Recent content by merddyn2002

steeped my grains AFTER doing the boil.... DOH got a nasty infection that ruined a plastic fermenter too.

uhhhh, wow, i truly hope to christ you're good with 8oz of ginger from the boil. If you need more than that you might just want to buy some ginger essential oil and dribble it directly on your tongue.... wow. That's a whole new level of ginger :) I wanna try it, i loves me some strong ginger ale

well, powdered ginger would get the flavor in there, but you'll likely cloud your beer

peel and slice the ginger as thin as you can, you want to increase the surface area as much as possible. Then I would use the ginger to make a tincture in vodka. The water and alcohol in the vodka will extract all the water and alcohol soluble compounds in the vodka. Let the slices soak in the...

If it were me I would add 1-3 oz of pellets during the last 3-5 minutes of the boil to pull out those aspects, but I always prefer to use whole leaf hops for flavor and aroma. I know there's a big debate on pellets vs leaf but pellet hops remind me of MSM (mechanically separated meat). Dry...

I'm toying with the idea of mounting some brass gauges on the fridge door for temperature, humidity and barometic pressure. Completely irrelevant to the kegerator but that's kind of the point of the style. One of my original concepts for this kegerator was to literally build one of those old...

too much bling? you mean the chrome faucets? Think i'm going to re-finish them to be brass and have the tap handles as brass pipes as well. Yeah, i'm aware my kegerator has been contaminated with Schlitz.... :( I'm actually a big fan of the Schlitz "blue bull" OML. I love that stuff and it's...

I routinely hop in the fermenter, but I always do it with fresh hops, never stuff I boiled with. I always strain out my boiled hops. You did nothing wrong :)

My cranberry cream ale should be ready to keg this weekend. I'm stoked Eventually I plan on pimping this kegerator out in steampunk style. Will mount the Tank and co2 manifold on the outside and paint everything on the outside to look metalic and aged. Will be removing the fridge handles...

been doing canned pumpkin in meads for years. It works beautifully, especially in conjunction with pumpkin pie spices. I love the idea of baking it first. I'm going to have to try that soon.

just sprinkle in. no need to re-hydrate. I've been brewing competition quality stuff for years and have never bothered with hydration. it's a myth.

yeah you can transfer to a 2ndary w/o harming anything, but it really won't effect clarity as long as you aren't disturbing anything with the trub.

I use ozarka bottles as secondarys and have for years. They work great, especially the new ones with the handles.

I just recently made a REALLY good partial-grain dunkel. The recipe is on my recipe page at http://simplehomebrewing.com/beersmith/ it's very very good. The only thing you might want to adjust is the hops level if you're more of a hop-head.

low tech solution to chilling wort 3 2-liters of sanitized water, frozen rock solid. Sanitize the outsides of the 2-liters and drop them into your kettle after the boil. Given about 20 minutes i'm down to 80 degrees after adding another 2 gallons of room temp water (I do a reduced boil) If you...