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Thanks! I just bought some Fermax.

I just got a shipment of Bromocresol green to add to my agar plates :-)

Ahhh... a un-bent paper clip is easy to sanitize! Does anyone ever just expose their agar to the air? It took several days to develop anything in my dilute sugar water - I would think the agar would dry out. Fleming's discovery of penicillin was supposedly on an exposed agar plate...

It seemed to work fine in an AHS Milk Chocolate Stout. I know it converted to galacto-glucose since almost nothing of the lactose would dissolve in water, whereas after using the lactase, I can make a concentrated syrup and store in in the 'fridge without it crystallizing or anything. I don't...

Hi Everyone: I just got a stack of Sabouraud-Dextrose plates and a nice microscope. Is there a good site describing some of the routine procedures to capture and isolate yeasts? I was able to capture, on an open vessel of sugar water, three different-looking things: a sort of gray mucous...

OK, on my first try, I put some sugar water next to my hummingbird feeder (but inside the house - the feeder is next to the window). I came home today and there is krausen! Sniff, sniff, and it smells sort of like a fresh toasted bagel. Did I hit the jackpot first-time?! I don't think...

Thanks for the replies! :D

OK, so you pitch yeast into a 1 quart bottle and it's a 'starter' but you pitch into the primary and it's not. The only difference I can see is maybe lower specific gravity in the starter bottle? Thanks, Patricia

So it looks like galactose and glucose are at least 10x as soluble in water as lactose - so I added some lactase tablets to a water + lactose mixture to see if it got more soluble. It does. This means you can use solubility as an unambiguous test of how well the lactase has done its job...

I'm starting the boil on an Austin Homebrew Belgian Schelde - I am *so* tempted to mess with the formula. I have some really nice cherry extract I am thinking of adding, or maybe honey or raw sugar (to boost). Has anyone ever brewed the Schelde (with the Wyeast Schelde)? I'm thinking maybe...

I'm playing with "big beers" and White Labs WLP099 suggests oxygenating the ferment several times during the first 5 days, whereas others say (with authority) to ONLY oxygenate at the beginning of ferment...

So no bubbles, and SG hasn't changed in days. So I'm going to try pitching some more yeast - I read here that sometimes helps.

*bonk!*

Thank you -that's what I was thinking - but the airlock bubbles were completely stopped before swirling, and afterward (after the blowoff stopped) the bubbles are back at 1 bubble per 5 seconds and stay that way for hours. Folks in the Forums seem to watch bubble timing, at least in the early...

Thanks. It wasn't that low, if I recall correctly, about 1.04 - I wasn't worried about the stopping of bubbling (or the airlock activity per se) so much as the fact that it started back up after I swirled the bucket (that much extra CO2 yields bottle bombs I read here), and how much CO2...

I brewed an AHS kit (my 4th) of chocolate raspberry stout. The airlock bubbled along happily for 3 - 4 days then stopped. It was their standard kit options (I think it's called extract/partial boil) but I added extra boiled cocoa to the cooling wort (stir well). I had pitched White Labs...

:d

"motorboat!" LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Humph - I guess I shouldn't be sampling the previous batch while boiling the new one - I must have read the hydro wrong!! The airlock has stopped bubbling after 5 days, maybe I'll pull the lid off, sanitize the hydrometer, and check the SG - and maybe add a pound of honey... see if it starts...

Thank you - this is why I was confused! My hydrometer says it's set for 60F, and I have a couple of thermometers (digital and a chocolate tempering thermometer) I think I was at 63F when I measured it. There was about 4 gallons in the pot (marks on the side) when I measured. The water added...