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The 4.5 or 5.0 cubic foot chest freezers should hold a single. I got a 7 footer to hold two buckets with 2 1gallon fermenters on the hump. Take some cardboard and make a cutout the same diameter as your primary. Take that to the store to make sure you'll have space. Don't forget to check...

From everything I know it generally tastes like a dry white wine. If you choose a variety of honey higher in maltose it will be more of an off-dry. I'll know more in another 6 months or so when my first batch is ready.

Extract. It'll taste as good and you get to skip the first 2-4 hours of brewing and get to the fun stuff faster.

Sounds like yeast rafts. Pretty much little chunks of dead/sleeping yeast with some CO2 bubbles mixed in so they float.

Sounds like you're running short on nutrient. Add a couple of tablespoons of nutrient and see if the smell disappears. (I had a batch of rhino fart cider bubbling away a few months ago, after adding 3 tablespoons of yeast nutrient I got the biggest foulest fart of them all, then nothing but...

1) sulfiting would be easiest. Pick up some Campden tablets from your LHBS and follow the instructions on the package. If you want to use heat, then just put the fruit in some water, heat it to 150* to 180* and keep it there for half an hour. 2)No. The skins will contain more pectin than the...

Almost certainly. You can harvest fresh yeast every spring, and it gets below freezing most places. Some of the yeast will die, and the rest will go dormant, so it will probably take longer for them to get started, but it's really hard to kill off all of the yeast.

Bleach kills almost everything. The only problem you might run into is if you have any scratches in the plastic that could harbor a biofilm or an air bubble in the bleach solution. Heat, on the other hand kills everything. HDPE is good at boiling temperatures, so filling your bucket up with...

A Belgian Blonde sounds like a nice midpoint between a Hef and a Nut Brown.

Did you check your gravity at 72 hours, or just trust that bubbles would tell you if it was fermenting? Having the second inoculation of yeast start up at 4 hours suggests to me that the first batch was just taking its sweet time frolicking in the sugary wonderland you provided it.

Dunno. I experiment 5 gallons at a time. If the batch is undrinkable I usually just invite "friends" over to help me drink it. I have made a few 3 gallon batches (in a normal 5 gallon carboy) and I have a 1 gallon batch of mead going right now (that one is in a 1 gallon jug that I picked up...

That recipe seems off. Almost two pounds of crystal 80 is going to give you a color closer to a brown ale than to a pale ale. You should also know that using a smaller mash tun you're going to have a slightly higher efficiency than the 10 gallon boys. Depending on how small you've gotten your...

Unless it took a drastically longer amount of time to reach a boil compared to your last batch, I'd be much more likely to guess you misread pre-boil volume. To boil off 2 gallons, I've got the surface jumping enough that I'll get splashes over the edge (2+ inches above the surface) so boiling...

Grain in the boil can add some astingency. It really depends on how much a lot is. If it's a small handful, I severely doubt you will notice. Once the grain makes it to the fermenter it won't do anything at all (well, except maybe add some yeast nutrients.) Barley Flour and grain husk will...

Something I've been thinking about a little bit is making some mozzarella to separate out the whey from the fats and proteins. Anyone know of a reason that using that whey wouldn't work? I don't think that the whey from a cultured cheese would work though, since you're using bacteria to...

Best guess is that your hops were just from the bottom of the bag, so they were a bit more dust than usual. A full boil or going AG shouldn't have any effect on the hops physically. Even so, getting the hops in the fermenter won't change your brew in any noticeable way. You need heat to make...

If the krausen formed at all, you're good. Sometimes the yeast just don't feel like piling up. I've brewed the same brew two weeks in a row and the first one blew off like mad, the second made 1 inch of krausen.

Nope, you're good. The idea is to keep the fermentation chamber completely O2 free after the first 24-48 hours anyway.

You don't mention what mashing method you're using. BIAB can frequently hit 80% or better efficiency without any trouble. Also, using approximate measurements of grain and trying to get an exact OG estimate is impossible. If you want to know exactly what your OG should be, you'll need to start...

Yeah, that kind of thing is pretty common when you're starting to use a new piece of equipment. 1-1.5 gallons an hour is fairly normal if you've just barely got a rolling boil. If you've got a boil that's really jumping, it's possible to lose a lot more than that. The dimensions of your kettle...