Recent content by gmcastil

A coworker that doesn't brew gave me about a gallon-sized freezer bag full of cascade cones he picked last week. I've kept in the refrigerator for the past week or so. Can someone give me a quick process for drying these? Do I just want to dry the cones or do I need to separate out each...

Most of your fermentable sugar is coming from the extract, so the fact that you steeped a bit on the hot side isn't going to really affect the finished product. If you were mashing your entire batch and you mashed at 170, you'd definitely have some problems. Your process looks pretty good to me.

Or you could just let it sit for a while and it will carbonate naturally on its own.

I can answer your ABV question right away. You racked a bunch of active yeast on top of 4 lbs of simple sugar. No wonder your ABV went through the roof. What is it with new brewers and fruit beers? Seriously - go make a couple of simple pale ales to get your system under control and then...

Not sure what you mean, but using table sugar as a medium for growing a yeast starter is a bad idea and does not yield the same quality of finished product. I'm not sure why anyone would choose to use sucrose to make a yeast starter in light of that fact.

You should read that article I linked to - it specifically mentions making starters with sucrose. It's not about how much multiplication you get - it's about the health of the cells. I'm just surprised that a guy that wanted real primary information is now willing to ignore it because "it...

Yeah, but it may not sanitize the surfaces of the glass which are further away from the burner. Wort boils at about 202 F at my location, but there is no guarantee that the walls of the container, particularly the lip, reach that temperature.

I don't imagine so - just want your starter wort to be about 1.020 to 1.040. To do that, you'd want 10 g of DME and then filled to 1 L with H2O. Should get you there. How much DME were you planning on using?

I thought of that, but I'm not convinced that boiling DME heats up the Erlenmeyer flask enough to sanitize it thoroughly. When I make starters, I sanitize the entire flask prior to adding the wort. Maybe I'm paranoid, but starters are one of the places where I get really anal about sanitation.

Sanitation during the initial stage of propagation is really important - I would toss it and start over with a new one, especially since it's your first starter from a batch of washed yeast. You want to make sure that your process is working right.

I ran across this article earlier today on diacetyl production in beer. http://morebeer.com/brewingtechniques/library/backissues/issue1.2/fix.html The author talks about a lot of different causes for it, but one of them jumped out at me, so I wanted to resurrect this thread in case anyone...

That article is fantastic, but a lot of it is going to be lost on brewers that don't have a background in biochemistry and organic chemistry. However, I think those of us that do, can definitely help others out by summarizing some of the more salient points from the article. Here's what I...

Wyeast has said stated many times that the Pacman strain tends to puff a little bit during shipping.

Thanks guys. I haven't been taking any gravity readings, so I have no idea where it was in the fermentation phase when I dropped the temp down a few degrees. Visible fermentation was vigorous and stopped after about 5 days or so, but that doesn't really mean much. I have a room where I...

No problems bottling stubbies.