Recent content by Duane_Austin

I'd have no problem letting my 6 and 13 year old daughters help out with some stuff, I'm sure they would love the capping of bottles. But the last thing I need is for them to be going home Sunday night and telling my ex, "Daddy is brewing tons of beer in his basement!" and have the whole thing...

Hm. Is human sweat fermentable? :cross:

My advice is, if you haven't even made your first Mr. Beer batch yet, is to just go with flow, follow their instructions, and get your feet wet. You won't make the best beer in the world, but it will be drinkable and decent, no worries. You have the West Coast Pale Ale to start? That's great...

Same here! Got Mr Beer for xmas, was kind of "ok, this is different, might be something interesting to do on a rainy weekend." Finally got around to it, and now I've been building up 5gal equipment. Just acquired a copper immersion chilller. She had no idea what kind of monster she was...

No such thing as a bad beer, just some beers are better than others, eh? :mug:

Juice?? I thought I was drinking Dimetap! Juice would have been ok. I still would have been mad that it tasted nothing like beer, but if it was blueberry "juice"...well, ok. But Wild Blue was vile. What made me even madder is that AB is sneaky about it and packages it markets it like it is...

You guys make me depressed. I turn 42 today, and just got started with homebrewing a few months ago. I don't care about missing that opportunity in life to play guitar, be in a band, change the world, do something great, or any of that stuff. Reading you just makes me sad that I didn't...

"Hello World!", huh? Why do I get the impression that a good chunk of us homebrewers are I.T. geeks? I wonder of those of us who are I.T., are "open source" geeks. Homebrewing -- the Linux of Beer. (apologies to those who aren't I.T.)

Huh. Well, me a being a relative n00b, I wouldn't know the difference between fresh cracked grain and stale if I tasted it. Guess that's another skill I'll have to pick up! :mug:

They are stored in the zip-lock baggies the grain came in at the store. He ground it for me and put it back in the baggies. Sounds like I should replace, at the very least to play it safe. Oh well, $9. I want this to turn out good, I am planning on bottling it for wedding favors when I get...

Howdy folks, Question -- what is the acceptable shelf life of cracked grains? I purchased all my ingredients for my first extract w/ specialty grains, an Oktoberfest, on May 16, but am only getting to it now, this week if I'm lucky, 2 weekends from now if not so lucky. That means the...

My girlfriend bought me Mr. Beer this past Christmas. Didn't touch it until February. I now have a 5gal setup, 5gal glass carboy to beef up my pipeline, copper immersion chiller, constantly think ways to expand, moving on to all-grain, even thinking about building a garage or barn to expand...

Howdy folks, Hey, just brewed my 1st batch using UME, so added my own hops for the first time, and used hop sacks. I'm almost positive that I've been reading that the sacks are reusable, but now that I'm done, I'm wondering what most people do to actually clean them out. Since they go...

It sounds like my mixes were just too passive to expect the big foam I thought I was going to get. I pretty much just filled a 5gal bucket with either 1gal or 2.5 gal water and poured (just under 1/4oz to 1gal) and (1/2 oz to 2.5gal) Star San, respectively, and stirred. For some reason, I...

I was thinking about using my Coleman camp stove as a Bunsen burner to do my yeast starters directly in the flask so I don't have to pot->flask transfers since I have an electric stove. Then invest in a turkey fryer for the big boils.