Recent content by Philsc

I recently switched from iodophor to starsan. I used distilled water and keep the starsan in two 10L plastic cans - I wanted to use it from batch to batch. I did some bottled one batch racked another to secondary and made a batch of starsan. I noticed a sulphurous smell and just thought I'd...

I find the baggie rolling pin doesn't work. What does work - it'd take flipping ages - is a heavy glass and a bread board. Strew the grains very sparsely over it and crush with the bottom of the glass. It gives a great crush and the hulls remain very much intact, but you're doing a handful...

I don't know. I think your thread title suggests that justice has indeed been done in beer form. I can't remember which brewery it is, but I remember reading that a similarly massive beer was turned out of the brewery in a matter of weeks and drunk relatively young. If this is a historical...

Yeah, I was good at art and English at school. This numbers lark makes no sense to me.

Challenger? Exquisite! I'd have said old ale too, but Old Peculiar it ain't, not at 1.092. Perhaps, it's something approximating a historical mild ale. I don't know, looking at Wheeler, I have difficulty seeing what exactly the difference is between strong milds and OP. Anyway, how long...

I got a hold of some California Common yeast. To my shame I've never tried Anchor Steam beer, but this recipe is beautiful in its simplicity, so I'm going to give it a go. It's going to be a weird British version though with MO and Munton's light crystal. Sorry about that. Thanks for...

That's a great question. I read in Homebrew for Dummies that one shouldn't crush the darker grains. I mentioned this on another forum and was told that homebrew for dummies was only good as toilet paper. Mind you, they do turn to dust that looks and tastes like the scrapings of burnt toast...

The stupidest thing anyone ever said about my beer was, "this is the best beer I've tasted in my entire life".;) I went to a very fancy chocolate shop a few months back with SWMBO. There were sacks of cocoa beans tastefully placed here and there, Aztec style art on the walls, uncomfortable...

I've been asking people to save me their bottles and someone just dropped off 24 bottles - saved my bacon, all my bottles are full (what a nice situation to be in) - until I saw that they were twist off. I thought I'd have to return them to the beer store, but came here to see if you could cap...

I have another question. This is a high mash temp. As a dry stout I would have expected a lower mash temperature in order for it to ferment dry. I would expect this high mash temp to result in a really sweet stout. Is this to create more body to emulate the nitrogen effect, or have I...

apparently not... Superb work, Riclark. I had a pint of guinness in a pub a while ago and fancied brewing some myself to make black and tan and just drink good dry stout. I keep forgetting how good Guinness is, probably because I don't like the nitrogen effect. Being able to brew a...

Oh weird. I just googled recipes on this today after seeing an episode of the Victoria Farm where one of the archaeologists, after messing up the hay harvest, made ginger beer from a Victorian recipe in less than sanitary conditions. I didn't note down the recipe but this seems close enough...

That had occurred to me, so I suppose it's a good thing that oxiclean has that annoying film. As I said every beer out of that carboy's been a bit wrong; that's why I'm switching to a bucket. My carboy doesn't have pits or bubbles it has short scratches in a four inch band running up the...

The same thing happened to me, hence this thread. After a few days' soak in generic oxiclean there was a film on the inside of the bottle and on one side of the film were lots of little scratches like, as I have described previously gravel had been dragged along the glass. Just on one side...

I read somewhere that if you manage it properly you never need to buy yeast again. There's a brewpub in toronto that uses it and they've been repitching it for over five years. The Ringwood brewery has been repitching it for longer 20+ I think. Yorkshire ales are lovely, you just have to...