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No-chill is great, but you have to take several precautions. Firstly, never put boiling wort into any fermenter, glass or plastic. The glass could shatter and your could warp the plastic. I allow my wort to cool for a few hours, covered, in the brew kettle before it goes into the fermenter...

Had it since high school - before it was cool!

A 0.003 difference in BG is meaningless for your finished product. All this means is that your extraction efficiency was slightly lower than anticipated - you didn't get all the available sugars from the grains that you intended to from your mash. This is easy to fix for next time, though. Crush...

What should I brew next, an Altbier or an Irish Red? I have all the ingredients I need for either beer and a ton of time next week to brew one. I'm slightly leaning towards the Red because I've got quite a bit of Central European beers on deck: Hefeweizen (48 bottles) Czech Pils (20 bottles)...

Is 75 your fermentation temp or you bottle conditioning temp? If it's the fermentation temp, then, yes, that's too high. Fermentation creates heat, so the actual beer fermentation temp could have been in the 80s, leading to "jet fuel" or solvent like off-flavors. If 75 was the bottle...

The white stuff at the top of the fermenter looks like yeast to me. I can't see any oily films in the picture, so I can't help you there. It could be hops oils. Could you upload a better pic?

Got a rasberry Berliner Weisse on deck. Hoping to brew it this afternoon, but might have to put it off until tomorrow.

I once had a beer that started fermenting with wild house yeast or something. I bottle-conditioned that one. It tasted good for about half the batch, but then started tasting putrid, so I dumped the rest. My point is, you never know until you try. I'd treat it like any other brew, but take one...

As long as your starter takes off in a reasonable amount of time, you'll be fine. Yeast are tougher little buggers than you give them credit for.

This is basically me, too. I brew alone but my wife and/or father-in-law are usually at home. It's nice to have someone around if I need a hand for a few minutes but they're more than happy to just leave me to it.

How do you store the bread yeast? In a cupboard or in a refigerator? I ask because I know from making bread that my dough never rises properly if I use yeast stored in the cupboard. Yeast stored in the fridge always works perfectly for me, though. Beer yeast and bread yeast are different, but...

Under Fermentables, click on the "Add Custom" tab. You can then add in customized PPG, Lovibond rating and whether or not it's a late addition.

Take a sniff of your fermenter. If you smell CO2, you got fermentation. Then, take a gravity reading like Goehaarden suggested. Since you don't know OG, you can't get an accurate ABV number, but you should be able to tell if your beer fermented. You should have a reading in the 1.01x range if...

2°C is about 36°F; 28°F is -2°C. Would it be more accurate that a 5% beer would freeze at -2°C? Because I've certainly had beer slushies after leaving one just too long in the freezer.

Nice. Enjoy the end of the school year and the brewing days to come, you've earned them! I've still got 5 weeks until mid-year break. Well, 4.5 if you want to get technical...

I alwys use the highest temperature my beer reached during fermentation (primary or secondary). I check the temperature every night when I swap out the ice bottles. Keeping good notes has prevented many bottle-bombs I would like to think.

What kind of beer recipe did you use? All-grain, extract or one of those Cooper's kits? It's possible the yeast you used was bad to start with (especially if it was from a Cooper's kit, who knows how it's been treated along the way...)- However, the curdle you saw was most likely kräusen- a sign...

I'll one-up you on the pedantic scale: it's actually trüb, a German word. The sound that ü makes does not exist in English, but is pronounced most closely like ew (like when your grossed out). So, it's really pronounced trewb. I speak German, so I use the German pronunciation (along with...

The bubbling you're seeing could be caused be several things. Could be the change of temperature and pressure causing some bubbling. More likely though, it sounds like you roused up the yeast when moving your fermenter. No big deal, just let it finish up and continue as usual.

Give us some more info so we can help diagnose why your gravity is still high: Grains/Malt extract used, yeast you used, temperature it's fermenting at, etc. I'd avoid doing this in the future. Anything that touches your wort post-boil needs to be sanitized or else you're risking infecting it.