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I had forgotten that he invokes Zen. Now, I find that odd, because I'm an absolute control freak, and the book definitely appeals to that aspect of me.

Well, Strong is opinionated, so if you don't share his opinions I suppose that could be a drawback. But even though I don't agree with him about everything, what I appreciate about Brewing Better Beer is that it's really about how to think about brewing, rather than a hard and fast set of...

I recommend Gordon Strong's Brewing Better Beer. https://www.brewerspublications.com/products/brewing-better-beer-master-lessons-for-advanced-homebrewers

Another oldie was the first edition of Noonan's Brewing Lager Beer.

I think it depends on when you rack to secondary. If you do it when you still have a few gravity points to ferment out, then the yeast will do a sufficient job of scavenging and purging the oxygen in the secondary, and you don't have to worry about it. It's more of a concern if your primary...

Will it work? Yes. Will it produce drinkable beer? Probably. Homebrewing is an incredibly forgiving process that we all worry about way too much. Is it best routine practice? No. You grossly underpitched, as evidenced by your 2 day lag time.

It's a lot of specialty malt. In particular, it's a lot (too much, in my opinion) of crystal and honey malts -- and I'm not sure they would play well together. Personally, I would cut the honey malt to 8 oz, and cut the crystal and victory to 4 oz. each (bringing up the base malt to compensate...

Exactly. On top of this is the fairly broad temperature range of activity. Even if you're at a temperature where beta has only 20% of its maximum activity, 20% of a huge activity is still significant activity.

If I'm reading it right, you're suggesting 0.5 pound chocolate malt and 0.25 pound black patent? I think that's still going to be awfully roasty; not as much as a robust porter, but very roasty for a brown ale. This is not necessarily a problem, but something to consider. For my tastes, I'd use...

First I want to say how pleased I am to see this topic finally getting the attention it deserves. I've been curious about it since Fix wrote about HSA the 1990s. I'm getting back into brewing after a long hiatus, and hope to incorporate many of the new techniques. I'm wondering if there is an...

My point is that maybe you need to lessen the fermentability of your wort for a "low attenuation" strain to actually behave that way. So, high-temp. mash, inclusion of dextrine malt, etc.

Doesn't attenuation partly depend on the wort? IOW, if all the sugars in your wort were simple mono- and disaccharides, wouldn't even a "low attenuation" yeast strain reach pretty high levels of attenuation?

I usually rehydrate 2 packs (23g) for 5+ gallons, and get first activity in 6-8 hours, major activity by 12-20 hours.

Oxygen is the problem. For any yeast to grow and not ferment they would need oxygen, and oxygen is the enemy of good beer flavor. In some situations, other compounds besides alcohol can be produced by fermentation (eg, lactic acid), but these compounds tend not to taste very good. That might be...

Outside of laboratory conditions, it's really, really difficult to be completely sterile. I've never heard of a homebrewer even attempting it, let alone achieving it. Most of us do our best to maximize sanitation, but this falls well short of sterile technique. I don't know exactly how you're...

The back of my envelope says about 190 gallons of CO2 from a 20l (5.28 gal) fermentation, going from 1.050 to 1.010 (assuming 6.5% by original weight of maltose gets fermented, and using the Ideal Gas Law). But it's been almost 40 years since my introductory chemistry class, so I could be wrong.

I think of it more as competition for limited resources than inhibition. The advantage you have with a big early pitch is that there will be billions of your yeast cells consuming all available sugars, while the contaminating wild yeast and bacteria number in the tens or hundreds of cells. Your...

I'd stick with real blueberries, but try to boost the residual malt sweetness of the beer to balance the acidity of the berries. To do this, you could add more base malt, or increase unfermentable sugars with specialty malts - eg, cyrstal malt, dextrine malt, honey malt, melanoidin malt, etc...

I asked: So I finally slogged through the contentious thread referenced above (https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/threads/is-3711-belle-saison-a-contaminant.643842), and from what I can tell there are actually two distinct issues here. First is the "diasticus" designation, which is not a...

If you keep it oxygen-free, then yeast will ferment sugar to alcohol. If you add oxygen, it will eat up the alcohol when the sugar is used up, but in the process will probably create flavors you don't want. And many flavors you do want would be destroyed by oxidation in such an environment. In...