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There was an article on this in Zymurgy a while back. Their tips: keep the OG under 10.40, and don't brew a beer that minds being cloudy. (Dark ales and wheats are obvious choices here.) Ferment a little warmer than you might otherwise, but not by a huge amount. The mild looks like a fine choice.

Not something I'd made my mind up about at all, but it sounds like a reasonable choice.

I want to brew a beer with guava. I don't want it to be a generic American fruity wheat thing, because I think the base beer for most fruited American wheats is pretty boring and if I didn't want the beer half to be exciting I'd be making a liqueur or a mead instead of a beer. It also seems a...

The "C" hops actually play together rather well. Sounds like the makings of a good American Pale or American IPA. Alternatively, a California Common but without the focus on NB hops typical in the style. Don't mention the base malt, since there's nothing particularly special about it anyhow...

I did a Munich-Aramis SMASH, lagered so as to be like an Oktoberfest but with all the hops FWH so you could actually taste them and get some feel for the variety. It has a lovely herbal-floral aroma that you would never mistake for an American hop despite the aforementioned hint of lemon. I...

This doesn't sound like a cream ale at all, to me. Where is the corn?

"Birch beer" flavor is oil of wintergreen, which despite the name is extracted from birch bark. (The same flavor compounds are found in wintergreen, but birch is a cheaper source.) Traditional birch beer is made by boiling birch sap and infusing birch bark in it, then adding sugar and carbonating.

Oh, smoke is undeniably an off flavor they're doing their level best to exclude, throughout Europe. But read their descriptions of how to make malt - unlike modern maltings, the fire and the grain are not separated in any way that would keep the smoke out. It won't be nearly as smoky as a modern...

I favor Y5 yogurt culture for my sours, mostly because it's cheap and they're not territory I've explored in enough detail to have another preference. (Nor is it likely I will - I detest the horsey brett flavor, so my sours are confined to sour mash and Sacch.)

I don't know how much lactobacillus it takes in terms of cell count, but I've had beer with >20 IBU go sour once because of a contamination involving what I'm pretty sure was a fairly small quantity. Obviously it's not something where you have to be so sensitive to these things that the whole...

jlangfo5, Caramunich isn't a good choice for a base malt - it's a caramel malt with high-kilned-like melanoidins, around 40L. Don't use more of it than you would of ordinary C40; as a base malt, replace it with Munich (or, in the Weyerman line, Munich II - or for a little bit less intensity...

Yes. This is desirable because the lactobacilli produce other flavors as well as just the acidity. No line stays infected after you sanitize it properly, but not everyone is perfect about such (I'm not) and equipment that has held souring bacteria can be prone to infection even under...

For A Song of Ice and Fire? We're talking fantasy here, so the recipes don't have to be exact historical ones. But they should definitely be informed by a sound knowledge of medieval brewing, so that all the ways they deviate from reality are deliberate. So, to start with, throw out every...

Saccharomyces has a tendency to kill off other organisms that aren't well-established. You can make mistakes with your sanitation, but if you get it mostly right, you'll usually have a clean beer. Sour organisms are the exception. If a bit of lacto gets in your beer, your beer will go sour. So...

So, to sum up: - pitch lots of Brett cells - any of the three species will work - temperature doesn't seem to be a huge deal but not cold - keep the oxygen out - pitch into a somewhat acidic wort - bulk age for a while before bottling That sound about right to everyone?

The latest Zymurgy is here, and it has an article about Brett in it. It mentions that it's possible to do non-soured clean fermentations using 100% Brett, but it doesn't say much about technique. In particular it says the following that has me very intrigued: Anyone know much about the...

I did mine as a 12-hour full-volume sour mash and got excellent results. Note that the Wahl-Henius Handy Book doesn't mention souring the style at all, so it's likely at least a few breweries didn't. In that case, it's just a brown cream ale, which does sound intriguing. The sour version...

Any blend of 50-75% wheat (get lots of rice hulls if you're going high), with the rest any blend of pils, vienna, or Munich, will get you good results. In the maltier versions, you probably want to use German hops, no additions past the half hour mark, and a German yeast.

6lb pale malt 4lb mild malt 1lb crystal 60L (and perhaps an ounce or two of roasted barley) of course, the hop bill will tell you why I do it like that - my pale ale is English, not American. Only once even done it the other way, and that was a cheapo beer that involved the second runnings...

Yeah, if I want the maltiness of a Munich, Munich is all I want to use. Hell, my biere de garde treats pils as a specialty grain and uses pale Munich as the base. (The only reason I used 20% pils is because it was inspired by - though not directly a clone of - Gavroche, which does so.)