Recent content by speedyvespa

Thanks! Should I wait until I know 100% that fermentation has stopped? It seems a little strange that it's still going so strongly in the 5th week... or is it? I think it's going to be good from what I can taste thus far... problem is, if it IS good, I'll never be able to make it again. My...

I'm pretty new to brewing, and am making my first 100% my-own-recipe-from-scratch beer. I made it from whole hops given to me by a neighbor. It's supposed to be a 5-gallon batch but I noticed when I transferred it to secondary that the hops in the primary had absorbed a lot of water. It's...

That's right, I'm the kind of person that gets into the science of anything and the how the minutiae explains the whole, so this kind of observation is part of the whole appeal of brewing for me. To that point, my mother-in-law gave me a book on brewing from 1840 that her dad owned (her...

I've looked up fermentation rate a lot and that's roughly in line with what I'm reading, but the nice thing here is that as new brewer, the more I read, observe and obsess it becomes less like machine code and more like a meaningful sentence of English :) One month ago, I wouldn't have...

Thanks everyone - yeah, I guess I wasn't thinking so much about the conditions being different vs. the fermenter, I suppose I'm just curious to see the pace of fermentation, how clear it is and so on - and also to educate myself about the #1 mistake it seems that newbies make - obsessing over...

Because I'm new, I want a way to monitor fermentation regularly as kind of a learning process. The books and web pages I've read all say that a common newbie mistake is to take too many samples and expose your patch to the risk of contamination. I can completely see why that's a common problem...

Thanks! I think a plastic or glass carboy for my primary ferment is the way to go possibly, takes the guesswork out of it. Plus it's interesting to watch. Well, relatively. I'm just curious whether there's any differences brewing with whole hops vs. pellets. I do know this for sure... when I...

Hello everyone, I'm brewing my third ever batch, and it's single hop recipe I was given by a neighbor that brews and grows his own hops. He gave me a big bagful recently that I've dried and on Sunday I made a 5 gallon batch with this recipe. Everything went smoothly, I'm fastidious about...