Recent content by TheHomebrewNerd

For me it's an opportunity to be creative, combining elements of both science and art, which keeps things interesting. It can be challenging, and there is enormous variety in what you can do. I also find it extremely rewarding when I share a homebrew with a friend and they return to the...

I agree completely. In my experience showing some patience will almost always result in better beer. Two weeks is not a lot of time. Hang in there a little longer. One of the fun (and sometimes frustrating) things about homebrewing is that no two batches ever seem to work the same. You...

You might be able to gently remove the bottle caps, add a bit more sugar and recap. I've never done this before, but I think it can be done. Of course you'd need to warm your bottles back up to room temp for the yeast to ferment out the new priming sugar.

I agree with this. I think something went wrong with your gravity measurements or your volume measurements. According to your pre boil measurements you had 292.5 total 'gravity points' in your beer (6.5 gallons * 45 pts/gal). If you boil off 1 gallon, your post boil gravity should be 1.053...

In How to Brew, John Palmer says to use 2/3 cup white table sugar, or 3/4 cup corn sugar (dextrose) as a general rule. You do need to keep in mind what your target carbonation level is though. For an ESB made to style you'd want less carbonation than you'd want for something like a North...

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with the kit or the kit instructions, but it is important to make sure that the priming sugar is thoroughly mixed into the beer in the bottling bucket. In my experience, if you add the sugar to the bottling bucket first, the act of transferring beer into the...

From one Boilermaker to another. RIP.

No problem. I actually had three bad White Labs vials from two different stores, which was unusual as I have had good experiences with them in the past. I contacted White Labs directly about the issue and they sent me vouchers for three free vials to replace the bad ones. They stand by their...

Are you using the same kettle for your all grain batches that you use for your extract recipes? If you are, and you are boiling with approximately the same vigor, I would expect that you'd boil off the same amount of water in both cases. There shouldn't be anything specific that I can think of...

I have only done the version of the recipe with kettle caramelization, so I can't tell you how it compares to the version with the specialty malts. I can, however, tell you that when I brewed my batch I ran off about a gallon and reduced it down by about a half before adding the rest of the...

I had some issues lately with some vials of liquid yeast that I believe were due to high temperatures during shipping. When I made starters with these vials, there was no noticeable signs of fermentation after 48 hours. 14 hours isn't an extremely long period of time, so I'd wait a bit longer...

Can you share a little more information about the process you used when bottling? What did you use for priming sugar? How much priming sugar did you use? Without knowing those things it is a bit difficult to guess what might be going on. The Homebrew Nerd thehomebrewnerd.com

I'm sure there are lots of ways to do this, but in a 5 gallon batch I use 0.5 oz of basil in the boil for the last 10 minutes, and then another 0.5 oz at flameout. The beer has a nice basil flavor and some basil aroma, but neither the flavor or the aroma are overpowering. The Homebrew Nerd...

You can probably expect a slightly lighter, lower alcohol version of the beer you intended to brew. I suspect you still may end up with a decent beer though as your OG isn't low enough to really worry. For your next batch, I'd suggest you measure wort volume well before flameout though. If...

That does seem like a farily big drop, but the last batch I did with honey started at 1.053 and ended at 1.008. It used only 0.5 lb of honey though. Did you taste any of the beer while you bottled it? As long as everything tastes fine, I wouldn't worry much about it. The Homebrew Nerd...