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I know Cooper's Ale Yeast has a pretty terrible reputation, and I just wanted to report my own experience. Last year, I received a Cooper's Stout extract kit as a gift. The kit was fresh and made great beer, and I saved the yeast packet in the fridge because I was fermenting the stout on a...

Long story short: Bought a nice used fridge, old fridge got cleaned up and is heading to retirement as a lagerator. This particular fridge has a freezer on top with a separate door and auto-defrost, which means both the freezer and refrigerator compartments have drain holes. The bottom drain...

From Ward Labs: pH 7.3 Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) Est, ppm 179 Electrical Conductivity, mmho/cm 0.30 Cations / Anions, me/L 2.7/2.8 ppm Sodium, Na 7 Potassium, K 2 Calcium, Ca 37 Magnesium, Mg 6 Total Hardness, CaCO3 118 Nitrate, NO3-N 8.2 (SAFE) Sulfate, SO4-S < 1 Chloride...

So homebrewers like to throw in neat little adjuncts, like nuts or baked goods or coconut, that are unfortunately filled with fat, leading to some kind of rancidity. Since lipase is readily available as a cheese-making enzyme, has anyone tried using it to destroy the fat content of beer...

That "meaty" taste from autolysis...Has anyone tried getting that on purpose? If I threw a couple tablespoons of yeast slurry into the boil, would that give me a slight vegemite taste, or would the living yeast clean it up after I pitched them?

Hi, I'm making a pumpkin beer (yes, just getting around to it). The guy at the LHBS told me that pumpkin rind would add an unpleasant flavor, but I was thinking it would help with all of the mashing problems I've heard go with pumpkin beer. Does anyone have any experience with pumpkin rind...

It's not online that I know of, but Beer Connoisseur has an article on the ancient and secretive world of traditional Lithuanian farmhouse beer. It was light on technical details, but there were two interesting things: 1) One of the styles involves making spent grain bread then crumbling it...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/air-force-obituaries/9626438/Flight-Lieutenant-William-Walker.html Last living member of The Few, decorated veteran, philanthropist, poet, brewer

The neighbors recently boiled a whoooole mess of sorghum molasses in their backyard and were nice enough to give us some. If you've never had sorghum molasses, it's pretty great. It has as much flavor as blackstrap cane molasses, including some vaguely malty notes, but it lacks the intense...

Just wondering.

I was thinking, if you took the first runnings of a big mash and made a big, plain old saccharomyces beer, you could take the second runnings and make a sour with the lower gravity runnings. After a few months, a high gravity sacch beer would be pretty mature, but a sour beer might still be...

Hi, I'm Radegast. I currently live in Richmond, VA, specifically in Varina, just on the east side of town. My homebrew club is MASH, and my LHBS is The Weekend Brewer. So far I've brewed 6.5 beers (does partigyle count as 2 beers or 1.5?), a couple batches of EdWort's apfelwein (1 straight, 1...

Every ingredient seems to get this sooner or later. Stuff like peated rye and honey malt have had SMaSHes made, but I'm curious about black patent malt. What's the most anyone's ever used in a beer? I was thinking a 1 gallon batch, with either a small amount of 6-row to convert or using...

I have a beer on some Weihenstephan Weizen I'm about to rack off, and I think I'm going to reuse the slurry just because I love watching this yeast go! It ferments like, well...findlaym said "like a grenade," and that's pretty accurate. I love an active fermenter, and I found it very...

I have a digital slow cooker (has push button Keep Warm, Lo, High settings, no dial), and I've seen a lot of discussion on the net about how these are too hot to do anything really slow (sous-vide, low temp baking, etc.) I even saw a homemade control for a slow cooker using an adapted dimmer...

Hi, I've been shopping for good, bulk dried cranberries. Everything I've seen indicates that plain old Craisins would be a good deal and present nothing in the way of problematic preservatives like sorbate. The only thing that gives me pause is the fact that they have some sunflower oil for...

I already have books that cover beer styles, like the great Daniels book, but I've picked up a couple of the Classic Beer Styles books just because I like the style or the author (Barleywine, Dornbusch, etc). I know some of it's a little out-of-date, like Fix's controversial ersatz Vienna malt...

I understand that freezing fruit to rupture it a little really helps with flavor extraction during winemaking. I was planning a dried fruit wine (Amazon has good deals on dried cranberries!), and I was wondering if it would help to put dried fruit in the freezer beforehand? I assume there's...

It's available for download here in OpenOffice format. This is based on the formula by rocketman768. Someone else made a continuous hopping spreadsheet a while ago but 1) It appeared to be based on 30 second intervals instead of a continuous function and 2) it's not available anymore. I...

I'm about to embark on brewing a stout, and I was just reading up regarding the idea of souring a small amount of stout and/or adding lactic acid from another source to get the correct tang. One thing I have not seen discussed anywhere is how appropriate this would be for a sweet stout? I...