Recent content by Hoser_brewing

Sorry, not here either, although I'm the inverse. Love me some big sour beers, but fungus on the plate? Ugh.

Bah. My kids know which one I like best. For that matter, so do my wives.

The university of Vermont also has a really comprehensive study of the agronomics of hop cultivation in the northeast - def. worth a read. http://www.uvm.edu/extension/cropsoil/hops

Ask and yet shall receive: From our trusty friends at the Journal of the Institute of Brewing: DMS production and boil-off from wort and simulated wort: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/j.2050-0416.1979.tb06845.x/abstract PDF at...

Here's another paper from the same journal that shows fermentability as a function of mash time, mash temp (145 vs 150F), diastatic potential, and more. So yeah. Take a read. Enjoy. The journal's got a crapton of great stuff. They just had their 125th anniversary and did a fantastic series of...

If you're going to switch, as was previously suggested, I'd go with the hallertau; you might taste a tiny difference in the herbal / floral range, but it'd be slight. But using the same rough amount of low alpha hop will help to preserve a bit of the light tannic / vegetal character that the...

Do you like porters and English stouts? Because that's what you're going to get. Also, even if you dropped the black malt, although you don't list your anticipated OG/FG, at 3 gals that grain bill looks like you'd be outside the range of a best bitter. That being said, if you brewed that up...

If you have access to podcasts, there is an episode of Brew Strong from 28 Aug 2008 dedicated entirely to beer foam. This includes lots of detail in its formation and stabilization, and is very much worth a listen. For quick improvement to head retention, a couple of suggestions: Doing...

Just make sure it's done its second round of munching; I bottled up a best bitter (1.043 OG) done with WY1968 that 'finished' at 1.012, primed to 1.7 vols, and then the stuff restarted in the bottles and dropped down to 1.007. Four exploded, and the rest were excitingly carbonated - usually...

And to follow up, in MA they have a spec of 50 ug/L (ppb) on Mn, but that's an aesthetic limit set by the department of environmental protection, not a health limit. See p9 of http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/monthly/wqupdate/pdf/cy2013/102013.pdf for more details.

Permanganate adds manganese, not magnesium. I'm not a water engineer, but it sounds like they'd be adding it as a pretreatment step, rather than in the municipal distribution lines. I know there's usually some MnO2 or other Mn salts in the water, as tap water recirculation lines in my lab have...

I've made several ambers with similar grain bills, although I used victory, in place of the melanoiden, but I like a bicuity note in my beer. I agree that with the Munich in there the melanoiden malt becomes a bit redundant. Considering all the flavors you'll have going on in there already, I...

Yeah, I've noticed batch to batch variation as well; first Summit-focused APA came back as resin/tangerine, but fresh batch of hops gave me dirty lady bits, or as my wife put it, "congrats, you made a beer that smells like a sweaty slut."

Lamb-ic is ok, but is better if you blend it after fermenting with a rosemary-mint gruit.

In an episode of either CYBI or Brew Strong, JZ was discussing White Labs' new setup where they parallel test yeasts using the same wort, and he commented that although he had always advocated wlp001 for a cream ale, after trying it done with their cream ale blend, he was a convert to 080. That...