (thick piece of metal...

Not sure how nano it is, but I have friends at a 1bbl brewery where everything is basically in a big garage. Until they built a mill box, they had to be really careful when they milled grain, because the mill throws grain dust (containing lacto) all around the brewery. Any time they would need...

Sorry, wasn't trying to call you out on poor sanitation. There's a difference between sanitation and sterilization. There's always bugs around, and wort is a great growth medium for a lot of them. Heck, the best I've been able to do is 2 days on my wort stability. Definitely don't dump it out...

Sounds like you made a 10L wort stability test, and it failed the 3 day test. Not sure what the flavor impact will be on your beer, but when I've done wort stability tests it has smelled terrible. Your situation depends on what microbes started in your unpitched wort, which may be more than just...

There's also the possibility that the yeast are suffering from a lack of nutrients. Not sure what % of the fermentables the honey and agave were, but alone they offer very little nutrients. Along with bumping up the temp and agitating I would add some yeast nutrient. Bottling with such low...

They get out competed. The likelihood of you getting something in your jars is really low, especially if it has to survive boiling hot and refrigeration. I just wanted to let you know that it is a possibility. Try it out that way, and if you make a lot of starters and like having wort readily...

Personally, I'd use a pressure cooker. There are bugs that can survive boiling temperatures, and they are some of the nasty ones. You're basically giving them a buffet with no competition. I wouldn't say it's likely you'll get anything bad, but there is a small chance. If you sterilize in a...

Jester King just came out with El Cedro, which is fermented in primary with their house farmhouse yeast, then bottle conditioned with a strain of Brett. The dregs would be mostly Brett, but it's unfiltered so there would still be some Sacc in there. All of there other non-clean beers have some...

I forget where, but I've heard the same thing, but only when in the presence of oxygen (so no worries in your brewing). The explanation I heard was that in the wild (say, on a piece of fruit) the yeasts produce CO2 and alcohol to lower the pH and raise the toxicity of the sugar solution they're...

Wow, thanks for all the responses. I really like this yeast because of its pepper/citrus flavor mix, is there a less attenuative or similar version out there somewhere? Would adding maltodextrin or flaked wheat leave more long chain sugars for the bugs? What would be a good amount if so...

I'm rebewing a sour saison base beer I made a few weeks ago. The last one I put onto cherries and added the dregs of one of Jester King's sour saisons. I want to have a similar un-cherried beer to compare, but last time the primary fermentation finished at 1.002. Not much there to sour. I...

I just transferred (and tasted) my batch with Cote de Blancs. It had a lot more mouthfeel than what I remember from last year's batch with 1118. But it filled my whole apartment with egg fart smells for about a week (even with added nutrient).

Sorry, got threads mixed up, this isn't about port. I think you'd be working magic to get 10lbs of berries per gallon. Definitely not 12-15. Like you said, water is around 8lbs, so a gallon of juice is close to that. Actually more like 8.5 of you factor in the sugar, the pulp is neutrally...

I checked with SWMBO and she reminded me that we added water to the blender. Guessing around a gallon total, maybe a little more. We used 56 6oz containers of blackberries, which works out to 21 lbs. We added them to a blender (4-5 packs at a time) and added water to the blender so that it...

Thanks, I'm actually an aerospace engineer, so it's a fun mix of the 2 things I enjoy. This was my first time using them, so I'm not sure if I did it "right". I put 2oz of the dried elderberries from the LHBS in a little water and heated it on the stove. My thinking was it would re-hydrate them...

I'm doing this with cherries (with vanilla and elderberries), modeling it after a sherry I had at Messina Hof winery. They use K1 (1116) and claim it lets them get their ports and sherries all the way to around 21%. They don't add any brandy. It might take a while to age to the desired...

I've done 1 gallon all grain batches pretty much exclusively. For dry yeast, I usually just pitch the whole packet. The packets Brooklyn Brew Shop sends are (at least 2 years ago) full packets. Usually I use something like us-05 that I don't need to stress to get certain flavors like a...