Recent content by nckmsn

No off flavors at all. I did detect some dms but it went away with time.

what did you end up doing?

I hate phenols. I am super sensitive to them and can taste it many commercial brews. About 1 year ago after brewing for more than 15 years without an infected/spoiled beer, I started getting phenolic off flavors in my beers. I would be able to vaguely taste it out of the fermenter and then it...

will do!

No problem man! I see where you are coming from. So I think that when I transfer to the carboy the beer is still fermenting. Would this still disrupt the post ferment cleaning? Also, I have no problem whatsoever not going to the secondary if not necessary and possibly detrimental. I guess...

The reason that I transfer to a secondary is to give several more days while not sitting on top of spent yeast. Also I sometimes use gelatin in the secondary as it is easier to deal with in the secondary than the keg in my opinion.

Last ipa I did was in the primary for about 7 days, then secondary for 10 days while dry hopping the last 4 days, then in the keg carbonating and clarifying with gelatin for about 5 days. The abv was about 6%. If I'm doing a higher gravity ipa I will leave it in secondary for a couple more days.

Why don't you taste it. 1.02 would be easy to notice if you taste it. In my opinion a lot of the time, putting science aside and using your own senses works very well.

Wow this is tricky one. I would think that the yeast has stopped working due to alcohol intolerance so in theory adding more of the same strain might not do anything. Decanting each bottle then heating to add more yeast seems like a bad move because oxidation and or infection could...

My guess is that it has something to do with the batch sparging. As an other has said this is usually a quick process. You mentioned that it took you 1 hr to do so I am wondering if it is a temperature change issue during the sparge. I myself have never batch sparged so I may be speaking out...

As a follow up (The next day) I checked the fermenter and it is fermenting away. So the small yeast starter and the temperature change didn't hurt much. I will also follow up to see if the starter had an affect on the flavor.

Thanks for your response. I will definitely do this differently next time. My concern with dropping the temp quickly was that the yeast would drop out. Also, I screwed up by only making my starter 1L, but this may work in my favor since I pitched without decanting.

Well maybe I haven't done this the best way, but I still want to find out the best thing to do at this point. I pitched at 70 degrees and then put my fermenter in my keezer and I am cooling it down to 55 degrees. Do you guys think that this is okay or should I wait for visible fermentation...

I usually just taste the beer to see if it is still sweet in a case like this. If it is still sweet then it cold be stuck or just fermenting really slowly. If it isn't sweet I would think that it could be complete and not stuck. Also, I have noticed others talking about stirring a starter...

For my ten gallon batches I use a ten gallon mashtun and have done up to 30 lbs of grain(it was hard to do with this much grain but definitely possible) which ended up at about 7.8% abv. My kettle is a 15.5 gallon stainless steel commercial keg. My Sparge tank is 10 gallons as well.