Recent content by briandickens

Heh. Just turning one! So not so much for him but for the other adult guests. Well 5 gal for them, 5 for me. :)

I plan on brewing a 10G batch of this for my son's first birthday party (he likes to drink, what can i say?), and I need some advice on hops. I have about 5 - 5.5 oz of Fuggles in the freezer for about a year that I would like to use up. I plugged numbers into Beersmith and it said that now my...

Yeah. I think I'll start at 1qt/lb. If it gets stuck I can add water to it to loosen it up.

I have one of those igloo ice cube 50qt coolers that I have turned into a mash tun. I'm planning a big brew soon and I'm wondering what are the limitations on the mash tun so I don't run into issues. My recipe for 10 gallons of blackIPA is calling for 31.5 lb of grain. According to rackers...

Right. That's what I expected. Thanks.

Great! I'll do that! Thanks!

So let's say I am doing a 10 gallon brew day with the intention of fermenting two 5 gallon batches of the same wort with 2 different yeasts. I have but one stir plate. If I grow one batch of yeast up so it's ready a few days ahead of time, take it off the stir plate and put it in the fridge so I...

I am putting together a recipe for my next brew day and thought I'd try making a Black IPA. To do this, my intent is to take a standard IPA recipe and add enough Debittered Black Malt to bring it to a black color. According to Beersmith, that's somewhere between .5lb and .75 lb for 5 gallons...

Well for what it's worth, I used the plastic corks in champagne bottles and I'll never do it again. They are a ***** and a half to get out. Yesterday I had to take a vice grips to them to get enough leverage to remove them. Next time it will be worth the money to get the corker and corks.

Eis-saison? Doesn't really flow. Anyway they're all thawed out now, but the ones that had frozen are marked so I'll taste them against each other. I don't think they'll be any different than the others. Thanks for the help!

Well yeah. You know that and I know that. But my inability to leave well enough alone apparently doesn't know that. I also managed to snap a very integral piece of the faucet from my kegerator as I tried removing it to clean it out. Now I have an excuse to buy a forward sealing faucet, I guess.

So this weekend, being the genius I am, I decided that serving beer in the low 40s was too warm. I upped the coldness control on the kegerator to try to get it a few degrees cooler. Well, I did it and I ended up freezing a few bottles of beer. They're just about thawed now, but will it mess up...

That is weird. I carbonated mine to around 3 volumes. BJCP style guideline says it's highly carbonated, though doesn't give a number. Jamil's book says 3-3.5 volumes. It also depends what temp the beer is at during fermentation. Higher temp beers need more sugar. Assuming 80 degree...

Though I guess technically you get away with 1 cooler 1 pot 1 bucket. I user 1 50qt cooler, 1 60qt pot, and 1 16qt (i think) pot. I heat strike water and sparge water in the small pot and drain the mash into the big pot to boil. It could be done with three coolers if you put an electric...

That last picture brings tears to my eyes. It's gorgeous!