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Since I only had 2 bottles of it left, I was planning on waiting, but I decided I might as well drink 1 bottle and test it. But, man, I thought I must be going crazy because I was expecting around 4.1% ABV and the data I got put into that website said I had 2.84% ABV, which would be more than...

While I wasn't ready to try this on the beer in this thread, I did try it on a beer that finished fermenting and that has been in my fermenter for about 12 days now. For reference, my initial hydrometer gravity reading was 1.041 and my initial refractometer reading was also 1.041 (initially the...

I used to have a stainless steel spigot on my plastic Speidel in the US, but that's unfortunately not an option where I live now. So I'll just need to keep an eye for something like this happening again.

Nope. The opposite. In over 1,100 liters of beer brewed, I've never had the washer on the outside. In fact, you'll notice that the advice in this thread other than your post is that I need to make sure it's on the inside.

Good point. All fruit is high in water, after all, and different fruits have different amounts of water. Purees may be lower in water than the raw fruit, but there's still a decent amount of water in there. I think that's another reason why this method could be pretty helpful in knowing the...

I've never forgotten to take a gravity sample before pitching the yeast (though I've almost forgot one or two times), so the main usefulness of the technique for me would be in cases where I added some form of sugar near the end of fermentation. Up until now, I've just guessed at what the...

I wonder why I'm just hearing about this now for the first time. Also, I'm curious just how accurate it can calculate the initial gravity and current ABV... I'm not going to take a hydrometer reading with that beer, but I'll try to remember to take a Brix reading with my refractometer when I...

I've never taken a refractometer reading of finished beer before since, as far as I'm aware, the presence of alcohol makes whatever values it gives completely inaccurate. The OG was 1.033. I assumed that the sugar I added brought it up to 1.036. Then the final hydrometer reading was 1.005 for...

You say that, but those are what sells. And I'm not saying that to be like "that's all that they should make." My favorite style of beer is sours, the sourer the better. My favorite sub-category is probably Gueuze, and my favorite Belgian brewery is probably Cantillon. But that's not a recipe...

As the OP, I will mention that so far that batch is still the only instance of that occurring that I've experienced so far. As mentioned earlier on in the thread, since I couldn't determine whether stratification had actually occurred or not (and if it had occurred, I couldn't be sure what the...

But my point is that the "heyday" you mention had a fraction of what there is now. I used 10 years ago, 2015, as a potential year you might be considering the "heyday." But the number of craft breweries has continued to drastically and drastically increase. That obviously cannot keep up forever...

Any data to back that up instead of just anecdotes? Homebrewing may or may not be on the decline compared to, say, a few years ago, but it's certainly not "dying." Beer is the third most drunk beverage on the planet (when you don't include water), after tea and coffee. When is this "heyday" you...

It looked perfectly sealed and it wasn't until I pulled it back that I saw there was any hop material there, albeit it very small. My guess, though, is that since I had dry hopped the beer quite a bit and was bottling from the fermenter instead of transferring to a bottling bucket and then...

So it seems that dry hops getting in there is PROBABLY the cause. When I took the bottle filler apart, there were some dried-up dry hops in the main plastic part. I cleaned up everything, then tried again, and it still leaked. I thought maybe it was no good and I just needed to buy a new bottle...

While a lot of people would agree that BMC Lite is incredibly low on flavor, the other example I gave, Guinness, is one I think most people would agree is quite flavorful, regardless of whether you like it or not. And it's typically 4.2% ABV in the US, though there have been Guinness variants...

Eh, I don't think that's true, though. The most popular beers in the US at in the 4-5% range. Guinness is 4.2%, a lot of American "light" beers are between 3.8% and 4.4% ABV (Labatt Light is 4.0% for example). Granted, in the US, outside of craft beers, you don't tend to see beers with the low...

That seems kind of strange since the most sold beers on the planet tend to be in the 4% to 5% range. I guess you could then say that they are less flavorful, but that mainly comes down to them being brewed that way. And with that mindset, an 12% ABV beer would be more "flavorful" than a 10% ABV...

Yeah, probably not. Taking it apart will definitely let me know for sure whether dry hops got in there and also whether the filler is salvageable or not.

I'll try to do this sometime when I'm free over the next week or two. If it does work, that'll mean I can keep using it. If it doesn't, I'll just buy another one. I've never taken apart a bottle filler before, and I've also never gotten an infection, so I think just running sanitizer solution...

West Coast IPA is the style I've brewed the most and it's also the kind I still make the most. I still tend to add a decent amount of light to medium crystal/caramel malt, which most modern IPAs do not. I usually do 5% to 8% crystal, but I've gone over 10% in a lot of my old-school recipes...