Recent content by slowbie

Most smoked malt definitely has the diastatic power of a typical base malt. The smoking is accomplished during the drying process that is part of the normal malting process.

This is correct. Red's Rye is moving to a seasonal four pack and Breakfast stout is moving to a year round six pack.

It won't work. The corn and rye can't be steeped, they need to be mashed. Your best bet would probably be to do a mini mash with 1.5 pounds six row (for the extra enzymes), and the corn, black patent, and crystal. Then make up the rest of your gravity with 2 pounds rye extract plus as much pale...

I brewed this beer on 1/20/13. This was the recipe I settled on: 3 gallon batch 6 lbs. Briess cherrywood smoked malt 4 lbs. Munich 4 oz crystal 80 1 oz Hallertauer at 90 min Wyeast 2308 Munich Lager 1.080 OG, 1.016 FG, 23 IBUs I fermented in the low 50s for two and a half weeks, did a...

I use buckets whenever I can. Easy to clean, easy to harvest yeast, cheaper than carboys or better bottles. Just be careful not to scratch them when you're cleaning and you'll have no problems. I just make sure to either rinse them immediately after emptying and/or soak them in oxyclean if the...

I haven't done either, but my mom always does a lot of canning at home, and to sterilize her mason jars she would always boil them. It's a little different, because she'd usually fill them with hot stuff as well. One thing that may be helpful is a canning jar lifter like this if you choose to go...

I think you'd be okay as is, i just think I would prefer it top have 20% rice. 40% would be the highest I would go with rice, so you're still under that.

Revvy, can you comment at all on your choice of two row rather than six row? It seems to me that six row would be more historically accurate and would also help with all the adjuncts. I'm assuming you just stuck with two row because you already had some on hand or it was easier to get, but I...

I'd suggest dropping the rice down to 20-30% of your fermentables.

I think unnecessary is a better word than overkill. It won't hurt anything, it just won't really add anything you don't already have.

The grain is readily available at just about every online store, but AFAIK the LME is not sold in the US.

Haha. You had me really excited for a bit there.

White labs doesn't give a lot of details about their strains, but wyeast says that their lacto and pedio have a max tolerance of 9% ABV. In practice, a lot of people will tell you that the lacto is even below that. You should be able to get some activity out of the brett though.

I don't think Briess makes apple wood smoked malt anymore. Their website only shows cherry wood smoked. Either way the cherry wood smoked malt is much stronger than rauchmalt, so your point stands; but I'd be hesitant to steep a base malt myself, as I would rather avoid the starches.

If you post your recipe we can tell you what your OG should have been. Otherwise you can put it into a recipe calculator like hopville and figure it out by yourself.