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You can add it more or less at any point in the boil. Some people may have opinions as to when is ideal, but I don't know it matters much. You can also add it during fermentation. The idea here is that the yeast will use whatever the most metabolically available sugar is, and if they eat too...

By the way, since both the OG and FG are more or less high by the same number of points, is the OP sure the hydrometer is calibrated correctly? I always have to remember that mine reports 2 points high.

Racking to a secondary is totally unnecessary in my opinion. My typical schedule would be after two weeks in the primary (maybe a bit less depending on how quick the yeast are) I'd put in the dry hops, and then bottle 5-7 days after that. You want to bottle immediately after you're done dry...

Dry hopping is typically done with relation to planned bottling date. Conventional wisdom is to dry hop for no more than 10 or so days in the primary. On my first dry hopped batch I did 10 days with an ounce of hops with little effect. On my second batch I did 7 days with 2 ounces with much...

+1 to dry hopping in the primary. It's been debated around, but for me it's just less work to dry hop in the primary and I've heard no compelling reason not to do it that way.

Indeed. I was hoping to find some kind of neat project where someone was maybe partigyle brewing but due to only having one fermenter or some other equipment limitation was freezing some wort to be fermented later.

As someone else mentioned (in an all-grain context), ideally you'd be using some combination of wheat and light DME to make your wort anyway, and getting color by steeping specialty grains.

As far as I know, aromatic malt is not typically used in IPAs. Half a pound of it will be quite assertive and out of style, I'm sure. Oats give a sort of slick mouthfeel that I also wouldn't associate with IPAs. IPAs tend to have a relatively simple grist, usually just pale malt and crystal...

I personally don't think of lavender as an aroma or flavor that would come through very well with beer. Blackberries would be a natural choice for purple, and they play very well with beer. As for the rest of the recipe, I would ease off the biscuit malt. Try 4 oz at first, and you can always...

+1 Better to have more options than less. BeerSmith has a lot of useful functionality, much of which could be found elsewhere, but it would be scattered and so your mash info wouldn't talk be integrated with your recipe design wouldn't be integrated with your pitching rate, etc.

It's got your growth factor around 4. So assuming that just means that you'll quadruple your yeast, and assuming that growth factor is solid over multiple starters (it'll probably go down as your pitched population increases), it would go like this: Pitch the yeast into first starter (10 billion...

Hello everyone. I just realized I never made an introduction thread and got right to posting about brewing. I started brewing in January after returning to my apartment in Brooklyn from a trip to Fort Collins. Tours of Odell Brewing and New Belgium had very much to do with it. I'm going to be...

If you have a container that will fit your carboy, you can do what I do and just keep it in a hot water bath. Unfortunately it cools off pretty quickly. But refreshing that every few hours when I was home resulted in decent souring in a week. I know other people use heatpads or electric...

This is 65% wheat, which conveniently is also roughly the conversion factor between DME and pounds of malt, so 5 pounds of that. That also nets you the equivalent of 1.75 pounds of barley DME, and you need a little over 4, so use 2.5 lbs of this or this. Berliner Weisse is traditionally brewed...

pH is a logarithmic (base 10) scale. Doubling the volume means that your pH only increases by .3, which is significant but not ruinous. I brewed a Berliner recently where I soured only half the wort. I wish it was more sour, but others have said it's spot on or even too sour. People's taste in...

If you can wait, let it sit at room temperature for three weeks and then put one in the fridge for 48 hours. If that's to your liking, put more into the fridge and keep them there for a week before opening another. That's more or less the rule of thumb.

That's exactly what I meant -- a high gravity (or perhaps a sour) brew that would need aging. I agree, it really comes down to your risk tolerance. Things can go wrong with fresh yeast, too. I personally think that reusing yeast is a small risk, but I can see where some might still think it's...

The way I interpreted his statement is that it was better to just harvest the yeast without washing it than to wash it. It was somewhat ambiguous. Even if he meant, "You should be new yeast every time," I can understand the sentiment. There is increased risk with reusing yeast, and if I was...

Did you happen to taste the wort at any time before fermentation began? Did you use extract? Partial mash? I've made at least one terrible tasting batch that had nothing to do with infection and was more likely due to unhappy yeast or tannin extraction during a poorly conducted partial mash...

Also many people use a spray bottle to sanitize the smackpack before pitching. Hex is on the mark with his questions too.