Recent content by MagicSmoker

I guess everyone wants to chime in with their different approaches to draining BIAB bags... Eh, why not? Had a thread like this been around a few weeks ago I might not have wasted my money buying two different size "boiling baskets", neither of which worked at all. The BBQ grill grate was the...

The $64,000 question then, is, at what point are the TDS too high? The carboy of RO water I just bought reads 8ppm, while the same water tested at 3ppm a few weeks ago. Is this a sign the membrane is wearing out, or does it seem like a reasonable amount of variation?

I dunno about the advice that if your water tastes fine to drink it will make good beer. My water tastes fine to drink (perhaps because of the whole-house carbon filter), but it is fairly alkaline (8.3 pH) so it makes *terrible* beer as is. Switching over to RO water made a world of...

What about leaves and such? That said, good point about keeping out microscropic invaders by simply putting the lid back on the pot when it is cooling down. As for the guy with too big a pot for the splatter screen, how about screen window screen (is that redundant, like hot water heater?).

+1 on this. Take advantage of the service now before the guy realizes $5 per IBU test just isn't worth the bother!!! :D

Thanks again for the help yesterday, everyone! The airlock was bubbling away when I got up at 6am, so either my starter worked or I have a helluva infection! :fro: All in all this was a fairly painless process, with the exception of the wort boiling over when I sprayed it with water to keep it...

I cover the top of the pot with a splatter screen intended for frying pans. It lets the boil roll along while keeping out all the airborne stuff. Got mine at Target: Splatter Screen

I'm using WLP051 which is supposed to flocculate well (it sure did after a couple hours in the fridge) so it didn't hurt to decant off a little more than half the beer, but the next time I use WLP001 - which doesn't flocculate well - I suspect I will have to pitch everything, so this is good to...

Huh, that's good to know. And so I just hit the wort with 60s of pure O2. HBT to the rescue again!

Yep, I didn't add any hops to the starter, though I wondered if I should have after smelling it this morning! I can definitely see why you want to decant off as much of the "beer" from your starters as possible. I want as little of that flavor carrying into the final product as possible...

Huh... I saw a tamale pot at Target recently (looking for other items to (ab)use for brewing) and thought it looked interesting. I'll have to give it a second look. That said, I suspect that the wall thickness on the tamale pot I saw was about the same as my cheap turkey fryer pot... Because...

I tried 5.2 in one batch and while it did, indeed, stabilize the mash pH at 5.2, it did not fix my astringency problem. It was only after changing to RO water and building it back up with CaCl2, CaSO4 and MgSO4 that the astringency went away. I also bought some 88% lactic acid and added it to...

As you can see off to the right in the pic there is another pot... that was from when I purchased a stock pot + strainer basket from Home Depot, thinking I could use the strainer basket as a convenient way to support the grain bag when it was dangling over the bucket. I don't use the strainer...

I'm a relatively new brewer, and an engineer by profession, so it was inevitable that I would start tinkering with the brewing process at some point. It didn't take me too many batches before I realized that BIAB was the way to go (for me, anyway), but one step I had already come to loathe was...

Ugh... I just decanted about half the beer off the starter and it smells - even cold from the fridge - exactly like a warm/flat BMC. I was going to taste it out of a sense of adventure, but I find I'm not quite that adventurous. :D