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My guess is that there are two sources for the extra heat unionrdr is seeing. 1) the metal burner the pot is sitting on, 2) the metal pot the mash is sitting in. If either of those is substantially hotter than your mash temp, heat transfer from them into the mash can continue raising your mash...

When you do the boil there is a 'hot break' of proteins and other stuff that wind up as part of that gunk in the bottom of your kettle and carboy. When you cold crash you get yet another 'cold break' and that will happen whether you include gelatin or not. The gelatin just helps the 'cold break'...

If you capped and immediately put them in the fridge, you might want to give them a good shake to rouse the yeast you put to sleep after they have reached room temp again too.

I swirl my starters whenever I happen to walk past them..lager or ale yeasts..

How much are you hopping the beers? I notice sour/tartness at hopping levels of less than 0.3 IBU/OG. To me, they don't taste balanced until above about 0.4 IBU/OG.

If by going to your head you mean giving you a bit of a headache/hangover feeling that could be a fusel alcohol problem and that is caused by fermentation temperatures getting too high. Some people swear fusels cause headaches, others disagree, but it is something you could test.

I think whirlfloc is just a finely ground and pelleted form of irish moss. Actually, all the gelatin/cold crash treatments I did were also whirlfloc'd in the boil. My impression was that the double treatments were crystal clear sooner than the ones only treated with whirlfloc, but after about a...

My 2c are that because the point of knowing the number is to guide future grain bill and hopping schedules for your equipment setup, it doesn't really matter how you calculate it so long as you are consistent in how you choose to do so. So, depending on your setup, it might be easier for you to...

I've been making do with two 5.5gal carboys using them interchangeably as fermentors/secondaries. Hefs and Belgian yeasts blow off like a mofo, but irish/british ales and lager yeasts have been much more tame.

I wouldn't worry about the water condensation. Even if your hydrometer reading is bang on where it should be, you want to see that it is stable at that reading for a couple days before calling it done. I've had just as many beers not reach the predicted FG as I have had beers that beat the...

I experimented with cold crashing and found that 1/4tsp per gallon in ~150F water works well (a bit hotter than the hottest tap water). It is critical that you 1) get the beer cold for >24hrs before adding the gelatin, and 2) actually get the gelatin to dissolve before adding it to the beer...

I do partial mashes and have added DME as a late addition and also at the start of the boil. In terms of taste and color, I don't see any difference and this is on final products with SRMs in the 5 range, so fairly light in color. I also found no difference in the fermentability of the resultant...

If the tape and string are not original to the hydrometer, your OG measurement was off as well. From the sound of it, your OG was higher than you think by same amount that your tap water reading is off. To correct your readings, measure tap water and whatever the value (X) is, add the...

I've struggled with this question myself. I'll give you a summary of what I've learned. 1. The later you add it to the boil, the more honey aroma/flavor will persist in the beer. 2. The whitehouse honey ale recipe puts the honey in at 5 mins left on the boil. If the secret service are okay...

Did a brown ale and accidentally hopped it to an IBU/OG ratio of 0.9 (58 IBUs/1.065 OG) when the target was actually 0.6 IBU/OG. To fix this error, brewed the same recipe again without any hops at all and then mixed 4 gallons of the 0.9 IBU/OG batch with 2 gallons of the 0.0 IBU/OG batch to...

Submitting my first candidate. This is a picture of something at the water line in the neck of a bottle. I saw it in another couple bottles from the same batch. I shook one of them a little to see what would happen and the little wafer-like thing slowly sunk. Beer has been in the bottle about a...

To make topping off to the right final volume easy next time, measure out 5 gallons of water one at a time into your fermentation vessel and mark the fill lines on the outside of the vessel with a permanent marker at each of the water levels. Super easy to top off by eye to your 5-gallon mark...

Given the OP was probably trolling, but this is actually why I like home brewing so much -- dialing in a recipe to the perfect pint based on my personal tastes.

My general experience has been that liquid malt extracts finish higher than dry malt extracts finish higher than all grain when you hold other variables constant. For example, I just bottled what were designed to be identical partial mash (some dry extract) and all grain recipes -- the partial...

If the temp of the room was 70, the fermenter was probably another 5 above that, so that sounds about right in terms of getting the aggressive blow off. It will be basically fine - there are gobs of yeast still inside. Do some swamp cooler searches for some simple ways to reduce the...