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Nah, for a seaweed ale you want to get some kombu for soup--serious kelp action! Gonna have to try that now. Thanks for taking this one for the team, komomos--now we know that not even 2 oz of Irish moss is enough to get that saltmalt flavor.

As far as book recommendations go, I wholeheartedly recommend Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers by Stephen Buhner. There's a lot of mystic fluff, Noble Savage crap, patronization and some outright wrong information, but it is an EXCELLENT introduction to the world of beer beyond malt, yeast, hops...

Sounds like a plan to me, but fenugreek...eugh. To me it smells more musky--which is to say footy and armpitty--than maple-y. Might work out anyway, though. Have you considered adding some rye? Seems like they'd work well together. Lactating moms need extra calories too. Consider adding...

The yeast has been using that week to eat your priming sugar and reproduce, so more yeastiness isn't a surprise. Give it time to finish up, settle to the bottom of the bottle, and pour carefully into a glass to drink. Aging a beer is almost never a bad idea--if it's not tainted, what have you...

Totally fine. You can either whip out actual measuring equipment and check the gravity of the wort compared to your original gravity (if you took one), and then check it again in a few days to see if there's any change...or you can do what I do and just let the fermenter mind its own business...

Another member of the Leave the Labels club. If they soak off in the Star San, great, if not, great. It's kind of funny to drink a cascadian dark ale out of a hefeweizen bottle. Every couple of batches I bake the bottles: pop them in the oven, set for 350, and once it's done preheating I turn...

The sugars in fruit, dosed with yeast that like that sort of thing, tend to ferment fast and get the ABV up to a preservative level quicker than the sugars in wort. At least that's my experience. You can make sima with malt, effectively a very weak unhopped beer where the fermentation manifests...

I like gruit in summer. All the herbs to make it are great in the spring: I've got yarrow and mugwort and mint going bat**** in the garden right now. It's refreshingly bitter, light in texture, and it tastes much more complicated than it is. Perfect for beersnobbing in the sun.

I'm talking about many specific individual people relating that they do it, have done it, and would recommend it. I'm not talking about some imaginary land of hypothetical bookbrews. Champagne yeast gets used. It gets used in the primary. It gets used in the secondary. It gets used in commercial...

It isn't, though. It really, really isn't. There are things in wort that champagne yeast can and will ferment. It's not an unusual thing to pop some into a big beer for a secondary fermentation--whether this does what the brewer was intending is another issue, but I've seen it mentioned as a...

I've used champagne yeast. It makes for a very quick ferment and a fairly sweet end result, because the yeast strain is better able to digest fruit sugars (fructose, sucrose, and glucose) and not so good with maltose. It provides a fairly neutral flavor of its own. I quite like the results on...

I dump mine into the fermenter through a wire strainer. Gets out the big chunks and leaves the particulates in, plus provides a little aeration. No problems here.

All-grain can be worth it or not; depends what you're going for. Me, I consider a by-the-book mash to be one of the least interesting and most finicky parts of brewing, so I save it for specialty grains and use extract to get me quickly and reliably to the parts of brew day I love. (i.e...

I'd rather have the chocolate added as chocolate, personally. And used in a beer with a polyspice hop--allspice, ginger, that sort of thing. Now THAT'S a stout I'd go through. Or a barleywine.

I think just figuring this is how you do would be more useful. It's interesting to know what your beer tastes like young, no harm in that. Makes the later bottles taste better when you have a clear comparison.

Every summer there's a plague of billboards for COLD-FILTERED this and FROST-BREWED whatever, and it just makes me laugh. If you don't know that lager is brewed cold already, doubleplusfrosticecold and so on sounds like a great thing! Because beer stays at the temperature it is when you brew it...

I'd be keen on a minty hop or a more explicitly floral hop--like nasturtium or geranium. On the never-never list: chocolate and banana.

I'd figure "filler" would be the rice and corn and so-on. And I don't believe for a second that it's been taken out. Who knows, maybe they've taken out all the barley?

Made some! I don't bottle it, I just pour it out of the fermenter--a one-gallon glass jug. That way some lucky people get the raisins. A fizzy sima raisin is a joy forever.

Have you considered using actual pine as well, or are you keen to get the flavor from just hops?