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A while back, a friend asked me about making a beer using traditional root beer spices. I picked out a recipe to base my beer recipe on, but I'm trying to figure out how to cut down on the spicing so it doesn't end up becoming so overpowering as to make the beer taste like crap. I'm thinking...

I must confess that I had kind of stopped drinking my own homebrew for a while. I had gotten tired of bottling, so I got into kegging a little over a year ago. It started out good and all, but all I had was picnic taps, and the inside of my chest freezer would constantly get grody pretty...

Keezer day is my own personal holiday today. Over the last few weeks (perhaps months even) I have been slowly collecting the bits and pieces to start kegging. I started out with the dual kegging setup from Midwest. They even give you a full tank if you pick it up locally. I've then...

I got some brewing equipment from a friend, it belonged to her husband, but he passed away and it was all just sitting in her basement. She brought over some stuff that she thought was brewing equipment, but I did see a couple of other things that I know are not brewing equipment. Among the...

I've made about 10 batches (which still makes me a noob in my opinion.) Most of my batches have visibly started fermenting within the first 12 hours, which makes me very happy. My most recent batch (a chocolate stout) was very slow to start, didn't see any krausen for about 48 hours, and even...

I decided to try brewing the northern brewer saison yesterday. I generally ferment my beer in an unused shower in my basement, but this time of year the temperature down there is really pretty low, about 55˚f so I filled a rubbermaid tub with water and put an aquarium heater in it. Based...

I was just bottling my first batch of apfelwein this last sunday, and racking it from my carboy to my bottling bucket was a bit weird. It was actually off-gassing so hard that I couldn't sustain my siphon. The siphon would start fine, but the apfelwein would start giving off a lot of a lot of...

I had been planning on making yesterday a brew day, and because it was so windy I decided to do the cooking in my garage. shortly after I started the temperature started to drop rapidly and it started snowing. Made me really glad I had decided to brew inside. The colder weather did have a...

My wife and I threw an end of season party last night, I had a red ale (my first batch) and a fake oktoberfest (my second batch) and then a few bottles of an alcoholic ginger ale (did a small, 1 gallon batch) and then some leinie's original if anyone didn't want the homebrew stuff. The...

During my last batch, I decided not to bother filtering out the hops (used pellets,) figured they would just end up in the trub and it would make my life easier. I went to replace my blowoff tube with an airlock today, and when I pulled off the airlock, the neck of my carboy was packed tight...

Found out tonight that I have at least one mouse in my house. Ran out to the store and they had 1 lethal trap left and a ton of non-lethal traps. Bought the one lethal trap and two of the non-lethal ones along with some poison. I never thought the non-lethal ones would work, I only set them...

I was talking to my parents about how I had recently picked up about 3 cases of bottles from someone locally for free, but was telling them that I had already used most of them for my last batch and needed yet another case for the batch I had just brewed over the weekend. They tell me they...

Back when I boiled up my first batch (it was the Brewer's Best Red Ale kit) I expected to make beer. I didn't think I would make some outstanding beer that would blow my mind, but I at least hoped it would be drinkable. While reading these forums and looking at the reactions of the other...

I got a bunch of bottles from someone and have been delabeling and cleaning them for the last few days, which I don't really mind, but there were 8 Sierra Nevada bottles in the mix and they gave me more trouble than all of the rest of the bottles combined. Even after letting them soak for 24...

I'm having a harder and harder time finding Flying Dog around me, I even looked up places to buy it on their website, and the 2 closest places listed no longer carried any of the Flying Dog beer. I gave up on trying the normal liquor stores in the area and finally drove out to a larger liquor...

I was just looking over my city's annual water quality report and saw that it said the water hardness was only 80ppm. Remembering all the testing I did when I first set up my fish tank a couple of years ago I scoffed at this, the hardness was about 200ppm. I was going to come here and...

Assuming you're not lagering, once alcohol production has ceased, is temperature control really all that necessary? From what I understand, fusel alcohols and esters are produced at the same part of fermentation that ethanol is being produced, so once you get past that stage, as long as it...

I just bottled my first batch, it's Brewer's Best Red Ale. I got 30-12oz bottles and 6-25oz bottles. I should have been able to get more beer out of the batch, but when I racked from the primary to the secondary, I ended up leaving a lot behind. I'm assuming the 25oz bottles will take...

I was just looking at a tripel kit, it has a note saying to let the beer sit in the secondary for 9-12 months to allow the flavors to blend properly. It seems like doing this would be somewhat detrimental to the yeast, and there would be none left when it came time to bottle. Would it really...

I got an Oktoberfest extract kit from Midwest Supplies, it came with 9.3lbs Amber LME 8oz Carapils 8oz Caramel 40l 2oz Mt. Hood 4.0%AA 1oz Hallertau 4.4%AA It says use the following hop schedule 1.5oz Mt. Hood (60min) 1oz Hallertau (5min) the other .5oz Mt. Hood is extra After...