Recent content by ASantiago

Not to be a master of the obvious, but are you saying you believe pitching warm was the culprit?

Ha! Exactly. In addition to avoiding over-carbonating, by having some sort of expectation of time I can also avoid the repeated testings, even if they are 12 hours apart. This morning I checked the beer and found carbonation to be good enough for my first try. Bottom line: 4.5 gallons of...

I agree. You know, my experience has been different. I've tried disconnecting, bleeding the keg, and leaving it without gas for periods of time, but it appears that once that gas is in there, it's a real challenge to get it out. It may be because I'm keeping the beer at the same low temp...

I've been doing "set and forget" for three years, with the occasional "lap dance" to accelerate things, but don't do that anymore. The issue at hand is that the beer lines in my kegerator are not long enough to provide enough resistance so that I can apply a good amount of CO2 pressure to the...

Is there such a thing as a carbonation chart that also indicates roughly how long it will take to reach the target volumes? Every chart I'm finding out there includes the standard temperature/psi/CO2 volume lookups, but nothing about time. I'm trying to figure out how long it would take 4.5...

Bump! I'm reading about Burton Union, Firestone Union, and other methods of getting yeast out of the beer *during* the fermentation, including harvesting that yeast. It seems the method I described above has elements of those other methods.

You can find the optimal range for WLP007 here. You assumption is in the ballpark. There will be a temperature difference between the wort and its surroundings during a certain stage of fermentation. And there is considerable debate over this in these forums. Nonetheless, the generation of...

Ditto.

Could this layer be floating hops?

This sounds fermentation related. WLP300's optimal temp range starts at 68F. Sulfur is a byproduct of fermentation, usually lager yeast. What was your fermentation temperature schedule? At what temp did you pitch? If you had to change from pitch to target, how fast and in what direction...

A lower mash temp is part of it. The roasted barley contributes to the dry flavor as well.

I don't use this personally, but I've seen an experienced homebrewer rack via a tube inserted into a stopper and into the fermentor. He drilled many small holes into the tube (I think it was made out of metal). When he transferred, the wort would come out shooting from all the little holes, I...

...go perfectly with a nice DIPA. :)

Others in a situation similar to yours will have to chime in. I hardly ever bottle... and I live in Florida. My problems are how to cool things down. But if I had to guess, yes, some source of heat that takes the bottles to the upper 60s or into the 70s would be a good thing. Maybe you can...

I always use a funnel with a filter when transferring wort from the kettle to the fermentor. It stops a lot of stuff from going in. For aeration, I stir the heck out of the wort for 10 minutes. Oxygenation doesn't seem to be a problem.