Recent content by Caveman3141

Tripel. Been in the bottle for about 4 or 5 months. Young American Barleywine. Only a month in the bottle. RIS. My first brew. The relatively few that I have left have been in the bottle for nearly 8 months.

Aye, this goes the other way too. I've known a lot of people who swore they hated "dark beer" (which to them is synonymous with Guinness) only to go crazy when given sweet/oatmeal/cream stouts, weizenbocks, and brown porters. Unfortunately Guinness has a monopoly on dark beer at least with...

That works out pretty well for you and where you are. For me, though, it's $3/lb for DME and about 75 or 80 cents a pound for base grains.

Yah, that's why if you extract brew full-time buying in bulk is your best option. Doing so brings the cost down to about $3 a pound. It's still cheaper for grain but it's not quite so stark a difference.

I wonder how much extract the OP bought. For $45 I can get 12 pounds of dry extract which is enough for a 1.100 beer. Most of my extract batches only cost about $30 for 5.5 gallons (excepting HG and extremely hoppy beers).

What's your OG?

Sounds pretty good, but just to be precise what you have with the lack of roasted barley and the addition of lactose is going to be far closer to a sweet stout than an Irish dry.

3.25% abv is completely appropriate for Scottish ale. Are you wanting to boost the abv just for the sake of boosting abv?

I tend to think that most SA bashing is done because it's trendy. Craft beer hipsterism. By craft brew standards most of SA's offering fall somewhere between average and good. Their imperial pilsner and dopplebocks are particularly excellent. Their cream stout is probably the finest example of...

Lactose dissolves in water (clearly illustrated in the case of milk) but as with all sugar solubility increases with temperature. You'll probably end up with some undissolved lactose at the bottom of your fermenter. You can probably take care of it by periodically swirling your fermenter.

I'd have to add Pliny to the list. Both Elder and Younger. Not because they're bad beers. They're really really good beers. But I still think they're overrated/overhyped. Hell, if mythical ambrosia existed, conferring ageless immortality on its drinker - it would still have less hype than...

I don't think it's unreasonable of his wife to react this way, especially since it seems to have happened several times. Not only does this damage the flooring it provides an opportunity for mold to infest the wood.

Just remember for the future, checking the gravity via hydrometer will tell you far more about how your beer is or isn't progressing than everyone on this forum combined.

With the setup you describe sounds like you could do any of those. Depends on what you want. Just keep in mind that the ingredients for AG will weigh more than extract so that may be a consideration if you have to ship everything.

Don't worry about moving to a secondary but I'm doing to dissent here and say go ahead and pop it open and take a gravity reading. It's only a 1.050 amber so it's perfectly possible this beer could've completely fermented in 3-5 days. Take one now and take one 2-3 days from now.