Recent content by SeanRRogers

I find this amusing. I was drinking though their summer variety pack a few months ago, and thinking that the beers all tasted kind of similar. Finally, it dawned on me that the taste was Pilsner malt. Not that there's anything wrong with that! The Koelsch was awesome.

Short answer: take from the wheat and carapils. "Normal" Koelsch grain bills usually have Vienna and/or Wheat and/or Munich as the main supporting grain--usually around 10-15% total. None are "necessary" to the style. Honey malt is also common as a supplemental element, but is not listed in the...

What's your mash thickness? It seems to be a lot easier for me to get my mash temperatures uniform and stable with thinner (or, "un-thick") mashes--say, strictly greater than 1.25qt/lb. The amount of variation in a thick mash, after (seemingly) a lot of stirring, was shocking to me. It made me...

How are you measuring the mash temperature? What kind of mash tun are you using? I.e., are you sure that the bulk of your grain is at the temperature that you are measuring for the duration of the mash?

Don't worry about the 5 gallon batch in a 5 gallon carboy. I do it all the time, have done for years. Just be prepared for blowoff. You'll lose a little beer, but not too much. I'm generally within a couple of 12-oz bottles of 2 cases in the end--which ends up being about 4.5 gallons finished...

Yep.

Do a search for "whirlpool hops". Cooling the wort quickly preserves the flavor and aroma compounds of the late addition hops, which continue to isomerize at temperatures significantly below boiling. If you must cool slowly, and you want the hop flavor (as opposed to just bitterness), you might...

This works perfectly if you are worried about sucking a lot of debris in. I also will slightly "thump" the fermenter by tilting it up on edge slightly, then putting it back down a couple of times during dry hop. This will get some of the hop flakes to fall to the bottom before racking time...

Those PPG numbers are actually not too far off those in the steeping column in Palmer's table. What was your steeping procedure?

Agreed--but we are talking about the difference between 100% fermentability of extracted sugars, which all the software seems to assume, and something that may be closer to 0% in reality. This difference amounts to 2-5 points of FG in typical recipes. If this is the case, then I assume that...

Are you including some base malt in the mash, or are you doing it with crystal only first? Cheers for actually doing an experiment! :mug:

That was one of the first pages that I looked at. However, it is plain that those PPG numbers are the ones used by all software tools to compute OG, and therefore must include both fermentable and unfermentable sugars/dextrines. For example, "everybody knows" that Carapils is almost entirely...

I've been researching this very topic the last few days in an attempt to write my own brewing spreadsheet, and agree with you that the software all seems to blindly apply attenuation calculations to the extract potential, regardless of whether the extracted "stuff" is fermentable or not. I am...

I have had California Lager and Nottingham yeast both emit pleasant banana aromas, even when they were fermenting in the low 60s. The beer did not taste like bananas, so I would not despair over your beer; it might not even be "too hot". The wet towel method will get you a several degrees...

I have done it with a sanitized bag in the bottling bucket to catch the larger dry hop pellet debris. It worked great. You don't want it tight around the cane or tubing though, because it will then clog and break the siphon. My bag fits around the rim of the bucket, so I just installed it and...