Recent content by rutheyrocks

Lovely!! Thank you for this!! :)

Yes, I'll try a few more bottles - we had two good ones, and two awful ones.. the difference was a few weeks between drinking. fingers crossed my larger batch of 'lager' won't suffer the same fate!!! I'm even more impressed by those who manage to do this on a larger scale.. I thought I was...

HEy, that's good to know slow chilling of wort isn't the issue... I left mine pan with a lid on, out in the snow.. but because I was making lager, it took a long time to get down to the 10 degrees pitching temp! I think it probably is a problem with the bottles.. I didn't check for debris...

Hey!! So.. I decide to let it lager... so it's in my shed, keeping nice and cold!! :) On another note, my lovely first IPA.. I made a 8 bottles... has become horribly sour!! The first bottle I opened was perfect, but a few weeks later and the other bottles taste terrible!! It took a long time...

Eric and Keizer, just to update you!! Checked on the beer this morning to find one of the carboys bubbling away nicely, and the other one is just getting started! Seems the yeast is waking up finally! Today, I did as suggested - siphoned off 1/2 a litre from each, dissolved the extra malt...

Thank you so much for these tips!! So are these speciality malts, extracts? I need to shop for my next few batches (planning ahead) so this is super helpful!! I've used a Richie's light DME, but I imagine it won't bring a lot to the beer given how different the wort looked/smelled! Yes.. I...

You're the beery-godmother!!! haha! Thank you so much!! I'm going to exactly that!!! I will let you know how it goes!! :):bigmug:

Also.. I need to dilute my DME before adding, which makes the calc a little bit complicated... hmmm.. perhaps I'll just go for it anyway!!! If it's going to be quite a quick ferment, now that I'm not lager-ing, then there's not much to lose!!

That looks a lot like some of the back of house station plant rooms I've been working in! No lovely copper stills though.. !! So.. I was lucky enough to do a few tours of some whisky distilleries in Scotland... the ones I saw were fairly small scaled and looked quite old fashioned.. in a...

Hey there, I diluted the beer by a third, to get the correct (10% BRIX) reading on my refractometer... so doing a quick calc, I probably have 190g of DME in my 5 litre carboy. I just checked out table beer (I didn't realise, but Kernal Table beer is one of my faves!) and it has an ABV of at...

I love this advice... more carboys!!!! :)

Hey! Thank you!! :) Do you think I can brew something that weak?? Is it possible?? Should I chuck a load of carb drops in there to give the yeast a little more to work with perhaps??

haha! I think after I realised there was a problem with my refractometer and I now seem to be attempting to brew a 1.5% ABV lager, I might accept defeat and start again :(

Hey!! Thank you for the link... the more the merrier!!! Some great advice around getting fermentation started! Thank you! Stupidly, I was only one successful home brew in, of a tiny 1 gallon batch of IPA. I'm a huge lager fan, so just thought it would be a case of different ingredients, not such...

haha! Thank you for the super helpful recommendations... funny you mention the first book... my mind is already turning to 'how on earth do they do this on an industrial scale, or even a microbrewery scale?'