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I was reading an old ask me anything with a brewer from Cellar Maker in San Francisco (absolutely great beer, BTW), and he recommended dropping your wort temp to 170-160 before adding your whirlpool hops. I just tried it last weekend, so I can't report on it's effectiveness, but I thought I'd...

As a Dutchman cheapskate I appreciated the gist of this article, but one thing that I have found over the course of brewing 30 odd batches is that my time is worth money, too. Once you have the investment in equipment, it takes more or less the same amount of time to brew 2.5, 5, or 10 gallon...

I sometimes use a cheap digital fish scale to weigh my keg to get a ballpark volume. I know that you're in Norway and use metric, but I figure 1 oz = 1.1 fluid oz (or maybe vice versa, it's been a while since I've done this). Works pretty well. I've always been +/- one pint using that method.

I decided to upgrade my immersion chiller a while ago and contacted Jaded Brewing about their Hornet chiller, which was sold out. They said they were no longer making it, but that they were going to be putting a new replacement chiller on the market and offered to sell me a pre-release version...

By all means, drink some now, but try to save a case or so and let it age for a year or more. Drink a bottle every month or two. RIS should get even better over time. I bottled an Expedition Stout clone a couple weeks ago to give away for Christmas gifts. I'm going to taste one in a few weeks...

It sounds like it's too late for this batch, but the only experience I had with coffee in a stout was to add fresh grounds at flame out (see the breakfast stout recipe in the database). I didn't add any cold brew coffee and the flame out addition gave me the flavor I was looking for. Turned out...

Short term I doubt it would make a big difference, but I would not want to keep my grain in a "homer" bucket for long term storage. At Lowes a food grade 5 gallon bucket is $4.48 vs $2.98 for a non-food grade bucket. Personally, I'll happily pay $1.50 for peace of mind. I've got 6 filled with...

@marcopolo I've only done one for a Cali common, but what I did was do one cycle of wort/fermentation/chill/decant and then add another 1.5L of wort onto the existing yeast cake. I don't remember my exact volumes for my steps. Most yeast calculators will have multiple "steps" for creating large...

Are you reusing your yeast? This happened to me with WLP002 that I had reused for a bunch of batches. The yeast took forever to flocculate (very weird for 002) and had a bubblegum/hefewiezen quality. I can only assume that the yeast genetically drifted or mutated over the batches until it hit a...

I don't mash in a keggle, but I've found that there is a big drop off in temps if I don't have any insulation directly on top of my mash. I'm currently using a Coleman Xtreme 70 quart for no sparge mashing and I was surprised at how much temperature it lost over the course of an hour. I wrapped...

I recently bought an $8 fish scale off Amazon. That plus a length of cord allows me to get a rough approximation of how many ounces of beer I have left. I've only tested it on one keg so far (tare it out on an empty keg, weigh keg, and divide by 1.1 to account for the difference between a fluid...

+1 on fermentation temps. Also, what are you using for sterilization? 20 years ago (I am old), I was getting off flavors from using bleach. Those issues went away with Star-san. Also, I think an IPA might be a tough style to recreate without kegging equipment (at least to commercial standards)...

I've been using an aquarium heater and a Rubbermaid storage container for a water bath. I add a little bleach to the water bath to keep it from getting funky. Works really well. I can't claim the idea as my own, I read about it on a thread here somewhere. I've been using a 50 watt Ehiem Jager...

You might want to try batch sparging. That's all I've done since I switched to all grain brewing (only 6 batches or so) and I've pretty much hit my numbers on the Beersmith defaults.

Yeah, it is odd. I'm wondering if maybe it should be 20 instead of 2.0. It's distributed by LD Carlson, and they have 2.0 on their site, too. Thanks for the reply, and the recipe.

Yoop, Your house IPA looks right up my ally. My LHBS (Bell's) only has Munton's Amber, which has a lovibond of 2. I saw earlier in the thread that you thought that there wasn't too much difference between Munton's and Fawcett, but would you recommend adding some caramel 20 or 40 to compensate...

I can't really say whether the shank or the spout would cause this. My problems were fixed when I used that website. The only thing that I can say at this point is to set your kegerator to the specs on that website and let things mellow out for a few days. I overcarbed a keg and had to take it...

michaelsmith- It sounds like your line is short. Dropping your pressure will make the beer flat. Eight psi at 38 degrees would give you 2.2 volumes of CO2, which is the very bottom end of what is recommended for lagers. I'm running 10-11 psi at 38 degrees with approx 9 feet of 3/16 interior...

I, too, recently bought a kegerator with a nitro set up. I haven't used it yet (waiting for fall and my garage to cool down), but I've done some reading and I think I know what your problem is. Hopefully somebody with more experience/knowledge can chime in and confirm if I'm right. As I...