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I forget what the measurements are, but 2 o'clock is tight enough that a credit card no longer fits through. I think it's around 0.024-0.025". 12 o'clock I think is 0.032". The tighter gap was creating a lot of flour, and I never noticed an increase in efficiency with 10-12 pound malt bills, so...

Lately I've noticed a severe deterioration in my mash efficiency when I brew high-gravity (>7% ABV) beers. It seems to have gotten worse within the past year. Once I get up over 14 pounds of malt in the mash tun (for a 5-gallon brew), efficiency seems to take a nosedive. To give an example...

How about cider? Worth wasting a gallon of apple juice to see what'll happen?

In cleaning out my basement I ran across a package of M&F ale yeast with a best by date of May 1998. Must've been from my father's homebrewing days. I'm sorely tempted to try brewing with it, just for the heck of it. Has anyone tried brewing with yeast that old?

I'm currently in my second year of growing hops, with two Magnums and two Mt. Hood. My Magnum rhizomes were larger and stronger, and threw up tons of shoots this year. I trimmed back to about six per plant, and they grew pretty quickly to about six feet. Now they've stagnated for over a month...

Well, it finally started fermenting last night, and now it's up to about 5 bubbles a minute. I think the 81 degree weather yesterday helped, but there's still a huge amount of yeast granules just suspended in the liquid. It looks like shotshell buffer suspended in ballistic gelatin.

I tried making my first mead last night, using Lalvin 71B (Narbonne) dry yeast. I followed the instructions for rehydrating the yeast, but after 15 minutes it didn't look like any of the granules had taken up any water. I stirred it and there was no slurry. So I figured screw it, and dumped...

Well, that must've been some infection, both my parents and I thought it was one of the best beers we'd ever had. :) If I let it sit another couple months and they're still not carbed would it still be safe to add more yeast or sugar, or would the 4.5 month wait have given bad bacteria too...

I brewed my first barleywine at the beginning of April, starting gravity was a little low at 1.087, and the yeast was S-23. I bottled on July 2nd, finishing gravity was 1.017. After a month in the bottle I opened the first one and was treated to a completely flat beer. So I moved the bottles...

I'm just using what Qbrew defaults to, which is 1.042 for honey. It shows 1 pound of honey as adding 8 points to a 5 gallon batch, or 7 points to a 6 gallon batch. But I guess that's another variable that I really don't have an accurate measurement for.

Okay, so maybe it was 7.92 gallons. 9.5" of water in my brew kettle at 75F is 8 gallons, with the 8 gallons being measured according to the markings in my 5 gallon pot. Fill it to 16 quarts, dump water into kettle, and repeat. Thermal expansion of water at 170F (when preboil measurement was...

For the last couple of brews, I have been having major problems hitting my target OG. Today I was attempting to brew a Tripel. Recipe was: 11 lbs Gambrinus Pale 0.5 lbs Rahr wheat 0.5 lbs Briess Bonlander 1 lb raw orange blossom honey According to Qbrew, for a 5-gallon recipe this...

One of the bines on my first-year Magnum hops stopped growing over a week ago. It's about 6" tall now and it looks like there's no longer a shoot coming up out of the center. There are also some lesions near the base. Is it okay to cut this and throw it away? The rhizome has one climbing...

I brewed a Weizenbock that fermented down to 1.001. Primed to get 4 volumes of CO2, and after about 6 days I started getting bottle bombs in my 12 oz. bottles. Heard one or two burst while I was in the basement and I hurriedly got the rest of them into the fridge as soon as I could.

Did they email you a shipping notice? I pre-ordered from them a month ago and am on pins and needles now that I know they're shipping.

I finally got to a workable solution, although I don't have compressed air, so I ran some water down into it to flush out stuck flour. The slave roller even beforehand was spinning with hand pressure, but not with malt. And it also had a fair bit of lateral play. But I reset the rollers to...

No, when it crushes I can feel the resistance through the drill, there's no resistance now. Plus I've picked up the mill base just slightly to look underneath and there's no crush coming through.

I'm having trouble with my barley crusher. It started during my last brew where it would periodically stop crushing, but now it won't crush at all. I ground 4 pounds of grain this afternoon, then went to put in an additional 5 of base malt and nothing happened. The main roller will spin but...

I had intended to brew Saturday but had plans come up to do something in Germantown so pushed my brew day to last night. Stayed up till 2 in the morning brewing a Baltic porter and tried my first small beer from the last runnings. Porter was fermenting nicely this morning, small beer not so much.