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Made a bitter with OG 1.038 and IBU 30 I used about 10% dark crystal and a touch of brown + Black ( 50g). Fermented with Windsor down to 1.016. It tasted watery in the primary so i kegged to see if that was better but it is still very watery. i know the abv is very low around 3% instead of...

Had my last 4 brews using dark grains turn out astringent or tannic (not sure which) Here is what I've tried. First 2 that went wrong I had miss read my water software and added some acid I supposed this was the problem and adjusted for the next brew(brown ale). This too was a bit astringent...

Give it to me strait. What do you think?

I have been having good success with No Chill + BIAB recently. Haven't used the chiller in months and saved a lot of time and mostly my beer has been good but I have had problems with my dark beers being tannic and astringent could this be due to the No chill or is that a red herring? I've also...

Hi I have been buying yeast slants from brewlabs, a british company. Each one i have used has left the same sulphurous flavour in the beer. I bottled one and it got worse and worse so I thought my sanitation wasn't up to speed. So for the next one i used a pressure cooker to sterilise all wort...

Familiar story I think. First time kegging, tried to force carb. Didn't realise I needed to purge keg before lowering psi to serving pressure. Couldn't understand why the pressure wouldn't go down so I just kept lowering that dail. :eek: to round things off i went and gave it a shake with the...

can i use this as a hop strainer? A little bit of rubber is left at the end that screws onto the tap. Will this cause off flavours?

It takes me over an hour to chill to 68f, even in winter. I understand most people manage to chill quicker than this. I bought a chiller from a homebrew shop. It is fairly small and is coiled very tightly. I've started to wonder if it was more spaced out it might be more effective. Anyone...

I have been having problems with some of my beers getting what i think is a phenolic taste. I thought it was just sanitation, started using oxiclean and starsan (quite expensive over here). But, just had it happen again. It has happened only in my highly hopped beers and recently in a beer I...

I want to try and squeeze as much beer out of my system as I can so i'm thinking of partigyling something. But i don't want a really big beer, i'm thinking of doing a pale ale around 1.050 and a mild with what ever is left. I want to make 6.5 gallons of PA and 4 gallons of mild. Anybody know how...

A friend has asked me to make him a barrel of beer for a hog roast in the summer. He said he wants it to be medieval, at least in inspiration. It has to be a crowd pleaser so nothing too weird. I want to use hops as opposed to a gruit as i don't think a no hop beer would go down too well. I'm...

I made a weissebock about 3 weeks ago, didn't quite hit my OG of 1.070 so i thought i'd get a bit experimental(usually a bad idea) and throw in some invert #3 to get up to what i needed. I used about a pound or 8%. I've taken some samples and it is quite nice but I can taste some hot alcohols...

I've had my mash tun for about a year now and in the past it has kept the mash to within a few degrees. For the last few months now it has started dropping from 156 to the low 140s. I reheat the tun before mashing, I cover with blankets but it is still losing too much heat. I thought maybe it...

I accidently let my IPA get too warm. My house is quite cool so I put a sleeping bag round the fermenter. 36 hours after pitching the temp had got to 72f. It has some weird flavours and i am quite sure this is why. Is there any hope of it improving with age? should I keep in primary for a while...

last week i brewed an APA. I prepared a large jar of boiled water in order to wash and reuse the yeast. I put the boiling water in the jar, covered with clingfilm(saranwrap) and left outside to cool. Predictably, the clingfilm popped with the temp difference leaving a hole in the cover for about...

I have posted recently about my APA that tastes like someone has emptied an ash tray into it. It seems likely that scorching is the culprit as my heater elements are black with burnt wort. The batch before this one was a stout and i got to thinking maybe the roasty flavours covered up some...

My APA has a really odd and strong tabacco taste to it. I didn't use anything particularly odd in it. But i did use some new green bullet hops at about 20g for bittering and another 20g plus 10g of saaz at 10mins. Does anybody know where this taste comes from? My best guess at the moment...

I need to get a christmas brew on soon and instead of going down the spiced ale route I thought i might go for something a bit different. I have wanted to do Randy Moshers Dark Night tangerine Porter for a while and the idea of a bit of liquorice in a porter also appeals so i looked to the...

i've recentely had two infected batches and i'm getting my self stressed out trying to pin down the problem. I think i might have skipped my cleaning step on the infected batches and just sanitized with iodine solution. But I've got my self wondering if it could be something else. I use...

I went to a tasting at a local gastro pub where they matched food with weihenstephan beers. There was a rep there to talk us through the beers. I got a chance to try the weihenstephan festbier. It seemed a fairly typical octoberfest style beer and i was amazed when the rep told me they used the...