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It's not sour at all. It's a pretty straight-ahead quad with just a hint of cherry.

Nowadays 16 pinches = 1 tsp is more common, with a dash as twice that. So 8 dashes = 1 tsp. Though 8 pinches= 1 tsp used to be a common measure (that's is still 1/3 the size that 1/8 tbsp would be). See, e.g., http://www.dutchovendude.com/cooking-measurement.shtml...

If they're making a great IPA, they're working well in the middle of what's the most popular (hence easiest to judge) craft style at the moment. If they're making decent lagers, they've got great sanitation, temp control, clarity, and are doing more than the typical kolsch/blonde ale effort...

Pilsner extract is pretty standard, even comes in DME--Munich's a tougher find but you can get it in LME at the very least. Wheat extract is usually 50/50 barley/wheat (or in that realm). I'd use twice as much of that as there is wheat malt, enough munich extract to make up the munich...

Yeah, I even use scottish ale yeast in one of my more American-style barleywines. It's great. And you need a huge starter (I always brew a smaller Scottish ale just prior to my barleywine, so I can have a nice huge yeast cake to harvest and pitch from).

Yes. Unless the freezer is full, keep all your hops in the freezer. It's by far the most important thing you can do to keep them fresh. If you have a vacuum sealer and are keeping things more than a month, go ahead and seal them; it's probably not worth buying a sealer just for that...

Yes. Vacuum sealing is wildly overrated. Freezing is far more important than vacuum sealing; hops in an otherwise unsealed paper bag in the freezer will lose about 15% of their alpha acids after a year (if you shrink-wrapped them, it'd be 10%; shrink-wrapping is really pretty immaterial to...

"How to Brew" is more modern than "Complete Joy", both are fine intros though. After that, 2 books are very helpful when you get into making your own recipes: Designing Great Beers Brewing Classic Styles And you can add Brew Like a Monk for Belgian styles and you have a pretty solid base...

Yes. Keeping frozen is far more important than shrink-wrapping.

Keggles always look like **** compared to real pots. But who cares? They work okay, and that's what matters--build yourself a setup where you can make good beer. The appearance is far less important than what you can do with it. All things being equal, having a bunch of shiny Blichmans...

I've had very good luck with this, but you need to reduce it a lot more than you think. The first time I boiled 1.5 gallons down to 2 cups or so, and it was a pretty good beer--the 2 cups looked dark, thick, and syrupy, and the beer had a nice caramelly/smoky thing going on. But it wasn't...

It's an 11.5 gallon recipe.

Milds and hefeweizens are really fast.

Jean-Pierre Van Roy hates Lindemans with a passion, though; he's not exactly unbiased in judging them. Certainly the Cuvee Rene offerings from Lindemans have are pretty traditional, so they know _how_ to make a traditional lambic. And Lindemans' web site describes a fairly traditional...

I wouldn't count on the DME to give it a better taste. It's probably not much different; the only blind study I remember reading had corn sugar and cane sugar as indistinguishable, with a couple of people preferring those over DME but most people unable to tell the difference there either...

You also don't need a stirplate if you shake constantly and make a bit bigger starter, and you can get a 1 gallon glass jug of apple juice for $7 and then clean the jug and use it to make your starters in. That makes the total cost about $14, which you'll recoup in 2-3 brews. OTOH, making the...

+1 on Max's, it's awesome.

Awesome! Thanks for maintaining the tool, Larry!

His post is saying that it used to use the simple one, but he's just changed it to use the more accurate equation.

I dunno, the beer I most often hear described as "cloying" is Dogfish Head 120, and it has no crystal malt at all. It's more about not having the hops to balance your malt selection out than any particular malt selection.