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We’ve been brewing for 3 years now and have learned so much from this website and from John Palmer’s books. My questions concern pH readings throughout the brewing process. Here are the pH readings for our most recent brew - a West Coast IPA. 20 minutes into the 60 minute mash - 5.3 30...

I just downloader the supporter's version of Bru'n'water 5.5. I'm using it on an older Mac running Excel. I enabled Macros. Set Calculation to automatic. I set no limit to the number of iterations. I worked in the suggested order. 1) Local water data (extremely soft water) 2) Sparge water...

Thanks for the silicone tubing tip.

Question about your Taylor probe: Do you let the braided cable go down into the mash? We've been wondering about thermo-layering in our mash. This device might help us see what's going on down below.

We made a stupid mistake on our last brew: forgot to add whirl floc near the end of the boil. The plan is for two dry hops: one in the fermenter; the other when we transfer the beer to kegs. But to make matters worse, the yeast is "medium to low" flocculation. Other forum members say that the...

First, thanks to all who replied. We were also surprised that our Brewhouse efficiency was higher and assumed that it was a measuring error. (Our volume estimating technique is quite crude.) IslandLizard asked about our brewing technique. During the mash, we continually recirculate the wart as...

We're new to brewing (6 all-grain batches so far). We want to make sure we are understanding brewing efficiency. Our most recent batch was a single hop using 24 lbs of pale 2-row malt. So - is this correct? Theoretically, we should get 888 gravity points (24 * 37 PPG)? After mashing and...

Thanks for the feedback. On our next IPA, we'll cut back a bit on the Calcium Sulfate. This will bring our profile closer to blkandrust's profile. We'll compare a bottle of the new with the old and see if we can detect a difference!

Thank you all. The takeaway I'm getting is that I should just scale the recipe linearly since the margin of error is so great. But I am curious if Vale71 can point me to the three formulas used to guesstimate.

We've got several 31 gallon beer recipes and we would like to scale them down for our setup - which produces about 11 gallons of fermentable wort. I've searched this site for information on scaling and learned that the hops schedule does not scale in a linear fashion. We know we can plug the...

I was hoping to see replies from experienced brewers. We treated our extremely soft city water and achieved this profile for our 3rd and 4th IPA brews. (We noticed a real taste difference for the better) Calcium 132 Magnesium 28 Sodium 6 Sulfate 328 Chloride 66

Once again, I thank all of you for your quick, helpful, non-judgmental advice. I think we're ready for our next brew.

I have a pH meter left over from wine-making days. For this next brew (our 3rd) we want to test the mash pH 20 minutes into the mash. (This is the time I'm seeing in several posts and Mr. Palmer's book.) My noobe question is: Do I just draw off some liquid from the bottom of the mash tun? I know...

Thanks for the tip about the Brew Science section. Lots of help there for us. Just read the primer on water chemistry.

We're about to do our 3rd brew: a clone of Russian River's Blind Pig IPA. After reading Mr. Palmer's chapter on water chemistry we checked our local water. Here are some of the results in PPM. Alkalinity 23 Calcium 4.2 Chloride 2.2 Hardness 18 Magnesium 1.8 Sodium 5.9 Sulfate 4.1 We would...

I thank all of you for these thoughts about yeast. We're gonna brew on Wednesday, re-hyrdrate 2 packages of US 05 dry ale yeast, keep notes and see what happens.

We're brewing our first beer soon. This first time we're using a kit to make sure we get the basics under control. The recipe is for an IPA with an initial gravity target of 1.063. Mr. Palmer's How to Brew book suggests we will need about 304 billion yeast cells for 5 gallons of fermentable...