I bought a Midwest Homebrewing kit on ebay, unused but the instructions were missing, my friend bought a "this Buds for you" recipe kit from Midwest and we followed the instructions that came with the recipe kit, so far so good. Bubbles in the air lock and everything seems ok.
Most of the questions I had just got answered by reading the stickies, but a few remain.
It was 17°F in my garage when we brewed on the old electric range we had set up for that purpose, because someone told up it would stink the house up to high heaven. Is that true? It didn't smell all that bad, but our noses were half frozen off....
The equipment kit has two 6.5 gal buckets, one with a spigot on it, the kit has a siphon, so what's the spigot for??
After cooling, aerating and pitching the yeast, we slapped the lid on (the bucket with no spigot) and the air lock and waded the snow back to my house. After two days at room temperature, it's now bubbling nicely under my kitchen sink. (temp in the 50s)
I forgot to get a specific gravity reading when we brewed, should I risk contamination by opening the bucket to check it now? I'm not really sure how that works, the instructions for the recipe kit doesn't say anything about the specific gravity so I'm not sure what to look for besides the rate of change.
Do you just drop the floating thing (hydrometer?) in the bucket? or how do you use it? (why yes, I am a n00b)
I just read in the stickies that transferring between buckets isn't really necessary, so to kis I'll skip that part.
I have a Midwest Red Lager kit for our next batch, once we make sure we know enough to get it right. I plan on buying a couple of glass carboys out of my tax return but till then we're stuck with the plastic buckets.
Any tips would be appreciated! Thanks!
Ottis
Most of the questions I had just got answered by reading the stickies, but a few remain.
It was 17°F in my garage when we brewed on the old electric range we had set up for that purpose, because someone told up it would stink the house up to high heaven. Is that true? It didn't smell all that bad, but our noses were half frozen off....
The equipment kit has two 6.5 gal buckets, one with a spigot on it, the kit has a siphon, so what's the spigot for??
After cooling, aerating and pitching the yeast, we slapped the lid on (the bucket with no spigot) and the air lock and waded the snow back to my house. After two days at room temperature, it's now bubbling nicely under my kitchen sink. (temp in the 50s)
I forgot to get a specific gravity reading when we brewed, should I risk contamination by opening the bucket to check it now? I'm not really sure how that works, the instructions for the recipe kit doesn't say anything about the specific gravity so I'm not sure what to look for besides the rate of change.
Do you just drop the floating thing (hydrometer?) in the bucket? or how do you use it? (why yes, I am a n00b)
I just read in the stickies that transferring between buckets isn't really necessary, so to kis I'll skip that part.
I have a Midwest Red Lager kit for our next batch, once we make sure we know enough to get it right. I plan on buying a couple of glass carboys out of my tax return but till then we're stuck with the plastic buckets.
Any tips would be appreciated! Thanks!
Ottis