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What's the least amount of additives? Zero. I'm not exactly the world's biggest expert on mead, but I've made a fair number of batches successfully, and have never used any additives other than yeast nutrient. Chemicals can make certain aspects of brewing/winemaking/meadmaking easier, but their...

Hey, I was barely even 19 when I first started brewing...it was classier, cheaper, and more fun than having someone else buy beer for me. To be honest, in this case you probably don't really have to pay attention to what's technically legal or not legal, it's not like the cops are gonna kick in...

I've been interested in attempting an approximation of "whole hive" mead ever since I read that book as well; I've dragged my feet since the cost of stuff like royal jelly is pretty off-putting, but I'm excited to see that it turned out well for someone else. IIRC this stuff would originally be...

K-Meta and Campden tablet are two different ways of adding sulfite to a wine/mead/must/etc. Sulfite stops bacteria and oxidation, so it helps keep the wine/mead/whatever from going bad. However, bacteria are unlikely to be a problem at this point, and oxidation is, unlike with wine, rarely a...

I'm gonna call bull**** on that quiz - it seems rather fishy that the hand-wavy "almost alcoholic" zone is, point-wise, three times the size of the "high risk" and "social drinking" zones. The whole thing seems like it's inherently set up to peddle this "almost alcoholic" idea (and a book to go...

A teaspoon or so of dried Irish moss added for the last 20 or so minutes of your boil is probably the easiest, cheapest, least chemical-y way of addressing chill haze. It's not technically moss, actually (it's a kind of algae) but it helps wort proteins form into larger chunks, which makes them...

Most modern thermometers, especially those for food applications, use dyed alcohol instead of mercury for the column since it's not going to poison you - same reason they use steel pellets for the weight instead of lead. Unless you had a really old thermometer, it's unlikely to contain mercury.

What exactly is the wife's issue here - is she suspicious that the beer's gone bad because it looks ugly? Or is she merely grossed out by the process?

Hey, OP, have you thought about incorporating molasses into your recipe? IIRC a lot of early American spruce beers were made with molasses, sometimes entirely instead of malt.

For those who lack the space and/or budget for a full engine setup - as I do - there's a pretty nice "miniature beer engine" build floating around that uses a snapware for a base/vessel and a small hand pump, plus some fittings, to dispense the beer. It's certainly not much compared to a real...

Meh, the federal "limit per year" isn't really worth much - I mean, it's not like the feds are stopping by every week to make sure you haven't gone over yet. You can violate the laws up and down all day in private and get away with it - but trying to sell, especially through a licensed...

If you're not looking for super dry I would probably steer you away from the EC-1118 - it tends to give you a really dry result, at least it has in my ciders and meads.

It's amusing how many people are convinced that drinking Heineken or Stella makes them informed, discerning drinkers.

Well, you're in luck - Hefeweizen, besides being fun to say, is a pretty common homebrew style. Hefeweizen is a naturally cloudy type of wheat beer; it can, broadly speaking, be sorted into "German" and "American" styles. Either way, you'll find quite a few recipes for Hefeweizen in the "Wheat...

If you're hard up at the moment and don't have the money to buy a hydrometer, I'd suggest doing an extract recipe for the time being - with extracts you're virtually guaranteed to hit your target OG, so a hydrometer isn't strictly necessary.

A neighbor of mine made an IPA at one of those "brew on the premises" places - it honestly wasn't very good, tasted kinda watered down. I realize this is just an anecdote and doesn't necessarily prove much, but ultimately with such a place you're going to probably pay more money with no...

When you say "upper end of the temperature range," what do you mean by that? Being on the higher end of a recipe's recommended temperature range (for example at 68 for 64-68 recommended) isn't going to cause problems, if that's what you mean. Yeast cells will do just fine even at well above room...

I recently made a pumpkin gruit ale - looked like a fetid swamp, even when it was wrapping up.

Freezing yeast culture is a fairly common method of long-term storage - assuming the packet wasn't damaged or anything, you'll probably be fine.

In general, appearance is at best a poor indicator of infection. If it smells OK, taste a little; if it doesn't taste obviously "off" it is almost certainly fine. A sour, funky smell and taste is the most reliable evidence of a bacterial infection, and it's really not at all a common problem...