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I agree. The crystal is only there for residual sweetness and body. This might be ok for an English IPA, but not for an American IPA. That brings up a good point. You have an English IPA recipe when you should be looking at American style IPA recipes to get what you want out of the beer.

What was the final gravity? You didn't mention it so I'm assuming it attenuated just fine, especially at those temps. The sweetness may be attributed to esters from the high fermentation temps though. Lower temps and longer conditioning in the fermenter should fix that right up if that's the...

Was this like the one you had??? There is a probe by the burner and two wires hooked up to that silver button at the top. Can I just solder the two wires from the button together? If not, I'm thinking I could fashion something to hold the red starter button down and achieve the same thing...

Hey folks, I just got a brinkmann turkey fryer that has this automatic temperature shutoff switch. There is a button (resistor I think) that the stock kettle sits on that is supposed to measure the heat of the kettle and turn off the flame if it gets too hot. The odd thing is that I can use...

Wow, sounds interesting. Make the spice tea with the chili peppers so you have more control over the flavor that the peppers are going to give to the beer. Also, I'd brew a small batch first if it were me.

Good point. Especially don't rely on the airlock to tell you when fermentation has completed. Measure and taste.

I'd go for 16 days. This will give the yeast a little more time to clean up after themselves and also will allow time for more settling to occur in the fermenter which will clear up your beer. Good things come to those who wait :D

Where is the cooling element/fan for the freezer? If it is on one end of the freezer then you could section the freezer off with foam insulation baffles and create a sort of two chamber son of fermentation chiller. The cold air chamber on one end of the freezer would feed cold air to the other...

You could also take a good clone of a beer in the same style and color and convert the grain bill. There is a good paper by Ken Schwartz on converting all-grain recipes to extract or partial mash here http://home.roadrunner.com/~brewbeer/extract/pres.pdf . Whatever you do though, do not...

What SRM are you targeting? I am fermenting an IPA that I made with 6.25 lb pale LME and .75lb Crystal 60 and its looking like 10-11 SRM in the secondary fermenter, although I'll have to wait for it to clear up before I can get a more accurate color.

Ideally I would want to keep the carboys in an insulated container like an igloo. Has anybody done this? Maybe get a cylindrical igloo and cut a hole in the top so the airlock/cap can stick out? I'd imagine you could make a system of these with water circulating if you wanted to get real...

I know I can always shove them in a closet and go on with life, but I want a bit more control over the temp than that. Also, I'm mainly curious as to what other people have built or modified to work around these kinds of issues (the "why didn't I think of that!" answer). I like the idea of the...

The cold weather season is quickly approaching and I wanted to get some ideas from you guys about maintaining proper fermentation temps when your fermentation vessel is (required to be) in a cold environment like a basement or garage. Right now its about 70F in Atlanta and having my pink foam...

This is only my 2nd batch of brew so I don't know what to expect. I neglected to mention the low OG (1.038). I used 6lb pale malt extract and 12 oz. crystal for the 5 gallon batch. The SG of the extract is 1.038. Maybe I need to bump up the extract a little.

I just made my first IPA 2 days ago. It is fermenting in my son of fermentation chiller at a steady 68F right now, but there's only about 1.5" of foam on top of the wort. The airlock is bubbling about once every 3-4 seconds. I thought there would be a lot more foam going on with this beer...