Recent content by pjj2ba

Anybody traveling through King of Prussia on the way to judgingon April 6th? My wife has a Sat. morning commitment so I am thinking about taking the bus from State College to King of Prussia friday evening and staying in a hotel there. My wife is driving down later on Sat. to pick me up and...

I agree with the others on shorter mash times. The longer you mash, the less dextrins (long chain carbohydrates) you have left, and these help to provide body. You can also add some grains with more protein, like wheat and flaked barley as protein really improves body

Hops? Hop flavor and aroma can easily overpower malty flavors. Try backing off on the flavor and aroma hops. I have two lagers on tap now, with fairy similar recipes, both with ~20% corn. You can readily detect the corn in the one, and it is much less evident in the other, the one with 3X as...

Clear or not is more often a function of the yeast you use. Many traditional wheat and wit yeast are poor flocculators. If you want cloudy, a good way is to add a little starch to your boil. This will give a permanent haze. As to step vs simple infusion, I am a die hard fan of step...

I've been absent from the forum for a while - new job. I skipped entering last year, but got serious for this year. Two of five are headed to the finals. A light lager and a light hybrid beer. Looking forward to Baltimore! We finally have a local club and we will be pouring - I'm re-brewing...

Hi All. We've finally gotten a club up and running in State College, and we feel we are ready to host a competition. Deadline for entries is Friday Nov. 20th http://www.statecollegehomebrewclub.com/phoc/

I still like the aromatic, but the toasted malt is what I used to finally give me the czech flavor. Without it, it just ended up more like a German pils.

All grain Kolsch

I'm in. See you Thursday! p.s. no IPA - I got busy and haven't dry hopped it yet. I will have my 2 final round pilsners with me though. Maybe some others.

The wife and I are arriving later on Wed. and leave Sunday, driving to Midland (MI) to visit my mom for a couple days before heading home.

I have a 1500 watt unit that I use to heat my mash tun ( I do 5 gal batches, but have done the occasional 10). I do direct heating and have 5-6 layer of reflectix (aluminized bubble wrap) around the tun. It will only lose ~1 F per hour. I do step mashes though and my longest step is 30 min...

I'd let it ride where it is. If it is bubbling, then the yeast are using up the O2. the bubbling could just be CO2 coming out of solution though. As to the autosiphon, air leaking around the seal is common. The best cure is to not siphon so fast. Make the height difference between the...

The sweetness of a beer is due to sweet tasting compounds that the yeast cannot consume, not leftover simple sugars. When we bottle beer, we add some fresh simple sugars to the beer and the yeast happily consume these to produce CO2 for carbonation (and a little ethanol). If the yeast were at...

The attenuation numbers given for yeast reflect some of the sugars that the yeast can or cannot consume. They all can eat up things like glucose, fructose, sucrose and maltose, and typically you will not find these in a finished beer. There are other sugars in the wort though that some some...

Don't dump it. Package it up, and then give it an extra month more than you normally would