Recent content by Rich the Brewer

Unless it has furry stuff growing on top, I'd boil it, throw in some hops and ferment it for a couple weeks. Malted grain just wants to become beer. Relax, have a homebrew and boil away.

My primary bucket was bought in 1982. With gentle cleaning with a soft sponge and long soaks in bleach it still works great. All the other plastics I use are over 5 years old, except the tubing. I replace it every 3 or 4 bacthes.

I must admit I brew because I like good beer and I'm too cheap to buy it. $20 for 5 gallons of ingredients is a lot cheaper than $72 for 9 six packs at $8 each.

The last time I brewed, it was 20 degrees out, so I used my turkey fryer in my attached garage with the main door open 2 feet off the ground, and the back door to a patio fully open. With no openings to the house other than a few cracks, both my basement and main floor CO detectors...

Relax, your beer will be fine. Just be patient. I usually don't aerate the wort. It just gets what air infuses into the wort when I siphon into the primary. I also just sprinkle on dry yeast and don't stir it in. Fermentation is starts in 8 hours and usually finishes up in three...

I did a 10 gallon batch of Edwort's house ale Sunday. My LHBS doesn't have Nottingham, so I tried Safale 04 on 5 gallons and Safale 05 on the other. On both, I opened the packages dumped it in and didn't even stir. By Monday morning, both were fermenting away nicely with the airlock...

At my homebrew store, we sit down, have a beer and design a recipe. He has a bunch in the recipe database and I usually choose a stock one he's made before. He crushes the grain and bags it while we chat about brewing techniques.

I had a batch where I lost about a third of my steeping grains through a small hole in the bag. I boiled them for an hour, and poured most of them into my fermenter. After fermentation and a couple weeks in the bottle, the astringency was pretty bad, but faded with time. I'd bottle it...

You may want to check your water rates as the per gallon cost for municipal water is surprisingly low. Mine is 3 tenths of a cent per gallon for water, plus 3 tenths of a cent for sewage disposal. That makes my cost for water somewhere between a dime and a quarter for all the cleaning...

I went alll grain a couple months ago. Brewd00d built a 44 quart setup with the sparge tank for $150 delivered. It wasn't that much of a premium over buying the coolers and parts myself. http://brewd00d.infinites.net/ I've made a couple ten gallon batches with it and it works well.

I just pull them out of the bag and use them. Are you supposed to sanitize them?

Hmm, 700 studies and only 38 "scientists" were concerned. Sounds like another one of those alarmist media stories. I saw no conclusive peer reviewed studies indicating elevated health problems in humans or animals from the very low levels ingested from typical consumer use. If you go...

All grain costs me 37 to 47 cents a bottle. My last extract brew cost 54 cents a bottle. All ingredients were bought in kit form from my local homebrew store. Newcastle Brown Ale costs $1.35 a bottle, and Sam Adams is about $1.10 a bottle.

I just bought a 20 gallon pot so I could do 10 gallon or 15 gallon batches. I did a google search and came up with Instawares.com. A 60 quart pot was somewhere around $50 and a 80 quart was $90 shipped.

I picked up a brewd00d 48 quart with the sparge manifold and sparge tank. It works great, I've done two AG's so far with no problems. The 48 quart holds a steady temperature for an hour with no problem. All the bits and parts are press fit and come apart for easy cleaning. He's great...