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A little update on this old yeast: I ended up just buying a different yeast for the beer I intended to be fermented with the 1469. For the 1469 starter that never started, I ended up cold crashing it, and then I poured off all but ~300 mL of the supernatant. I thought it was interesting that...

Hey folks, hoping to get some excellent advice from you. I have a 5.25-gallon batch of pale ale that was at 1.011 four days ago (OG was 1.049). It's now 13 days after pitching yeast, so I expect this is finished fermenting; I'll take another gravity sample today to confirm. The problem is...

Go to 15:50 in this video: http://brewingtv.com/episodes/2012/10/3/brewing-tv-episode-69-palmers-oaked-mild.html Although it's not as useful as I remembered it. John is sort of miming/demonstrating how he broke the pouch earlier in the brew session. But still, I can smack and smack and smack...

There's an old Brewing TV episode with John Palmer showing his strategy for breaking the nutrient pack...he just lays the pack on the counter and presses down on the nutrient pouch. I tried it after seeing the video and it's A TON easier than smacking or squeezing the pouch.

For your current batch, yes, dry hop that sucka! Wouldn't hurt to do more than the 1 oz though. I agree with the above poster that if you can get your pot to boil that would be ideal. My only other suggestion is more hops, and later in the boil. Try a full ounce at 5 minutes and a full ounce...

OP, can you dumb this down even more for us? Everything you've written so far makes it sound like you just want to bring grains home from the homebrew store, put them directly in a fermenter with room-temperature water, and pitch yeast. In this case you WOULD need to worry about yeast and...

Are you using a hydrometer or refractometer for your gravity readings?

Are you sure about this part?

I'll try. Think of the starch molecule as a tree branch (I read this analogy somewhere so I can't take credit for it). Beta amylase can only chew off maltose units from the end of the branch, and once it gets to a branch point, it can no longer produce maltose. I don't know what percentage of...

Also, I missed the part where it's only been fermenting 7 days. Probably too early to be concerned about a higher than expected SG. But it wouldn't hurt to rouse the yeast as suggested above. Another question - are you monitoring the temperature of the fermenter itself? That's a much more...

I'm just not sure beta amylase is all that active at 130-135. With very little beta or alpha amylase activity, I'm thinking you'd end up with a wort that is even less fermentable than one mashed at 158-160 degrees. According to Braukaiser...

Was the whole mash at 130-135 degrees? What was your grain bill? Did it spend any time at 140-160 degrees? Are you using a hydrometer or refractometer for your gravity readings? Some quick googling tells me that lactose contributes ~36 points per pound per gallon (ppg). So assuming a 5...

How sure are you about your volumes? If you were expecting 1.052 for a 5 gallon batch, and your hydrometer read 1.038, you would actually have more like 6.84 gallons of wort. Are you fermenting in a bucket or a carboy? What size? I think it's much more likely that you have close to 5...

I agree with your points here; I just wanted to point out that it may not be the best advice to say that taking only one FG reading is the best practice, or is even USUALLY the best practice. Especially when your other brewing practices are suboptimal, like poor oxygenation, etc.

I think this one is good practice. I had a stout that had gravity readings that continued to drop for over 5 weeks. As it was, I think I bottled too early and had over-carbonated bottles; if I'd bottled after 3-4 weeks it would have been even worse.

What yeast did you use? Was it actually a lager yeast? My impression is that a lot of these lager kits actually use ale yeast, so that might explain the slower ferment if you started cold. If it was a lager yeast, 10 days may not have been enough to reach FG, so 1.034 might actually be...

Mine didn't even come with caps. Don't worry about it.

I recently used a nearly 4-month old pack that seemed to behave pretty normally, and a different 6-month old pack that did nothing in my starter. So somewhere between 4 and 6 months may be your limit. Note that this is in the context of pitching the pack into a 1-liter starter and letting it...

I would err on the side of caution and let it ferment out, and then take a couple more gravity readings. You didn't say whether you took a FG reading before your 1.015 sample, but best practice is to take 2-3 gravity readings over the course of several days so you can be sure fermentation has...

I bought a pack of WY1469 West Yorkshire yeast that was more than 6 months old, hoping I could revive it in a starter. Bad idea. The starter never seemed to start fermenting ("never" meaning overnight in this case) so I gave up and went back to my LHBS for new yeast. But I figured why waste...