Recent content by AgoristBrewer

Bottled and Carbed. Don't know volumes, but it was a half cup table sugar + 1 gram champagne yeast (i'd crash cooled, killing off all the old yeast...). Everyone loved the carbed version, we ended up calling it hobo champagne (or "hobo champs" for short), and drank it all very quickly.

Thanks shek! I'll make a test batch with a little rye (maybe follow a hop-rod-rye clone), and see how that tastes. Do you think a Hefe yeast would enhance the spice? ruin it?

@idgenius2000: Yeah, the spice store and I are trading spices for beer (agorism, ftw). Star Anise is pretty licorice-y, right? Do grains of paradise have that same thing going on? I think I'm set on Black pepper, Cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice?, and perhaps some actual spicy pepper. I'll probably...

So I figure it's a good time to start my christmas (x-mas, channukah, kwanzaa, winter solstice, etc.) brew, so that I can let it sit for a while before I bottle, then it can bottle condition for a while before I give it out. I want to brew two beers, and give them both out. One will be...

Been a pretty die-hard baker for a while (since before I became a brewer), and I've been using some washed hefe yeast to make pretzels and pizza for a while. You've gotta be sure to use washed yeast, not just yeast cake, in order to be precise with the yeast amounts. I also use washed yeast to...

5 Brown Ale, 5 Dunkelweizen, 5 Irish Red, 5 Stout, 5 IPA, 1.5 experimental lager = 26.5 for me and 7545.5 gallons total or 243.53 barrels

So... how'd it go? I'm looking to try a parti-gyle, and I want to know how yours went. Any advice?

I don't know if the dried bananas will be neccessary. Just the yeast alone will produce a lot of banana esters if you let it ferment around 72-74 F. I made an english brown, but my thermometer was busted, and it tasted like banana bread after fermenting at that temp. There's a banana bread...

So... I'm doing a dunkelweiss, and I added a pound of honey to the wort (5 gal.) I then took the gravity. I would like to be able to calculate how many points the honey contributed to the overall gravity, but I don't know how to do that calculation. Can anyone tell me how to figure it out...

Y'all pitched more yeast in there when you put it in the barrel, right? If it's going to sit there for a year, won't the yeast decompose and make it taste terrible? (I know you have it figured out so that you won't have that problem, but I can't figure out *how*). Why isn't it going to taste...

So... I guess I really did screw up by transferring to the secondary, but the question is "what do I do now". Can I salvage this in any way? Should I re-pitch? There's more fermentation going on now than there was in the primary. If I leave it alone until that fermentation stops, I should be...

update: So it's bubbling at about 8 bpm (bubbles per minute), whereas it was only going at 6 bpm the last day it was in the primary. It's seemed to pick up pretty nicely, so I think I'm just gonna let 'er sit... If it stops after a few more days i'll consider re-pitching, but seeing as how its...

So I'm following this recipe here, and I just racked from primary to secondary. I took a hydrometer reading, and It came out at about 1.043 (it was 1.074 when I went into the primary). It's been in the secondary for a few hours now, and there's nothing happening, no bubbles in the airlock at...

I've been lurking for a while, and this looks fantastic! Quick Q: When you take it out of the barrel, what are you doing then? Are you kegging? Bottling? drinking it flat? I'm really curious, because I have no familiarity with barreling beer.