Recent content by BribieG

Mangrove Jack's dried yeasts are from New Zealand and here in Australia they have become very popular over the last few years. Nowadays I rarely use liquid yeasts as the range covers most of my styles. I'd even go so far as to speculate that if similar ranges had been available ten years ago...

The use of "cool ships" was a common method of cooling wort until the 20th century. For example Pilsner Urquell was produced using coolships until the major refit of the brewery following the fall of the Iron Curtain and its eventual acquisition by SAB Miller. Obviously PU isn't a sour beer...

Enjoyable article, but the comments about keeping beers is incorrect. At the end of the 19th century breweries established their own huge estates of tied houses. This enabled them to divest themselves from keeping huge and expensive stocks of beer at the brewery itself, passing the job of...

For any interested non-Australians, there are several reasons why Australian mainstream lagers are brewed with around 30% cane sugar (by gravity). Along the same lines as rice being used in many American beers such as Bud , malts available in the 1800s were high protein and inconsistent, and...

In Australia most Aldi stores sell liquor except in Queensland. Interestingly Aldi own Trader Joes in the USA.

Corrections: Pride of Ringwood hops are rarely used nowadays. Supermarkets usually have an attached liquor section in New South Wales. Convenience stores in rural villages likewise. The major adjunct used is Cane Sugar, not Dextrose, and has been since the 19th Century. Carlton Draught and VB...

I have yet to hear of any incidence of botulism from no chilling, after doing it for about 8 years so far. According to the Bureau of statistics botulism cases are less then one per year in Australia, and the fatality rate of botulism cases that do occur is around 5% On the other hand, It is...

A popular method is to reserve some wort and do your flame out or whirlpool additions in a pan, cool quickly in fridge then add to fermenter at pitching. That way aroma hops bypass the cube without alpha acid isomerisation during the time that the wort is sitting above about 80c.

Occasionally brew clubs get the use of a microbrewery to do a batch. Bring your own cube and take your share home. One club I was in, we all fermented with different yeasts and had a club tasting night. That was actually the night that switched me on to Ringwood.

As a fellow Australian I've been no chilling for years. We rarely use carboys here, mostly HDPE barrel type fermentors with taps. And of course increasingly SS conicals as they are dropping in price. A couple of points - throughout most of the country for most of the year the domestic water...

I've got a stainless steel mesh "tea ball" that opens up into two halves. Try Asian grocery stores, mine was made in Vietnam. You can get small single - cup size but the one you'd need is the about the size of a golf ball, as long as it fits through the opening of a cornie it's good. The...

Hi from Australia. Without trawling through 75 pages :drunk: just one question. This product is about to arrive on our Antipodean Shores in June and I (along with many others) have pre-ordered one. The bigger sized Chronical fermenters are also going to be on offer. I've heard through the...

I used 2L soft drink bottles for several years before I started kegging, if they are kept in a dark place the system works very well. The other advantage is that it only takes a dozen bottles to contain a whole brew, which makes bottling day a lot less miserable.

I used 2L soft drink bottles for several years before I started kegging, if they are kept in a dark place the system works very well. The other advantage is that it only takes a dozen bottles to contain a whole brew, which makes bottling day a lot less miserable.

I've been giving batch #2 a swirl and it's finishing off nicely. Here in Australia we almost universally use barrel shaped FVs with screw on lids and these lend themselves to using cling wrap instead of the lid (the rubber sealing ring from the original lid comes in handy) so the beer always has...