Recent content by rjman53

I'd post a photo but my camera is out of commission unfortunately. I'm not really worried about it, merely curious. Thanks for the responses.

I'm trying out my first batch of cider and it has turned bright orange. I bought regular apple cider from an orchard that started out fairly brown as you'd expect. I used a campden tablet per gallon to sterilize. After adding the tablets, the particulate matter in the cider began to settle out...

I'm still working on a good way to control fermentation temp. I haven't got a spare fridge or anything so I've been reading a little on how others do it. Right now, setting them in the coolest part if my house is all I've been doing and has worked fine for my previous batches. I'm beginning to...

Guess this one is going in the learning experience column. If I were to do another big beer in the future, is there a way I can still do two seperate mashes without getting an overly dry beer? Could I simply do a thicker mash and then mashout to avoid this? Or would I just need to suck it up...

Thanks for the reassurance. I hope you guys are right. The IBUs are right about 100. I used a White Labs 001 California Ale yeast cake from an IPA that I'd just moved into secondary. I expected that a five gallon propagator batch would really get things going quickly but not that quickly. I...

OK. Like I said, this was my first attempt at a big beer. The rapid drop in gravity was totally unexpected so I just thought I'd ask. Is that sharp alcohol bite generally a characteristic of a green beer?

Thanks for the quick reply. The beer wasn't infected. I just seemed intolerably alcoholic and dry. I'm considering a blend with the APA I made from the second running. If I was to add maltodextrin, how would I go about it?

I attempted my first AG barleywine about two weeks ago and decided to take a gravity reading to see how it was doing. The OG was 1.091 and 12 days in the gravity had dropped to 1.013. I had been expecting, after everything I'd read about making big beers, to have problems getting the FG down in...

This was the first time I've made starters and definitely expected some kind of visible activity. Sorry to have put you on another ingnorance induced tirade about yeast Revvy but thanks for the info. Guess I'll refine my method and see how it goes.

I've been using this site for a while and figured it was about time to say hi. Fortunately, I was given some secondhand equipment, but it left me the daunting task of delving immediately into all grain. I'm a few months into it and so far so good. I obviously have a lot of questions. I trust you...

Has anyone else out there had issues with wyeast. So far I have bought 3 packs and none of them have worked at all. I have use primarily white lab yeast but decided to try out wyeast; it was a total bust. Not one has inflated after breaking the nurtient pack. The first time was an activator pack...