Recent content by Gnomishninja

1.035. I'm not sure if I should dump it or let it sit and hope at this point.

Cold spring water and a bag of ice we bought at the store.

When the boil and mash were over, we chilled the wort by adding cold water and ice. It took over an hour to get it down to a yeast-pitchable temperature (85 F) and I worried and fretted the whole time. I saw a thread on here about doing a water bath and we plan on doing it that way next time...

The DBF got the sanitizer from our local brew shop. I asked him and he said "iodine" but I think he means idophor (sp?). We usually fill a bucket with idophor and dunk any siphons, airlocks, etc into it before it touches the brew.

I'll definitely be more careful with the mash temperature next time. It didn't get up to 185 until about 40 minutes into it. When we sampled from the secondary, it tasted very yeasty and there was a lot of dead yeast on the bottom of the primary fermenter when we racked it. The two weeks...

We usually just rinse them out and sanitize them. I take it we should be be using a bottle brush and detergent?

We run the bottles in the heat cycle in the dishwasher. There's no fan or anything where we're bottling, so the air movement is minimal. The bottlecaps are boiled in a small pan.

We've done a couple batches of beer now and I've noticed that they all have a distinctive "skunky" taste to it. I've been poking around on this forum for a while and see a lot of stuff about sunlight making beer taste skunky. While we don't get a lot of sunlight in our kitchen, the only...