Recent content by Rootski

I agree not to worry about it too much. It sounds like you've already made some efforts to bring down the gravity and your recipe has a lot of "less fermentables" in it. I currently have a RIS in the carboy and it's been at 1.044 for over a month now. OG was 1.125 and I used WLP007 and have...

I did a "farmhouse" with this strain that turned out really well. If I recall it was: 70% 2 row 15% flaked corn 15% wheat Hopped to about 25 ibu and threw in some Mosaic at the end of the boil. I co-pitched an active starter of WLP644 with WY3711 (no starter) and I would recommend co-pitching...

Fill that bucket with sanitizer. Honestly, it'd be fine as you have it right now, but typically the other end of the blowoff tube is submerged in sanitized water.

Good to hear. I'm in the construction world too and thought I should speak up for safety concerns, but I'm glad you've already thought about it all. Keep on building!

Nice build! I second the concern raised about ventilation. PLEASE consider a different method for mounting your burner! Keep fire away from walls! That flame will lick up around the sides of your kettle and burn your sheetrock eventually, probably when you're not looking. Your insurance...

Sounds good! I don't know about cheese, but a brewing buddy and I did a smoked porter in 2013 and one a year later in 2014. The grains in the 2013 version were smoked in the smoker after a bunch of meat and the grains for 2014 were smoked before any meat. When the 2013 beer was fresh there...

My guess is that while municipal tapwater is generally contaminant free, DME is not guaranteed to be. DME should be boiled.

6 months so far - It's been at 68 for most of that time although I did hold it a few degrees higher for the first couple of weeks.

No I never added anything. It seems to me that if you and others are getting tropical flavors without adding anything, so should I unless I did something dramatically different. The only other thing that I can think of is that my malty recipe (a Belgian Dubbel) is overpowering any flavor from...

It has been a long time since I brewed this beer and I decided to put it out of my mind since I was a little disappointed with the lack of yeast flavor that I attributed to over pitching. I measured and sampled yesterday and FG is all the way down to 1.005. The sample now has slight fruit...

The Shipwreck Saison and Cottage House Saison in the recipe section are both really good crowd pleasers from my experience. I've backed the recipes down to a lower OG and removed the table sugar and produced beers that the non-craft beer drinkers really like and I've been happy with as well.

I'm surprised I'm the first one saying this. That doesn't look like an infection to me. Maybe some oils from the orange zest and spices got disturbed when you moved it the first time and now are congealing on the surface? I'm not sure.

First, congrats! I agree with the saison or patersbier idea. Something Belgian will please most beer drinkers.

I agree with the above comment. When I did mine I made a multi stage starter until I had roughly the same cell count as a pack of 3711. I still didn't get a ton of brett character compared to the saison yeast, but definitely some. I consider that beer a big success for my brewing.

One of the beers I'm drinking right now is a 50-50 blend of 3711 and 644. I pitched a starter of 644 along with a smack pack of 3711 all right at the start. The overwhelming flavor came from the 3711, but there are complexities that I think are coming from the 644 and are showing up more the...