Recent content by hobohrau

Greetings everyone, So batch #3 for me was a Brewer's Best Dunkelweizen kit. I believe this was the recipe: 6.6 lb. Wheat LME, 1 lb. Maltodextrin, 8 oz. Chocolate Malt, 8 oz. Munich Malt, 5 oz. Vanguard Bittering Hops, 1 oz. Argentine Cascade Aroma Hops, and Munich Danstar Yeast (I found...

Hey everyone, Brewing our 3rd beer tonight and something occurred to me. Previously, we would always just pour the beer from the brew pot into the primary by just dumping it in and doing our best to keep the sediment at bay. Usually that doesn't work too well and there's a ton of hoppy goo...

Agreed. Brewed this about 6 weeks ago and I think the spice was waaaay overpowering. Though almost the whole batch did disappear at a cookout, so it couldn't have been *that* bad I suppose...

My first batch I oxidized the living crap out of it (i.e. I didn't have siphoning equipment so I bottled using a ladle and a funnel). And it took me about a month or so to drink the beer. One bottle seemed to go bad after about a month, but the others were all great. I'm still a newbie but I...

Yes, I believe that the guy at the LHBS said it was a PET carboy. Maybe it is the stopper that I was smelling -- it was brand new so it was very stinky but the beer didn't slosh against it or anything so I should be OK on that front ... Interesting about the campden tablets ... I ran all the...

I'll have to get back to you on the recipe -- since it was from a kit it's a bit hard to discern some of these things. I think next time around I will be actually buying ingredients a la carte to actually put together a recipe. The yeast health could be an issue -- the AC had some issues for a...

So I just finished bottling a pumpkin spice porter (from a kit) and I realized that I may have done something stupid. I'm trying to RDWHAHB, but I can't help but think I've tainted a whole batch. I was at my LHBS and I got a plastic 6 gallon carboy (you know, before I discovered the...

I use iodophor as the sanitizer and I don't think that will get rid of any label gunk if it happens to re-adhere to the bottle... but yes, I do know to sanitize after the oxy soak!

I am getting ready to prep bottles and I have decided to give the oxiclean+warm water method a go, but reading the threads there is one detail that is unclear to me. Do I: 1. Just throw all the bottles into the solution and fill them up with the oxiclean solution to weigh them down (i.e...

The family has been collecting wine and beer bottles to be used for homebrew, but I guess not everyone has been rinsing them out thoroughly, so some of the bottles are growing spore colonies of ... who knows what. I have Easy Clean and Iodophor -- if I fill the bottles with the Easy Clean...

I just wanted to give an update in case someone finds this thread and is wondering what the outcome was. I've slowly been working through the plastic bottles and they've all be completely flat, however I finally got to a glass bottle and it had amazing head, nice and bubbly. So basically I'm...

Gotcha. All great tips. I'll definitely be more prepared for the next brew. I saw some flip top 32oz bottles at ikea and picked up a few (after seeing on the forums that people have had generally good results). The bottles I tested out weren't well-chilled and they definitely let off *some*...

Everyone seems to warn you that you shouldn't overfill the bottles so I was pretty conservative with the amount of beer in each bottle (too bad I didn't know that not filling enough was also a problem). So I just want to make sure I sort of understand what is going on here. If I leave too much...

They were all twist caps.

Gotcha. Thanks. I guess the first time out I just wanted to see if I could brew something that wasn't a complete failure before investing more money (those poor grad student instincts, you know ;) ) I'm going to the brew store tomorrow to get another kit so I'll pick that stuff up.