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I just brewed a three of my regular BIAB batches, using a freshly-calibrated pH meter and allowing the samples to cool before measuring. Normally I unwrap the mash after 30 minutes and take the pH, gravity and temperature, and invariably the pH is within 0.1 of the Bru'n water calculations...

The final gravity seems a shade on the high side - starting at 1.050 and ending at 1.017 implies about 66% attenuation, whereas - especially with extract - you'd expect that yeast to give something in the low 70s. As it stands the alcohol is about 4.4%, so certainly not overwhelming! It's a...

I went with a four-body secondary regulator for the extra flexibility it gives for a fairly modest one-time cost - as well as varying the carbonation of different styles, I can be force-carbing one keg while bottling from another and serving from a third.

The other thing to check with Pliny is what day it gets delivered. Everywhere I know that carries it around here gets theirs on the same day, and it's all gone within a couple of hours.

Once a month I brew 20 gallons in 3 batches (10 + 5 + 5) ... is that 12, 36 or 48 brews per year?

Famously said about my (academic) profession: Often in error, never in doubt.

Your fermentation should be finished before you add the dry hops, or the CO2 still being produced will strip the dry hop aromas. I'm guessing the instructions assume 5-day fermentation and 5-day dry-hopping. As others have said, fermentation happens on the yeast's clock not yours, so ferment...

A bomber and a bottle, which meant I could drink the little one with dinner and still have the big one to share with my wife when she gets home ... PatrickGoss thinks of everything.

A mighty selection of hoppy midwest goodness from PatrickGoss

There's a big difference between fares from New York and from Hawaii! And Heathrow is one of the most money-grubbing airports I know - they even charge departure tax on the seat you're sitting in rather than the one you paid for, so if you're lucky enough to get upgraded you suddenly have to...

Another important difference (and this goes back to the inadequacy of any analogy) is that the closed 2D balloon surface is embedded within a 3D Universe, whereas a finite 3D Universe doesn't need a 4th (spatial) dimension to bend in to close back on itself.

Part of the difficulty with cosmology is simply that our terrestrial existence hasn't equipped us with the concepts necessary to think about the entire Universe a a single entity, and any analogy we employ is always going to be incomplete and inaccurate. As a science, cosmology is also only a...

LOL - I understand.

Emphasis mine; it isn't. The Big Bang isn't a gigantic explosion at a single point in space and time, but rather the creation of an entire space-time. The space created is either infinite, or finite but without any edge (curved back on itself). In either case, an observer at any point P in...

We intercept photons that, 13.7 billion years ago, happened be heading in our direction from a point 13.7 billion light years away.

Nope - I mean we detected photons created in the Big Bang and built up an image of it from them.

That was in my pre-brewing days.

Sure. The data were taken by the BOOMERanG balloon-borne telescope and the image made the front cover of Nature (false-color image of the Big Bang in the background, balloon readying for launch in front of Mount Erebus in Antarctica in the foreground).

I'm a computational cosmologist at a national lab. I use the largest (unclassified) supercomputers on the planet to turn raw data from crazy-sensitive microwave detectors into pictures of the Big Bang, and as a result I was the first person ever to see the beginning of the Universe.

Which lab? What data?