Recent content by Hotspur

Lot of good suggestions so far. I just set up a brew space in my unfinished part of the basement. One thing I didn't see is that you REALLY want a fan out to dump all that moisture outside the house. I set up my brew kettle right under the window and got an hvac fan to vent it out. Sink wise...

Seconded. I picked up a 1/2" Black and Decker refurbished drill for $30 about six years ago, and it's still working great. I have a great cordless, but I can control the speed really easily with the regular drill, and never run out of charge.

Sent you an email about checking if these are 15.5 gal or 50L. Definitely interested in two if they're 15.5 gal.

Adding on to the don't do anything to the cider. I've made two batches of cyser by putting 15lbs of honey into 5 gallons of fresh pressed, unfiltered, non-pasteurized, sulfite free cider. No issue with either batch, and it drops clear exceedingly fast. I do add nutrients and degas, but don't...

This is spot on (with the understanding that their processes and equipment are optimized for the short cycle). For example, if you have an 11 day cycle, you'll get 33-34 batches per year. If you have a 10 day cycle, you're looking at 36. If that one day difference doesn't change the...

This is pretty much what I do in the winter in Vermont, so I don't dump water all over the driveway to ice over. I have a cooler, a generic submersible pump and free snow (you'd need to buy bags of ice). Pump, snow and water go into the cooler, and it runs that through the immersion chiller...

The Duvel strain is one of the SLOWEST yeasts around. I've done two triples with the Wyeast version of it (1388), and left both on the yeast for about two months. No trace of autolysis, and both finished very low and had great flavor. Make sure you pitch a healthy starter and give it time...

Only one I've tried this year was the Hooker's Oktoberfest from Connecticut. It was... not good. It didn't really have enough malt backbone, and the hops produced an odd grassy/vegetable flavors. Next trip to CT I need to pick up something else of theirs and see if it was an off batch or...

I minimize the amount produced by packing a cooler full of snow, adding a gallon or two of water and hooking up a submersible pump. All the water is contained in the cooler, and you can keep adding snow if you want. Best cold breaks ever! I usually dump that by the brook, and since we...

Building on the "export as html and host on a local Apache server", I signed up for Dropbox.com and do a text file output of the recipe and save it into the Dropbox folder on the desktop, which auto syncs it with their servers. You can get to it from anywhere, but it comes right up on the phone...

I've been using the Tygon lines for a while now, closing in on 8 months or so. No off tastes at all. Yeah it was $45 for the 50', but I didn't ruin any beer in the process, and I've only built the system once. ;) The one thing I've noticed is that the Tygon lines definitely have less...

Beersmith sets the default measured OG to 1.010 and FG to 1.005, and it calculates the caloric content from measured values, not expected. It drove me nuts for a while until I figured it out, so I just fix that by hand when I'm done with the grain bill, and update it after each measurement...

Start taking gravity readings. I ended up leaving my golden strong with the 1388 yeast in the primary for roughly eight weeks. It was amazingly perfect, no hot alcohol, the yeast had dropped nicely and it was way, way too smooth for a 9% beer. The reason I left it so long is that my...

When I did this last year, I added .25 oz of *each* Amarillo, Warrior and Simcoe every 7.5 minutes. It made for a long, long boil. I'm going to do it again, but probably wait until it's a bit warmer out.

This came up a while back, and I think the cat proofing idea was to bungie cord a 1x4 in front of the tap handles, locking them back? Obviously wouldn't stop kids, but it'd be too much force for the cat to surpass. Unless you have some sort of super-kitty.