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I used frozen whole raspberries from the store, and did the freeze/thaw cycles by just taking the bags out of the freezer, letting them thaw for a while, then sticking them back in. I guess I should add, I used a food processor to do the coarse chopping, but there's no reason you couldn't just...

In my experience, you'll lose a lot of the nice fruit flavors if you add the fruit in the boil, and then even more during fermentation. I'd let the beer mostly ferment out, then add your fruit. I did a cranberry wheat beer last year for Thanksgiving. I started with a Blue Moon clone based on...

I cracked open a bottle two nights ago. It's fully carbed and very delicious. It has a nice malty aroma, good crispness, and it's easy drinking despite being ~6.25% alcohol. I'll definitely be brewing this one again. I'll post future competition notes as appropriate.

I doubt 64f really counts as too cold for 1056; I'm fairly certain there are people around here who run it at 60. 1056 is supposed to be better than some others (e.g., s-04) with regard to throwing banana at higher temps, but I'm guessing you're going to get at least a bit.

Lagunitas uses Wy1968 for their house strain and makes some fine IPAs, in my opinion.

I use Fermax in all of my starters. You can buy a half pound of it for $7ish, and you only need half a teaspoon in a starter and/or 1 tsp/gallon in your boil. The result is healthier yeast, so I think of it as a small extra price to pay for higher quality and less chance of a stuck fermentation.

It's still very green, so it had some bite to it, but was generally tasty. I used cultured Delirium Tremens dregs, which (from what I've read) are approximately equivalent to WLP550+WLP570.

Mr. Malty's Pitching Rate Calculator will help you get your starter size figured out.

Frozen will work fine. In fact, I'd recommend doing at least two freeze/thaw cycles to break up the cell walls and thus extract more flavor from the cranberries. Also consider pasteurizing the berries at 150-160F for 15-20 minutes to reduce the risk of infection, assuming you're adding the...

What was the OG?

I've dry-hopped in primary in the past with excellent results. If you cold crash before bottling it's not hard to avoid most of the hop sludge, but I'd go with a strainer bag anyway just to be safe.

Got mine from Amazon yesterday. Did a quick scan over the book, and it looks like it has a good deal of useful information without being heavily technical. (I was secretly hoping for something that read like a biochemistry textbook, but I'm sure I'm in the minority there. :))

I'm with ian-atx. Either make a starter now if you have some malt extract handy, or just wait and make a starter from a reserved 1-2L of your wort. After the starter has gone for 24hrs, pitch it. Your wort isn't going to suffer from waiting in the fermenters for a day if your sanitation is good.

Take gravity readings on three successive days (or, if you can wait, wait an extra day between each reading) to be sure it's not moving. If it's still dropping, you risk bottle bombs. It's very possible you'll get lower than 1.010. I just bottled a 1.086 OG Belgian finish at 1.005. It was in...

Sounds awesome. Sorry about the loss of beer to your explosion, but glad to hear that you have some happy yeast :)

The only form of contamination you should worry about is a fruit fly crawling into your starter. Contaminating microorganisms float around on the breeze, which means as long as you've got the mouth loosely covered and the foil hangs down an inch or so all around, nothing is going to get...

One of my most memorably bad micro brews was New Belgium's 2 Degrees Below. It tasted like someone had taken a beer and added a scoop of potting soil to it.

You can prevent or retard mold growth by adding bleach to your swamp chiller solution. Of course, this just replaces the mold smell with a bleach smell :)

There are still a few things to try: Warm it up. Most Belgian yeasts are happy at _warm_ temps (80+ F), and you're unlikely to get off flavors this far into fermentation. Pitch a big starter of Chico or another neutral, high attenuating strain when the starter is at high krausen. Rack your...

Letting in oxygen encourages more yeast growth. An airlock will prevent additional oxygen from entering the starter vessel and being absorbed by the wort, which will cause your final cell count to be lower. This is also the reason a stir plate is recommended---it's constantly aerating the...