Recent content by Kai

I am in love with these guys right now. I mean, I've had good luck with their products before, but now I'm just glowing. On Thursday night I smacked a packet of Belgian Ardennes (Chouffe) yeast to brew on Sunday. The package was 6-8 months old, not ideal, but alright. In order to warm it up...

Beef, marinated Indian-style in yoghurt, with dried fruit. Seasoned with black cardamom and coriander. It's a fairly sweet, mild dish, creamy with a mild dried fruit tanginess. This is not a bold hot curry, so it doesn't call for an IPA. Served with potato, cauliflower. I'm thinking a rich...

Is that a 3G batch?

Draught box with three taps, five-line chiller plate, double reg, ball lock connections - free.

That's what I'm thinking. For the fridge I'll take the regulator and two taps (with space for #3). I'll test it out and if it works I'll transplant the gauges from my reg and buy a new low-pressure gauge. I might try the chiller plate as a wort chiller, but I prefer immersion in theory (all your...

I was hanging out with the manager of the campus pub, and he mentioned he was getting rid of the old draught box; I chimed in, and he ended up getting rid of it to me. I tried to pay him, but no dice - he was going to trash it. The haul: three soda taps, ball-lock connecters, some very dirty...

Eh, just a t-shirt, the room it's in is north-facing but with lots of indirect light. If it's a light beer, I'll use a darker shirt, but it's basically what's sitting around. Never had a skunking problem. My lambic is wearing a rather nice casual button-down. I figured if it's got to wear the...

The only off-readings it would cause are pre-fermentation, and it sounds like you didn't take one (which is well enough, as extract OGs are usually dead-on). The fermentation going on now will already have adequately mixed the beer. Your FG reading will be right. Don't worry. This will not...

I'm trying to find a picture of my wit in the fermenter. It looked quite brown looking right down through it in the carboy. It is pale straw (hoegaarden-coloured) in the glass. If it's an extract recipe, though, you're probably a couple of shades darker. It is nigh impossible to brew a...

It is pronounced "vit". Like the first syllable of "victual". The full form, witbier, is pronounced "vit'-beer"

Looks almost identical to the mold infection I had recently. I don't have a good picture (just fuzzy cell phone video) but I bottled anyway. Wasn't able to rack cleanly from beneath (some got mixed in). My bottles have a tiny bit of a skin, but flavour is totally unaffected. It's good. If...

Wood has a pretty high oxygen permeability, relatively speaking, and I've heard of some pretty decent brews being aged in that. Just sayin'

Um. OSX? Built on BSD Unix core, able to run many linux-family apps in X11, easily portable, more stable, frankly better and easier human design? You basically just described OS X. You've got to at least include it - your choices are a Ford, a Bimmer, and a custom car. Obviously it has some...

This doesn't work. Just saying. My ordinary bitter is all clogged up.

Bah! Hops are a soporific, sure. It's called dimethylvinyl carbanol or something. Any erectile effects are so minimal as to be nonexistent. The impotence rumours were started by English brewers 16th Century to defend their market share against Dutch merchants selling hopped beers.