Recent content by justflow1983

Do you have a wort chiller? Submerge the chiller in an ice bath and run your beer through it between the keg and the tap. That's what bars do when they serve at picnic tables etc.

Is there really no value to quality when it comes to beer? Honestly, the price of something is more than just the sum of the cost of its ingredients. I pay more for certain expensive beers because I know I am going to reliably get a beer better than I would at a lower price point. I don't...

Are you brewing with extract? Is it liquid or dry? I have found that LME beers go stale faster than DME, so I brew exclusively with light DME as my base sugar and then adjust flavor as needed with steeping grains. Also, what are you fermenting in and for how long? Beer losing freshness is...

There has to be somewhere local (within 30mi of Stamford) where you can get liquid yeast, you're not in the boonies. Even here in Syracuse we have 4 brew shops, one of which is excellent and has every yeast strain I've ever looked for. I would be surprised if there wasn't a LBS with a full...

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I happen to have done about 30 extract brews, never managed to make the all-grain jump. I've moved between countries a few times and every time I had to dump and rebuy all my gear except for my precious wort chiller, so it would have been pretty hard to part with AG gear over and over. Someday...

How do I take into account different hop AA% between recipes in a particular batch and what is listed in my recipe? Currently, I am calculating the new hop weight in a separate spreadsheet and then updating the batch info manually. This ought to be something that is done automatically...

well I'm more concerned with it having not been clean enough. Has anyone brewed with a chiller that hadn't been properly cleaned before use?

I bought a copper coil immersion chiller (didn't DIY, its from Brupaks) and I boiled it in hot water with some vinegar for 20 minutes. I must not have used enough vinegar, because the beer that I made the next day, and chilled with the chiller, tastes metallic. I am bottling it today. Will...

I meant the bottles themselves, that they can hold the pressure. I capped them a day late, but they were kept covered so I'm pretty confident the beer inside will be fine. :mug:

Great, thanks! Here's to hoping that there's no "compromised" bottles.

Well the krausen was only in the uncapped bottles, I think it had to do with the fact that the CO2 wasn't being forced into suspension. I put 230g sugar into 22l of beer, as per http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html?9778299#tag, for a 3.8 volumes of CO2 carb level...

just capped them. All of the bottles had developed Krausen inside, so I'd say they're moving along fine. They're pretty heavily sugared so I'm not worried about them undercarbonating.

I was 7 caps short when I bottled yesterday. The brew had a bit more in it than usual and I knew I was going to cut it close, but I was supposed to have 300 more delivered yesterday. The finally arrived today. I left the last 7 bottles in a dark(er) corner of my kitchen with aluminium foil...

I also wouldn't use hot tap water. Hot water tanks accumulate mineral buildups, so the water coming out will be harder and of a different profile than your cold tap.