Recent content by ForRealBeer

Thanks guys. Dan Kehn's assessment was pretty much spot on about CCC...it's a really friendly place to work, and one where you're treated very well as an employee. I spent some time with Nathan Brown today...he's a really, really good guy. These days he leads the Marketing department. I...

If you've got 60 batches done in two years, I think you're making something quaffable. 60 x 5 = 300 gallons ... 300 gallons x 128 ounces = 38,400 ounces or 4,800 pints ... 4,800 / 730 days = 6.5 pints per day ... :tank:

Well, kinda sorta. I'm the IT manager and I oversee all of our tech systems. Everyone that works at the company either has a deep background in coffee and is already a certified coffee steward or they have six months to take our training classes and get certified. We don't have retail...

They're nylon pads that are about 3/4" thick that goes on the bottom of the mash tun to serve as a filter -- much like the stainless steel braids that a lot of folks use now, but they cover the entire false bottom. I like mash pads better because they have more surface area for filtration...

Burundi is an interesting area for coffee that's starting to emerge after their government released state control and now their coffees are graded for quality before being sold and shipped. We (I work for Counter Culture Coffee in North Carolina) roast and sell a single origin from the...

I still use a mash pad in my 10 gallon round cooler setup. I guess that's been out of fashion for 10-15 years, but it works for me and the issue of it being food safe was settled a very long time ago by John Palmer.

I brewed some two year old two-row a couple months ago and it did just fine. The finished beer tastes fine, it has good head retention and no one who's tasted it knows the difference. The only difference between your situation and mine is that I keep my grains in sealed containers and I grind...

This thread is very interesting to me because SWMBO went on the wagon for health reasons and sometimes it has become a point of contention that she cannot have a "good" beer while I literally have gallons of it in the house on any given afternoon. Soooo....thanks for digging it up and making it...

I hear you about six bottles, I have often had the sort of homebrewer's remorse. One time, though I got smart and left a case of bottles at my late grandmother's house for safekeeping. I got down to see her about six months later and had some of the best homebrew ever. Now that I keg, it's a...

I can second that. Back in my extract days, I could never quite get the twang out, at least like I can now. Having control of the product from grain to glass is really the way to go, but as others say, you can win competitions with extract brews. Me, I like the lower cost and the control I...

I think that the one thing that's made my beer better over the past several years is getting a small chest freezer and controlling my fermentation temps much better than I can with ambient temps. I live in the south, and in the summer, it's 72-73 degrees inside and that's a little warm for the...

If you are at all worried about boiling over an Erlenmeyer flask when you're making a starter, use a couple drops of Fermcap and bring it to a boil slowly. I do that for all of my starters just to eliminate the possibility of that happening (and yet another round of speechifying by SWMBO about...

I've got a Wyeast 2565 / Kolsch brew that's near FG and is really slowing down in a 59 dF chamber, and this brew is getting near the all-said-and-done part of the show. Smells good, looks good, everything's normal. To finish her up, I am thinking of taking it out of the cooling and letting it...

When I brew, I heat up my remaining sparge water (always have a couple extra gallons) to around 180 and mix in Saniclean and run it through the Therminator and my tubing with no cooling. After that, I drain it and discard the first pint or so of the finished wort before I start filling the...

Doesn't a solid boil drive the DMS out of your wort? Also, how would you cool this wort, no boiling aside?