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Well, I agree that staying encouraged is important. And someone has to be the first to discover that something tastes great!

I have never tried brewing what you are talking about. My only thought is that maybe you should brew the kit as sold. If it tastes great then you are good. If you start adding stuff and it is bad, then you will not know if it is the kit ingredients that are off or the stuff you added.

Actually, I think that the bubbling airlock is a pretty good indicator that the beer is still fermenting. If it were my beer, I would wait until the airlock stops bubbling, and then test. The point of the two tests a couple of days apart is to make certain that fermentation is finished. As long...

I think it will definitely work. Whether you like the resulting cider is another question. I recently made cider with yeast slurry from a beer batch brewed with US-05. Mine fermented out very dry but pretty good, at least to my taste. Not much apple flavor at all, though.

Some bottles just will not work with some lever cappers. I have one of the inexpensive cappers like you describe, and I cannot use Guinness bottles, for example. At this point in the process I would just leave the beer in the bottles. If there is no carbonation at all when it is time to drink...

When I put a new batch in the fermenter, I check it before I go to bed and before I make my coffee the next morning. I really like seeing the first bubbles in the airlock!

Maybe you should go back to basics. Try brewing a kit beer like Muntons. It it turns out bad, then there is probably something fundamentally wrong with your water or equipment. If it turns out good, then at least you know it is not the water or some kind of microbes in your equipment. Just a...

Right. And I am a complete novice and possibly buzzed.

Does the beer your make taste good? Give you a buzz? If so, then my first thought is that maybe there is a problem with the way you are measuring OG.

She who must be obeyed I think the first use of the phrase was by H Rider Haggard in his novel She. Sometime in the 1880s. The acronym seems to have started popping about the time the internet got going. A swmbo affects brewing in a bunch of ways. For example, if she is p----d off while I am...

Is Paw really serious? If you search for 'delete account" this thread is number one on the list. Give the guy credit, when I give up on a forum I just fade away...

Back to the original topic: Hop flavor in a really small batch of beer. Here is another idea. A while back I made an amber kit beer, 2 gallons. It was pretty good but a bit bland. So when I made the next two gallon batch of the same amber kit I tried this. When it came time to bottle, I boiled...

Slightly off topic: but since you are using such small quantities of hops, why not just use stainless tea infusers instead of all the straining? That is what I do. Also, I am a bit forgetful, and when I forget to add the hops to the boil until the last six or seven minutes I certainly get more...

I sprinkle the dry yeast on top and gently stir it into the wort. I do not think the stirring really helps, but I do it anyway. It works.

I am not knowledgeable on the subject, being a newbie. Just me, but if wort did not turn into drinkable beer in a year, then yes, I would probably dump it. It is one thing to let beer age for a while to get better, but if it is no good after a year I question whether more aging will make it...

Very nice report to read. When a person reads the news it seems like everything is just going to h--l and everyone is an a-----e. But then, in real life, folks try to help when trouble hits. I had that happen this week and was deeply appreciative. Good luck with the ale!

I use a lot of Grolsh style bottles as well as regular long necks. The Grolsh style seem a bit more hit or miss when it comes to maintaining pressure. Most times they are just right, but I have opened plenty with minimal pressure, and some with no pressure inside at all. Whereas when I cap long...

Maybe some of us were overly critical, including myself. But ... the OP did ask: Perhaps I should not have responded, since I have never attempted, successfully or unsuccessfully, to brew a beer from start to finish in seven days.

I think it might be feasible, but my question is why? I you want a commercial like beer: just buy it. It will be a cheap brand of beer, because you are not going to brew a top of the line beer in 7 days. I keep a log of the batches of beer that I brew. I note when I brew, when I bottle, and...

Just a comment: the juice you add is fermentable just like the priming sugar. If you miss the right point to pasteurize, then you could get bottle bombs.