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While I was just mashing in my 65L, I had the 1500W heaters turned on. The mash temp dropped so the heaters kicked in, but the temperature went up quite fast and overshot by a couple of degrees Celsius. I think I’ll just use the 1000W heater from now on during mashing to provide a more steady...

I’m in the middle of my second brew with the BrewZilla 65. To be honest, having the display on the bottom is not as big a PITA as I thought it would be. But I sure do like having it as low as possible when I lift the malt pipe up and then sparge.

Great, I’ll bottle at 2.2 this time and go from there. I did kind of think 2.6 might have been on the high side. I read somewhere you don’t want IIPA’s to turn out ‘spritzy’ because that doesn’t complement the hop flavour and aroma.

I've gone from making crap beer to beer I would pay good money for at a bar in under a year of brewing. The two major equipment factors responsible for that is moving to an all grain setup, and using a temperature controlled conical fermenter. I could never go back to the way I use to do things.

I see there's a lot of people in forums who confidently state that you don't need to pitch yeast at bottling, and given time your bottles will carb up. I've been burnt so many times by my high ABV batches that never carb, even after months at room temperature. My personal experience is that once...

I guess that's the general approach. But I've done 11% abv Belgians at over 3 volumes, so there's always an exception. This is my first IIPA, so I don't have any prior experience to fall back on.

I’m bottling my PTE clone tomorrow. Not really sure what carbonation level I should be aiming for. At this stage I’m thinking 2.6, unless someone can give me a reason to aim higher or lower. I just tried a good Aussie IIPA that was very low in carbonation, and was wondering if they did it on...

I received my replacement sight tube today, so will be fitting it shortly ready for next brew day.

My first brew was a IIPA so there was hop trub everywhere. On top of the false bottom and on the actual bottom of the unit. That was even with using a hop basket. But after whirlpooling, most of the pile was in the centre and clear of the pump intake. So I just pumped away and transferred to my...

It was only 6.5 kg of grain, so the grain bed wasn’t very thick. I realise that’s why it just gushed out the bottom of the malt pipe when I lifted it.

I’ve used my 65L once. When I raised the malt pipe all the liquid gushed straight out the bottom and there was no way I could keep the grain bed covered in water. So I just sparged as fast as I could. I heated the sparge water in a big pot and jugged it on top of the grain bed until I hit my pre...

I circulated through it during the boil to sanitise the CFC, but only for 5 minutes. KegLand suggested it might be the combination of 70C for a long period.

Maybe. But might end up with a lot of smashed sight tubes if they used glass.

I sent KegLand a photo of the split polycarbonate sight tube, and described what happened. They believe heating the PBW to 70C and letting it sit for 2 hours was to much heat for to long for the polycarbonate to handle. They are going to send me a replacement which is very nice of them. They...

What annoyed me most is I spent an hour marking the tube with volume indicators. I'll have to do that all over again with another tube. It was nice to have the levels marked so I could see when I reached my pre-boil volume during sparging.

The polycarbonate tube has a larger OD than the stainless tube it is replacing. They don’t supply a saddle with the tube, so I used the one that was on the BrewZilla. It was tight to get it fitted over the polycarbonate tube. When I did my trial run with water I discovered I had split the tube...

I stirred inside the hop spider a few times and then when I pulled it out all the wort came out, so it wasn’t blocked. So I’m hoping I didn’t lose too much. Over time if I figure bitterness is on the low side I’ll add extra hops to compensate for the mesh in the hop spider.

I did come up with a good process at flameout. I'm sure others already do it like this. Five minutes before flameout I started circulating wort through the CFC. At flameout I turned off the heat and turned on the cold water to the CFC so I was running chilled wort into the BrewZilla. It didn't...

Thanks, I think my first AG brew day went well. The colour and aroma of the wort is like nothing I’ve ever done with extract. My whirlpool wasn’t so good though, and I ended up transferring a lot of break material. But I will dump that out the bottom of the conical before I add the dry hops...

That’s perfect. I tried a few combinations, and the 3000w looked good to my eye. I estimated a 3.5 litre boil off/hour using the 3000w, which is about 1 gallon.