Recent content by Jocky

Friends at my club that have keg hopped with spectrum say that it needs time, as at first it’s very grassy/unnatural.

Spectrum just dissolves in to the beer, so you don’t need to transfer the beer after dosing.

I usually rinse off any hull I use (oat husk most often) before it goes in to the mash, simply because they are often pretty filthy. The rinse water goes grey.

I normally put them in at the start of the mash. The amount you add is small (about 5-10% of the wheat malt by weight), so it’s not going to make much difference what you do. Of course if you want to recirculate during the mash it’s best to add them at the start.

Give that repitched yeast genetically drifts over generations, while I can confirm WLP002 and Imperial A09 aren’t the same as Fullers now, they may well have been isolated from a long distant generation.

I have a Fullers pub at the end of my road and during lockdown I missed it, so I decided to brew my own ESB, growing yeast from 1845. The moment I opened the fermenter at the end of fermentation I could really smell the Fullers character.

The less talked about challenge not mentioned in British beer recipes is yeast. In British beers the yeast is as important a character as in Belgian beers. Graham Wheeler didn’t recommend commercially available yeasts in his editions of Brew Your Own British Real Ale, because his opinion was...

The two ball valves on my kettle get stripped after every brew as that’s the one place that I know can retain a little wort. They’re two piece ball valves so I actually leave the back half attached to the kettle and just unscrew the front bit that holds the ball. When I had a fermenter with a...

Sorry I missed this originally. My own experience with spectrum was that it worked really well being added in the late stages of fermentation as instructed. If you’ve stored it cold the definitely warm the packet a bit (no more than 30c/86f though), and you can squirt it straight on top of the...

I recently had a slightly sulphury hefeweizen, and stirred the keg with a length of copper. It reduced the sulphur, but I don’t know whether that was down to the copper or the foaming causing it to gas off. It’s impossible to know how much copper exposure will remove the sulphur from your...

I’ve hear that commercial bottling/canning lines produce foam by firing a little jet of water in. I wondered if you could do the same with carbonated water and a syringe or bottle with a nozzle on it.

It’s best to get it dissolved in a smaller container away from your main boil, then once dissolved you can add it to the boil. So weigh out what DME you need then add about 2x the amount of wort to it. Stir it until it’s all dissolved. It might need a touch more wort, but the key is to not have...

What’s your definition of “perfect”? When a group of us went to Koln in 2023 all but one of the Kolschs we tried was 4.8% ABV. They were all brilliantly clear and dry with a beautiful crisp hoppy bitterness.

16 days after brew day and almost all sulphur has gone. I’ve just left the beer in the fermenter with an airlock. Will keg before the weekend as I’d like to free up my fermenter for a brew this weekend.

After 4 days with the fermenter lid open the WLP380 has dropped the gravity from 1.048 to 1.012. I've just closed up the fermenter and added an airlock before the fermentation completely stops. It's still sulphury but I'm determined to wait for that to dissipate before I keg.