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We just moved into our new house and we have central air conditioning with a filter grille in the hallway ceiling. It's just like our old house except it looks like the previous owners lost the two knurled thumb nuts that hold the grille in place and replaced them with a couple of regular nuts...

The Gnomes are buying a new house and it has a 20' x 14' finished, detached building in the back yard. It currently has electricity but no plumbing. It sits about 20 feet from the laundry room of the main house and is on the same side as the electrical panel. Would this make a good Brew Hut? How...

How important is it to maintain temperatures during the 1-2 years of aging a lambic or sour ale? I keep my house between 68F and 78F throughout the year but I would say most of the year it is in the mid 70s. I live in Arizona and keeping the house much cooler is not an option. I could set up...

Yesterday I brewed up a 5 gallon batch with 12 lbs of Belgian Pale Ale malt. No specialty grains or anything else in the mash. Just Pale Ale malt. The predicted SRM was a 6 but it looks much closer to 15 or 20. Not just a shade or two darker than predicted, but 2 or 3 times darker. This...

I understand the basic premise of a SMaSH recipe. Pick a single malt and a single hop and brew up a batch. Since I'm buying hops in bulk, I'm beginning to realize that I won't be burning through some of this inventory fast enough before they go stale, even though they are stored in vacuum...

I'm planning on brewing this Petite Saison d'Ete recipe from NB: Fermentables * 4.5 lbs. Belgian Pilsner * 2.75 lbs. German Vienna * 0.75 lbs. Torrefied Wheat Boil Additions * 1 oz. East Kent Goldings (60 min) * 0.25 oz. Styrian Goldings (10 min) * 0.25...

For example: pre-boil gravity = 1.040 post-boil gravity = 1.048 boil off rate = ? I'm having a hard time determining what exactly the rate is in my system. Measuring large volumes is difficult to do precisely. I think if I had a way to infer the boil off rate in each batch, I could...

I brewed this recipe on 8/9/2009: The Golden Dragon Belgian Dark Strong Ale Batch Size: 5.00 gal Ingredients: Amount Item Type % or IBU 12 lbs Pilsner (2 Row) Bel (2.0 SRM) Grain 75.00 % 12.0 oz Aromatic Malt (26.0 SRM) Grain 4.69 % 4.0 oz Special B Malt (180.0 SRM) Grain...

Mrs. Gnome would like to make some wine and since I have I already have all my brewing equipment, I'm wondering if it's OK to use a lot of the same gear. I retired my old Ale Pail (I switched to Better Bottles for primaries). Would it be OK to use this for wine or should I pick up a new one...

When you have a HERMS/RIMS/Direct fired mash tun, is it better to raise the temperature of the strike water so that you hit your mash temperature after you dough in or is it OK to mash in lower and raise the temperature after adding the grains? What I've done on my last few batches is let my...

I saw a bunch of threads about using a paint strainer bag in the boil to help filter out hop trub and thought that was a cool idea. I'm using a 10 Gallon Rubbermaid cooler with a false bottom for mashing and was wondering if it made sense to apply the same idea there. The first benefit would...

I wanted to soak the labels off of some swing top bottles and dropped them in a bucket of StarSan solution overnight. It completely stripped the plating off the wire bales and they're a rusty mess now. :mad:

OK. I've seen plenty of arguments for longer primaries and/or skipping secondaries altogether. I get the concept that the yeast will do cleanup. What I'm wondering is if the yeast that has already settled at the bottom is really doing that much work of it it's already dormant or dead. I've...

I'm planning out my next 5 gallon AG batch and want to do a thin mash to get a more fermentable wort. The recipe calls for 13 lbs of grain. If I aim for a 2 qt/lb ratio, that would be 6.5 gallons. With that much water used for mashing, I would only have 1.31 gallons for sparging to hit 6...

One of my propane tanks loses pressure when it's about half empty. The gas still flows but it's like having the valve almost closed. Any ideas?

No, it's not a crazy trailer setup like beerthirty has, but it's perfect for my needs. The only thing I'm looking to change is to ditch all the vinyl tubing (please don't berate me, I didn't know any better) and replace it with silicone with QDs. First is the mashing setup. I do my mashing in...

I'm looking to upgrade all my plumbing to silicone tubing with quick disconnects. My immersion chiller and heat exchanger coils are 3/8" OD, 1/4" ID copper tubing so I'm going to plumb with 3/8" ID silicone tubing. Here are the parts I've picked out at McMaster-Carr: Silicone Tubing (3/8"...

First post here but I've been scouring these forums for information for the past month and figured it was finally time I showed my face (so to speak). After just 2 all-grain batches, I knew I wanted to set up a HERMS, so the first step was to build a control box. Basic design considerations...