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Just went by the store for beer to make cupcakes with. I want the beer to be apparent this time, so I picked 6 to choose from. The recipe is for Beer Batter Maple Bacon cupcakes. Choose one: Sam Adams Lat 48 IPA Sam Adams Cherry Wheat Guinness XStout Rahr and Sons (Ft Worth, TX) Ugly...

I'm making a custom tap handle out of something that means something to me: an old beat-up joystick I used to play games in high school. I'm planning on sanding it down and spraying it with spray paint and a finisher. Maybe in glossy black. My problem is that I need to find a good way to...

I've recently tasted a few beers with a particular mid-to-after-taste. The beers were Alamo Golden Ale, Fireman's No.4, and Holy Grail Ale. The last thing I taste is an almost stale snap that reminds me of thin pizza crust left out over night. Is that "oxidized"? Or perhaps stale grain? Or...

I had a homebrew recently that had a distinctively pasta-like aroma and flavor. More specifically, it smelled like tortellini stuffed with ricotta and covered in marinara. The style was supposed to be an all-grain Belgian ale. Aside from using a brew kettle used for Italian food, is there...

Over the last two days, I was letting my ordinary bitter diacetyl rest at about 70 degrees in the garage fridge. This morning I though it had rested enough and yanked the controller to crash it down for a transfer to a keg. I plug the fridge back in directly to the wall, now on the coldest...

Let's say you have a collection of green bottles and you MUST put your hyper-hoppy, hyper-bitter beer in them. What measures might you take to protect your beer? I had one kind of silly idea: if you throw a shirt over your glass carboy to keep the light out, you could always get little baby...

Has anyone tried this? I'm thinking about rigging up a Vinturi wine aerator in a racking system to aerate wine as I'm transferring to the fermenter. When I'm done with the boil and the cooling, I decant the wort into my bottling bucket to get off the kettle trub, throw a lid on top of the...

So, I just took my fermenter from the fridge where I was cold crashing at about 45F and moved it to an elevated surface to use good ole gravity. When I left the ferm at rest, I started to walk away to get my keg and then I heard..... -glub-. I waited another 10 seconds. -glub-. Now, without...

I'm reading the John Palmers' book and he recommends holding off on timing your boil and the first hop addition until after the hot break. Does anyone else vouch for this idea? Also, does the hot break occur when the proteins appear or when they drop out and disappear?

I searched and did not find a good answer for this question. How would you answer it?

Is it just me, or are all LHBS dusty? I read a lot of homebrew store reviews online and most of them complain they are dusty and dirty and they give the impression, as taken from one review, that their kits will have dead spiders in them. I also see frequent allegations of rats, though I have...

My homebrew store packs corn sugar packets for their kits. Their instructions say to make a simple syrup on the stove first before adding it to the bottling vessel. Is there a reason besides sanitation that I cannot add the granular sugar to the vessel without boiling it? Does it just not...

I've noticed that beers, even ones that I thought were dead on arrival, get better with age, and even undrinkable can turn into drinkable. As long as you aren't brewing with bleach-saturated fermeters, got the temps right, didn't get lightstruck, sanitized correctly.... you know, the basics...

I'm wondering what brew mags everyone reads and which ones they would recommend for someone forming a budding, unhealthy obsession with brewing...

I was watching one of CraigTube's videos on kegging, and I saw what I thought was the strangest things. He said there was still some StarSan foam in the bottom of the keg... and he filled right onto it. http://www.youtube.com/user/CraigTube#p/u/45/S1dwBC-gKc8 Would that harm the beer, or...

The Dixie Cup in Houston is offering a crazy competition for 2012... a shed aged beer competition, on the theme of the end of the world. You turn it in at the 2011 competition and let it sit in a cardboard box... through the winter and through the Texas summer to the 2012 competition. I may...

I've brewed my first three batches so far and I'm taking a homebrew course to learn some of the hands-on bits I might be missing between YouTube, HBT, the Homebrewer's Bible, and the instructional video from Coopers. And of course, from my taste buds, and my taste buds tell me... I need to do...

I'm looking for cool ideas for fermentables, either in brewing or carbing. I hear about honey or German cane sugar candy occasionally, but that sounds rather tame. Has anyone used something strange like soda syrup?

Any experts here on force carbonating? I wondered if it was possible to force carb the last batch using the CO2 from the current primary, either directly or through storing it somehow.

I'm contemplating ways to get further into home brewing. My first batch with a Cooper's kit is currently conditioning in the bottles and I want to wait on results from that before starting on the second batch. But I can always think about it. My in-laws down the street are dropping off...