Recent content by Goaltender66

Wear a coat!

You are probably fine. Take another gravity reading in three days or so and see if it's changed. A little suck back isn't going to kill your beer.

What is your pressure in the keg? If you're in the 30psi range your picnic tap may be failing because it's not designed to deal with the higher pressure.

Good article but I disagree with the conclusion. If you're a big corporation you don't have to bust into a market by brewing the same low-volume low-margin brews. If this conglomerate is as big as represented, it will be the largest single purchaser of raw materials (hops, malt) in the world...

Get the recipe from him, say you want to brew it yourself, and invite him to your place for the brew day. If your technique is superior he'll pick up on it and apply it the next time he brews. Have you tried any of his other beers?

You can but you should brew based on taste, not on volume. When you rack the beer taste it. If it tastes fine then I'd wouldn't bother with adding more water. That said, assuming you're bottle conditioning, you can just add the half gallon of water with your priming sugar.

Agreed. It doesn't have to be an either/or thing. When I first went all-grain it was as simple (from an equipment perspective) as punching holes in the bottom of a bucket and placing it into another bucket with a spout on it. Get the theory down, then get the equipment that makes applying...

It is fine. Assuming you don't smack it before opening, when you do open it up you'll find that the yeast nutrient pack is likely unbroken. Since you put the package in the refrigerator immediately after receiving it you have no worries at all. As for re-yeasting, I'm torn. On one hand...

Rock Clone. From the glass carboys of my basement I made this cloned beer for my enjoyment, as a tribute to my technical excellence. It comes from my plastic bucket to you. Yep: 33.

I didn't see this asked. 3oz of priming sugar: is that by weight or by volume?

Good luck. It sounds like a great idea.

Hop pellets shouldn't be brown unless they're old and/or have been stored incorrectly. If your shop doesn't think it's anything to get worked up about, they should have no problem replacing them.

AiredAle, I can only offer my observations. For a particular style I've had to increase my proportion of crystal malt (60 degree if I recall correctly) to get approximately the same color and flavor as the 5 gallon version. It has to do with how my system works. If keeping the proportions the...

The first batch is always the hardest. Not from the technique...but from the worrying. A tbsp of water isn't going to kill your beer, that is unless you have a third world municipal water source. Even then I'd put your odds of a bad beer at 20%. An infection will be evident from odd...

It's very hard to scale up recipes. Main issue I see here is with the hops. It's not as simple as multiplying by three, because your hop utilization doesn't follow a linear schedule. You'll get different utilization depending on the volume of boil, so a utilization rate at 5 gallons will be...