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Cool, I'm just north of Lancaster in Lititz. I make my way up to Portland several times a year. Cool city, great people and food and the best beer in the world, IMO. I got to chatting with a brewer at Allagash who turned me onto closed transfers that made a world of difference in my home brewed...

I spoke with a brewer at Allagash about why I wasn't getting the hop aroma I would expect after dumping several ounces of dry hop into a NEIPA. He told me about fermenting in corny kegs and doing a closed transfer so I tried it out and it sure made a difference. Now I can smell the beer as soon...

Yeah, you definitely don't want to use a bubbler because it won't let in oxygen, the whole point of continuously stirring it. Just cover it loosely with a sanitized piece of aluminum foil.

For Portland add Foundation, Battery Steele, Austin St (tasting room) and Definitive (across the street from Allagash), Liquid Riot (down at the docks), Goodfire (behind Lone Pine). The Austin St brewery is down the street from Rising Tide. The Thirsty Pig (near Novare) always has good stuff on...

Sweet! A couple years ago home brewing bit bad and I starting thinking about opening a micro brewery. I happened to take the tour at Allagash and ended up talking to a brewer. I guess he was a little impressed with where I was at and how receptive I was to his story of how he home brewed and...

Quite true, like any other style there are some that are excellent, there are some that are hot dog water and there’s a lot of mediocre stuff. But the truly excellent ones are actually why I started home brewing. Bissell Brother’s Swish and Substance, Tired Hands’ Alien Church and Hophands...

RO filters particulates, it doesn’t adjust pH. I’d say draw off some water every now and then over a few days and, if it doesn’t move, there’s your base line. Add something base to bring the pH up a bit and you’re golden.

That looks like something that sat in a cooler for quite a while and cold crashed in the can, forming a tight layer of yeast and hop particles on the bottom, and then broke up into chunks when it was poured. "Best by..." means nothing unless it's Enjoy By or you know what the brewery considers...

If you use a hop bag weighted with marbles to transfer is needed, just pull the bag out at the end of the week, reseal the keg and purge the headspace with CO2. Loose hops in the keg may well present the problem of clogging the liquid out poppet with hop material unless you have a screen over...

And again from southeast Pennsylvania! A hobby that makes alcohol....win win! :-)

A wine thief works well, too. Sanitize it and the hydropmeter, put the hydrometer in it, put it in the carboy far enough to get the hydrometer off the bottom, take your reading and then put the sample back in the carboy by touching the bottom to the side of the carboy. No muss, no fuss, no loss...

It's always best when the keg is two pints away from kicked. :-D

Different people have different tastes. To me both taste like a tropical paradise.

Yeah, I get that. I played around with Columbus a couple months ago using it at 60/FWH and in the dry hop (along with some other hops for the same Trillium reason) and the beer was drinkable but definitely not my favorite. It imparted a very sharp bitterness and an astringent quality from the...

Quite hard, yes! That's one of my favorite things about Bissell...A 4 pack of Swish is $17 and a 4 pack of Substance, a very solid IPA, is $13! Trillium and Tree House (and a bunch of others) should be ashamed at their pricing for lesser beer than Swish. Portland has a TON of great breweries in...

Bissell doesn't really distribute outside of the Portland area, never mind the rest of Maine. Demand for their beer is huge.

Unless you're winning the lottery lucky, the answer is almost 100% no. Few NE breweries can meet demand even in their local area. Now and then SE PA sees Lawson's Sip of Sunshine and Session 2 but that's all and it's once or twice a year.

It's called a "secondary fermentation" but it's actually just leaving the bulk of yeast, trub and hops behind in the fermenter, no real fermentation takes place. When the beer in the fermentor is where you want it via a hydrometer, you can instead transfer to a bottling bucket, add the priming...

I'm pretty sure we've all made a bad beer or two. It happens. I did a big equipment upgrade a couple months ago and spent almost a month making bad beer but once I dialed everything in, it was good again. In three years of brewing I've poured out maybe 6 batches and it's disheartening to where I...

Yeah, I read that from John Kimmich and I did think about that but I never noticed a difference well beyond that many generations so maybe it's a moot point on the 5 gallon scale. I also notice that Conan seems to do quite well with biotransformation. I figured London Ale III wasn't Conan. It...