Recent content by teetee523

Thank you everyone for all of your input! I was thinking the same thing about just using BeerSmith when doing 3 gal extract then adding water. It doesn't seem to ever mix completely and always gives us a high OG. Hopefully we will be moving up to a full boil soon and won't have this issue any...

Sorry to revive this old thread, but yesterday when making an oatmeal stout with a target OG of 1.053, our hydrometer said 1.082, which is impossible. We did 6 lbs DME and alot of steeping grains/oats, but there's no way it could be that high. So obviously it was that the water we added to bring...

Hi everyone thanks for all your helpful responses. I also thought 1.092 was high, we had just added the water so maybe it still wasn't completely mixed, but we used 5 gallons, adding about two to our 3 gallon boil. We used White Labs english ale yeast with a starter. I actually already put it...

It was actually 8.5 lbs, I know thats still alot less than you used. I was wondering if we had miscalculated but we triple checked. We used about 2 lbs of steeping grains and a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder, but I know that wouldn't make a difference with gravity. Anyways, thanks for the...

Hi everyone, this could be a total newb question, but I just transfered a high gravity extract with grains chocolate stout to secondary. The OG was 1.092 and I just checked the gravity and it's at 1.036 right now. I'm putting it in secondary just to clear, so I'm not sure how much lower it would...

Brewed the extract version of this beer and it's been almost 4 weeks bottle conditioning. We tried it earlier on and before bottling and it had a weird aftertaste to it, almost medicinal. I think it was the spices that needed some time to mellow out. Just tried one last night and that flavor has...

I think it would be cool to just do a paper on how you homebrew in general and the different levels of it (extract, partial, all grain) along with other cool things you can brew with (fruit/veggies) And you could also do a paper on the history of homebrewing too. Or about homebrewers becoming...

This is extract so I'll be steeping the grains. I am going for a big beer and am planning using a yeast starter. How did your beer with unsweetened bakers chocolate come out? I think that's one of my main questions besides the grain bill, what type of chocolate to use!

Hi everyone! I am going to brew this beer to give to family/friends for xmas (I also posted this in the Recipes thread but realized afterwards this is probably a better place to get feedback at). I am trying to make a chocolate heavy/sweet beer that even non beer loves would like. I took the...

Hi! Thanks for the feedback (also, I love your icon!). I actually have some cocoa powder on hand but would be open to tracking down some nibs to use as well or instead. I had read this thread (https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/what-you-need-know-about-chocolate-brewing-94804/) and there really...

Hi everyone! I am going to brew this beer to give to family/friends for xmas. I am trying to make a chocolate heavy/sweet beer that even non beer loves would like. I took the recipe from a book we have and then tweaked it quite a bit. I'm also trying to decide about the chocolate addition...

This response might be too late for you, but I just froze my fruit and took them out of the freezer right into a sanitized fermenter then siphoned wort on top of it. Before racking to bottling bucket, I used a strainer to get most of the fruit out which had floated to the top.

I did the extract last week and steeped it in 3 gallons of water then removed grain back and brought the whole thing to a boil and added pumpkin/DME to the mix. I have read that you steep in less water in other places on the forum, but I'm not sure the reasoning behind this. I've always just...

I just added my pumpkin spice over the weekend. What I did was took a sample with my thief and tasted it. It was somewhat spicy and we didn't want it to be overpowering, so we added 3/4 of a tsp of pumpkin pie spice to the secondary, which will sit for 2 weeks. So I did a different method, I'm...

I had a similar issue with our brew, but I think it might've been unrelated to the fruit since there was a similar problem with earlier brews. I spoke with our LHBS guy and he said that it might've been since we hadn't been thoroughly cleaning our bottles that we'd already gotten the labels off...