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Sounds good. As long as you got all the rehydrated yeast slurry into the fermentor you should be good to go. The main thing with rehydrating is not going to hot with the rehydration water. BTW, my thoughts are you did your beer a favor by rehydrating first. You won't see activity in 4 hours...

Has the yeast completely dropped out of solution? Yeast in solution can carry a lot of hop oil increasing bitterness. If the beer is cloudy, stick it in the fridge for 2 weeks and try another bottle.

6. Large scale, it is carbonated first, then filled into bottles and kegs. In your lager scenario, the 4 months does nothing to increase carbonation if the CO2 during fermentation is allowed to escape to atmosphere. You very well could brew a lager and cap it at the end stage of fermentation...

2. Secondary fermentation is a bad word used in homebrewing. Just because the beer is racked from one vessel to another it is still in the same fermentation cycle. The beer when rack is yes, still consuming the same sugar unless further sugar is added. Primings are added depending on the...

Here is my take on it. 1. Primary fermentation does not necessarily need to take place in a closed tank. A large majority of breweries use closed tank due to lower risk of contamination among other things. One large brewery that uses open tanks is Anchor. For reference, all lambics are not...

I have been preaching the wonders of fiber for years. I know it sounds counter productive, but I swear 90% of the time it helps. For years I have had problems with IBS type symptoms. My problems are on the loose side of things though. On a suggestion from my mother I tried some fiber...

@david This is what I figured, I was just looking for some input to back me up, thanks. @bmckee The Arduino is a opensource microcontroller project. It is really flexible and can be used with a ton of different inputs and outputs. It is programmed in a mix of C and processing. I am not...

What was your starty gravity and fermentation temp? I would assume that being an IPA your OG was somewhere in the 1.050 to 1.070 range? Either way 1.010 final gravity is good. As far as the speed of the ferment, sometimes beers will hit their final gravity in 24-36 hours, sometimes a week or...

I have thought of that also, but it seems that there is enough thermal mass that it flucuates pretty slowly. I also have a safety coded in the firmware that doesn't allow the compressor to cycle back on unless it has been off for at least 20 minutes.

I scored a chest freezer off of craigslist to turn into my fermentation chamber. I like tinkering with electronics, so I built my own controller using an Arduino http://www.arduino.cc/. I wrote the code to turn the freezer on or off if the temp gets higher or lower than 1 degree F of the...

Specific gravity is the measure we use to indicate how much fermentable sugars are in the wort or beer. Starting gravity, or sometime called O.G./original gravity, is the measure of sugars in the wort before it is fermented. Final gravity is the measured value after fermentation is complete...

To clarify, breaking the inside pouch and having the pack swell, only verfies that the yeast inside is still viable. It does not increase yeast cell count to any noticable extent. To get to a proper cell count, you must make a starter. Most likely, unless your OG was very low, you...

kwantam says it best above. From all my research it is the cheapest and easiest to just turn the element on and off at full power in matters of seconds. ie, if you want 50% power, turn element on for 2 second and off for 2 second or something similar. I wouldn't go much below a 1 second...

@hang When you say your lag time is longer, is that based of hydro readings or watching for bubbles at the air lock? When you ferment colder, the wort can hold more CO2, so it takes longer for the airlock to bubble. So the lag may be the same, just longer percieved lag. Of course this can be...

What resistors do you have in the circuit? Here is a calculator to determine how fast it should be cycling. http://www.electronicdesignworks.com/utilities/555_frequency_calculator/555_frequency_calculator.htm If you are cycling too fast it will give you wierd results like this, since SSRs...

I've been reading the spec sheet for the RM1E. That looks like the tits, a little pricey($79), but the tits none the less.

@bmckee I will have to check out the variable SSR, I didn't know there was such a device. As far as programming the Arduino, that is another hobby of mine, just wish I would have paid closer attention in circuits class back in college. I love hands on brewing, but automation control is...

I thought this might be the case. Thanks.

Yes it would create alot of heat. The SSR with the right heat sink could handle it. SSR's are not rated by cycle counts but rather by TIME between failures. Most SSRs should last ~10years before failing regardless of number of cycles. As far as control, I would have temp sensors that would...

OK, this I am cool with, totally agree. Not sure what the first sentence means, but I believe all of this stuff (that is the SSR internals) is now designed to be 'zero crossing'. That means it switches when the sine wave is at zero to minimize wear and tear on the device. You shouldn't have to...