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Very good question. Personally, I go down to my brewery several times a day, even in the middle of the night, just to check on what they are doing. Have you ever noticed how the flocculating stuff makes tiny craters in the trub? It is a lot like I imagine planets being formed by a primordial...

I guess I am like the hunters who say "If I kill it, I eat it" no matter how tough or gamey. If I brew it, I drink it. So far nothing has actually made me sick, other than hangover. I have never dumped a batch, though I am sure some other folks would have said it needed dumping. Think of the...

I have not had anything as dramatic as some folks. A few weeks ago I was transferring my beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket. I was thinking that it sure was taking a long time for the bucket to fill up...when I noticed that I had left the spigot on the bottling bucket open. About a...

Very interesting post with a lot of good info. Seems like one heck of a learning curve to get to where you are with the cider.

If there are still fermentables in the mead, could adding a wine or champagne yeast with a higher ABV tolerance get rid or the sweetness by fermenting the remaining sugars? I have never done this, but that would be my first thought.

Sorry, I intended to say that I do not have a clue! I am way too much of a novice to diagnose your brewing problem.

Somehow I suspect that getting rid of ten gallons of so-so beer might not be as much of a problem for you as for some folks. Sometimes the off flavor grows on me (not literally, usually) and by the time I finish five gallons I am okay with it. Actually, I have wondered if the same thing happened...

Back in the last millennium, when my mom made Scuppernong wine, she squeezed the pulp out of the hulls into a bowl, and when the bowl was full strained the pulp through a stout cloth (a cotton flour sack), then wrung out the sack like wringing water out of wet clothes. Hopefully someone knows a...

I just started brewing this summer after taking a break since sometime in the 1980s. The amount of information available now is almost overwhelming compared to what I had access to back in the 1980s. I am using lme also, while I try to figure out just what hardware I want to invest in. Good luck...

I have never found a cure. A mug of coffee, two aspirin, some crackers ... and four hours of misery is what I do.

Well ... I am not going to argue that they are not valuable. I am planning to move to more advanced brewing in the future and try some different things: but right now I am a novice at the art of brewing. The point I was trying to make was that if a brewer is following recipes and not having...

I was kind of hesitant to comment on this thread because I only recently started brewing again. But here goes. Back in the 1980s I took up home brewing as a hobby and probably brewed seventy to a hundred batches of beer using LME or apple juice. If instruments for testing gravity were available...

I save some of the yeast cake , or trub too. I just put it in a bottle in the fridge. Maybe not the best practice, but so far it always makes beer.

What a weekend the rats will have! This has been an informative thread. Thank you fellows, for providing the info.

To me the smell of vinegar is distinctive. I do not recall ever tasting it. But does beer actually become vinegar? Wine, yes, but I never heard of beer doing that.

I think that tastiness it is subjective to a degree. But beyond a certain point ... it is either good or bad! I like my homebrew better than a lot of commercial beer. And the funny thing is: some of the beers that are supposed to be great, I just do not like. There is a local brewery that I...

Oops! That' s me. I always check New Posts and sometimes forget to check which forum the post is in.

Your capper looks identical to mine, and mine works okay. If the caps are crimped down like a normal beer, and feel solidly tight to your hand, I doubt it is the capper. I do not know about the cleaner question. I would try another bottle from the batch, just in case the first one is a fluke...

I just soak them in hot water for a few minutes then peel off what will peel. After that I use a scouring pad to get the residue off. Some labels are a lot tougher than others. Fat Tire is pretty easy to get off, Angry Orchard very easy, so I use a lot of those bottles.

Are you saying that you are okay with drinking cheap bourbon yourself: but you want the best for your yeast?!?! I do not have any knowledge about your question since I have never tried bourbon soaked chips in my brewing.