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I have to admit this reminded me of a super-hero origin story. "Mild mannered home brewer falls into boiling malt and hops and emerges . . . Wort-Man!" Only amusing because you're healing. Get better! And I also like "Second Degree Lager"!

Ha, I just did my first night time batch. Started at 8 PM Saturday night, pitched at 1:30 AM, bed at 2:00. Like many of you I have a young son - four years old - and my wife is expecting twins! So everyone went to bed and I had the house to myself. I think this will be my plan for the near future!

Calder, it might have been there at bottling and I might not have noticed it. It didn't taste quite right (as I mentioned, it tasted "stale"). It's been after a few bottles that my wife, actually, nailed down the soy sauce smell. Anyways, my basement is consistently 60-65 in the winter...

I brewed my first all-grain munich style weiss beer using a Wyeast smack pack. I had good gravity readings and decent efficiency. The yeast were very active, and even with a 6.5 gallon carboy I had to use a blow-off tube (into a bucket with sanitized water) to manage the overflow of activity...

Brew when you bottle, that's what I say. That way there's always a new beer to come along if you screw up, or if you like something so much you drink it too fast!

Leave it be. It's probably just slowly bubbling a bit. You don't really have to secondary ferment a Weiss beer in the future. After 2,3 weeks in the primary, just bottle it. The secondary will clear it up some, but as you generally pour the yeast into a hefeweizen clarity isn't that...

Thanks for the advice - the gravity went from 1.05 to 1.015 after two weeks. I'll leave it be for a while and let it finish. It's hard not to micromanage and fret when doing something for the first time (in this case, a fruit beer).

I racked 5 gallons of wheat beer (after two weeks in a primary) onto four pounds of frozen mulberry and blackberries today. I expected some more fermentation but it's going crazy. And I see from other posts that I should have expected this. I plan on letting it sit for about a week to ten...

I manned up and bottled the beer. Thanks for the encouragement.

I really need to bottle my latest batch of Oktoberfest maerzen asap but I got a terrible head cold and I'm sneezing all over the place. If I manage to keep my sneezes in check and I wash my hands alot, what are the chances I'll ruin my beer while bottling? Feel free to laugh at me if this is a...

My palate's pretty good. I like sour Saisons and Berliner Weisse, and I appreciate lambics. If the beer is infected, I'm pretty sure this is a Lacto infection, because it doesn't taste or smell like vinegar. The ale is also heavily hopped, so perhaps the hops are contributing to the "off"...

After a month FG was 1.01.

Brew day went okay. 10lbs of grain, 1/2 lb of crystal, 1/2 pound of Munich. 70% efficiency, a little low but equaled a 1.05 OG. 4 oz of assorted hops. Wyeast London Ale yeast. Then the problems started. A very slow fermentation. After 10 days a faint sour smell coming from carboy...

I did my first AG last weekend (a simple IPA), with a setup much like yours, and also got a low OG and about a 67% efficiency. I think my problem was rushing the sparge. I had the right boil volume of 6.5 gallons, but I needed to let the 170 degree sparge rinse sit before draining. My...

I did a kolsch at room temp (75 degrees) and it came out fine, no off flavors. I used the wyeast kolsch yeast, though. I think kolsch is more ale than lager.

How to sterilize the oak chips seems the question, especially if you are adding them in the secondary. As I said, my instructions called for making an oak "tea" along with the bottling sugar - so basically boiling the chips for a few minutes along with the bottling sugar, then adding to the...

It was a kit from The Home Brewery, based in Missouri. My mistake was that I steeped the oak chips. The recipe called for an "oak tea" at bottling. I still don't know if this beer tastes like it is "supposed" to or not. But I've learned not to worry. It was a learning experience.

After a few weeks in the bottle, the oak aftertaste is still there, but not as prevalent. When I tell my friends it's a "Whiskey IPA," they like it. When I say it's an IPA gone wrong, they agree it's terrible. So it's all in the marketing! Anyway, I kind of like it. I'm going to save the...

Maztec - I added the oak chips while the water was warming up - they were in water below 170 degrees. They never boiled. But they did steep for about a half hour. I removed them when I added malt extract and boiling hops. The sample I tasted reminded me more of a whiskey than a wine. I will...

I'm making an IPA from an extract kit that included a small bag of oak chips. Fermentation went fine, nice kreuzen, and after ten days I decided to rack to a secondary for a week or two. I tasted my hydrometer sample and it's really oaky. I went back through the instructions and I see that I...