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Yesterday I quickly whip up two batches of Blonde Ale for customers and as I was playing with the hop additions a bit (gotta make it fun somehow) I decided to give the wort a taste at the end of the boil to see how the bitterness compares with the sweetness in there (I like to do this from time...

Bru, gremlins.

I had a keg slightly under pressure with a weak poppet spring. Pushing the pin in resulted in it getting stuck in the post, wide open. SPC solution EVERYWHERE.

Does the cooling light on the STC's screen come on?

This looks like the **** literally hit the fan :P

A regular freezer will freeze most of the water in there. Leave the beer in there for 24 hours at least, and then continue. I've gotten a pretty nice ABV with freezing alcohol and removing the water from it (legal here). Take note I am NOT condoning illegalities.

An update on this. I proceeded to disassemble the whole tap assembly and sight glass, dunked it all in boiling water and added a generous amount of SPC once it cooled down a bit. The amount of gunk that "boiled" off the entire assembly with the SPC was incredible. I then filled the urn with...

Yup, that's hot break.

My latest Irish Red. Not a fan of the recipe, it's VERY temperature sensitive. At ice cold (poured at 1°C) it presents a strong bite, almost a bit sour on the tongue. I added some brown sugar to the boil (500g on a 50l batch) to boost some ABV and mimic an alcohol bite without using too much...

Place the probe in a bottle of water, and turn the probe temp up. It's not impossible that the probe's calibration is off.

I'd like to learn more about using simple sugars like invert in my beers, to be honest. I've been using regular brown sugar in some beers to mimic a sharp bite that I pick up in some commercial beers that is actually quite refreshing. I've done it with success in a few pale lagers, had it fail...

Caramelisation will affect fermentability. Caramelisation is a chemical reaction where the sugar physically changes to other stuff (lots of papers on the matter), of which lots are not fermentable. The darker, the more the change (until you get to black and you pretty much have just carbon...

Damn that's beautiful

I just buy invert from my local chems place. They use it in producing all kinds of bacterial soaps and stuff. Very cheap, and the syrup caramelizes in under an hour to a rich brown on the stovetop. I always remove it from the heat BEFORE it's as dark as I want because it darkens further off...

I installed my shanks right in the middle, but they were so short I had to countersink the holes to fit the nuts. So they're not really in the way, it's pretty easy to just disconnect the coupler or disconnects if I have to move the lines. Anyway, another thing - I decided I want to have kegs...

Keep in mind lagers you typically pitch twice the amount of yeast as well (because the cold doesn't allow them to propagate properly), so if you didn't do that it might take longer and throw flavours as well. Prepare for that. Those flavours often take a long time to age out, if at all.

I've had a lager, with a starter, take 5 days to start fermenting. Give it time.

When you've been brewing the same recipe over and over and you know it by heart, and you double it up, don't brew it three times with a funny low bitterness issue before looking at your recipe trying to figure out why, and then seeing you never doubled up the hops as well. Don't do that.

I do an extra dunk-sparge in a bucket and then suspend the bag by a rope. Let it hang over the kettle for the duration of the boil as well.

So, story time. I made a Diamond starter for a Helles I made for a competition. The Helles turned out so-so, with obvious flaws I can only write down to the yeast. It tasted bready, yeasty and a bit like sour dough. It was very, very mediocre which was a real downer for me as I love lagers...