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I've also made some tasty summertime ales with grain bills resembling lagers and fermented with Kolsch yeast (Wyeast 2565- the ale yeast that wants to be a lager yeast). This works especially well in the wintertime, when my basement is nice and cool.

I know plenty of people use copper maniolds, especially fly spargers. I made one and used it in my first AG over the weekend and it failed miserably. I ended up having to dump out the mash in a bucket and use a washing machine lint trap. A SS braid would have been better but I didn't have one...

Your LHBS probably sells cooler conversion kits, if you don't mind spending a little more than if you pulled the parts together yourself.

After mooching off the great information on this site for the past year, I finally did my my first all grain batch / equipment fail / crisis aversion all in the same day. Brewed a simple ESB with an 11# grain bill - it was all smooth sailing until it was time to collect the runoff from the...

Some twisties accidentally contaminated my bottle supply also, and unfortunately I noticed a big difference. I use the red butterfly-style capper, not a bench capper, though. Flat beer sucks.

I haven't kept official time, but I know I'm coming in under an hour, not counting the time for a sanitizing dishwasher cycle (with PBW). First, I microwave the priming solution for 5 minutes in an erlenmeyer flask. While that is going and cooling, I sanitize the bottling bucket, then pour in...

Even with a 6.5, there is no guarantee you won't need a blowoff tube at some point. And a blow-off setup is a whole lot prettier than a floor/walls full of krausen. I started with a 6 gal and moved up to a 6.5 when I started making wine. Now I just use the 6.5, just because its more versatile.

I think you'd get better heat and better stability with your kettle on the grill itself. It all depends on your grill, though.

I've just been boiling the priming solution in the microwave - in my yeast starter flask. I figure - why get another pot dirty? I let it cool at room temp for a couple minutes, then hold it under cold tap water. It's a pyrex flask, so I'm not worried about the boil - I'm just afraid that one...

I have had the best luck adding apricot extract (or any extract for that matter) into the primary fermentation a few days in, just after fermentation of the malt sugars has subsided. That way, the yeast go to work on the sugars in the fruit and you are left with great apricot flavor without a...

I have their oktoberfest partial mash kit in secondary, and so far so good. Tasted like a winner before I racked it. It fermented on a Kolsch yeast cake and I was a little salty with them for not taking some $$ off and leaving out the yeast, but oh well.

Thanks. The simplicity is more of a product of my photoshop ineptitude than anything else, but I think they came out ok.

I am hoping to unveil these guys at my 30th birthday party in mid-June, if the brews are ready. First, a little background. I am a graduate student in Molecular and Cellular Biology, so many of my friends and acquaintances are science nerds (like myself). Second, a little history. In...

You can use a Kolsch yeast. My Mocktoberfest was fermented with Wyeast #2565 Kolsch yeast, and it's not quite ready yet, but it's tasting like it is going to be a winner. Kolsch yeast ferments best in the low 60's if you can manage, and requires a little extra aging, because it is...

Red light has the longest wavelength (in the visible spectrum), and is therefore lowest in energy. Because of that, is has the least capacity to do nasty things like mutate yeasts or denature proteins. I guess they are doing it to protect their clear-bottled beer. Not really an issue with...

That's a good point, anything vinegar based is going to make wine taste vinegary. And that's huge, since vinaigrettes are killer with just about anything, especially this time of year. On another note, has anyone seen Sam Adam's new TV ads? Really emphasizing the fact that beers pair with food...

I would agree that stout + steak = awesome. But I don't think that pairing is head and shoulders over the experience you get with a nice cab or another full bodied red. IMHO, where beer/food pairings really shine is with spicy ethnic dishes, like Indian and Thai, etc. There really is no good...

That would be a logical model to explain the correlation, but you also need to be careful not to rule out other models without evidence. Like the possibility that there is some unknown factor that would make someone susceptible to both tooth plaque and heart disease, which would rule out plaque...

I'll be watching this one too!

I think there are way too many uncontrolled variables at play here to be able to really concentrate on smoking. People just have different tastes. And I don't know that smoking is really all that related to personal tastes - I don't feel that smokers have some intrinsic desire for more flavor...