Recent content by Bradmont

Krenshaw, I'd say it was about 1/3 of the bottles. jfr, I can't give you an exact mash temperature, my thermometer got rather miscalibrated in the process; I estimate it was in the 145-150 range. The beer tastes fine; a little bitter, but that's more the style than anything else.

To answer questions, I did not secondary. It was in primary for 5 weeks. FG was 1.009 after 2.5 weeks (OG was 1.053), I didn't measure at bottling time but I doubt it went any lower. I think it's carbing so fast since I left them all on my kitchen counter with the intention of making labels...

I bottled my pumpkin spice ale Saturday, and looked at them today to find this: It looks kinda gross, and I'm trying to figure out what it is. Is it pumpkin pulp, krausen, or some sort of infection? I opened one up to try and figure it out, and it overflowed with carbonation, which was...

My wife bought me a bunch of equipment to build a keggerator for my birthday (yay!), but no kegs since she had to have the stuff shipped from the states and that would have cost an arm and a leg. I found a classified selling used cornies locally, but since I have zero experience with them, I...

Ok, bleach it is. Thanks everyone!

Bleach shouldn't be a problem. But doesn't oxiclean have similar properties? I thought it did.

The carboys are glass, I should have thought to mention that.

I had a couple brews get infected, and want to make sure my carboys are nice and clean before I put anything else in them. I soaked them for 24ish hours with oxiclean, and of course I'll starsan the heck out of 'em before I brew again. Will this be enough? Should I do something else? Thanks!

Well, I have a birthday coming up... I'll put it on the list. :)

Thanks for the input (to the others, too). I added the sugar this afternoon and it took off on a second strong fermentation. I'd like to pick up a copy of brew like a monk (unfortunately I haven't been able to find any brewing books at my local library. :( ) and a couple others, but my brewing...

ghpeel, would you do that even despite not having enough yeast to pitch? I've added the sugar now, and it's off and fermenting visibly again; but I was because I was using yeast I'd harvested from a bottle of a local craft beer and I hadn't stepped up the cell count to a level where it would be...

Make Marmite?

Hmm... I didn't want to do it at boil because I knew the gravity was already pretty high for the amount of yeast I had. So you're saying I should do it sooner rather than later? I roused the yeast just now, I doubt they're all that sleepy yet...

I brewed up a batch on Wednesday that's going to be a belgian dubbel(ish). The background is that this is a 2 gal batch that I'm using to step up a yeast I harvested from a bottle before doing the batch I was actually wanting to do (why not make beer instead of just wasting wort?). I'm pretty...

Thanks guys. thesnatch, I really have no way of estimating my starting number of cells... I started with maybe a tbsp of beer from the bottom of a 3/4l bottle, and stepped it up by doubling the volume several times. Do you know of a way I could estimate cell count, say by measuring the volume...