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Is there anything I need to watch out for vis-a-vis hop utilization or caramelization of malt? Since I'm probably going to have to add top-up water afterwards to keep the boil volume down and guard against boil-overs, I'm imagining that my boil gravity is going to be pretty high -- or at least...

To chill your wort after the boil, use a sanitized spoon to stir the wort, and also stir the water around in the ice bath. If you just drop your pot in the bath and wait, what happens is that a "boundary layer" of cooled wort / warmed water forms right next to the metal pot and stays there like...

I'm trying to create a Guinness clone for my friend who LOVES the stuff. From what I gather, this is a bit roastier than standard nitro Guinness (possibly just because it isn't on nitro?), and I've been contemplating ways to smooth the flavor out to mimic the standard nitrogen-ized Draught...

Being a beginner, I'm still collecting equipment. One of those things I have yet to collect is a proper large pot for boiling. For my first batch I borrowed a large stock pot from a friend, but I don't necessarily have easy access to it at all times. One thing I wondered is, how difficult...

That makes some sense. Sugar is a preservative in large part because it is hygroscopic -- it sucks the water out of pretty much everything and absorbs it all. Considering the availability of dry yeast, however, it seems like the yeast could probably survive that.

Scratching the aluminum does sound like a problem, perhaps, but as long as you wash/rinse them out immediately after drinking it sounds like they'd be pretty ideal as long as they seal properly. Talk about not letting light in! Also, aluminum is a much better heat conductor than glass, so...

I'm hardly a treasure trove of experience, but one thing I've read that did strike me as important is chloramine content. I can't say exactly how big an effect it has on the end product, but apparently it doesn't come out with boiling like chlorine does. Campden tabs are recommended for...

Thanks! I'm probably never going to suck on the hose, I'm way too nervous about contamination for that -- perhaps partly because I'm a n00b and don't know what I can get away with -- but this did give me an idea. Attaching one end of the hose to the cane before filling the tube would be way...

Damn, that's really fast. My understanding is that "cold break" are proteins in solution that coagulate when the wort cools. Cooling quickly is supposed to help them clump and clear the beer more effectively. Whirfloc is supposed to basically accomplish the same thing by other means --...

Honey is a pretty sterile thing since it is super-saturated with sugar (very sugary solutions are a preservative, hence fruit "preserves"). I guess there might be wild yeasts in it, but the chances of a bacterial infection from the honey itself is virtually nil as long as all the things that...

They sell strainers that fit right into standard 5 gallon buckets. A lot of people who keep bees use them to strain foreign particles out of honey. I can't see anything wrong with using them; I used a fine-meshed regular kitchen strainer when I poured my wort into the fermenting bucket and it...

I'm about to siphon beer to a bottling bucket for the first time and I've got a couple questions. I don't have an auto-siphon, just a racking cane and some tubing, so I've been looking around at siphoning techniques. As I was practicing with plain water the other day I found that the easiest...

I've heard that the "skunking" range for light goes up to about 550nm, which is about in the middle of the green-yellow transition (hence why green bottles don't work well). Of course green bottles probably aren't going to transmit very much blue or UV, which helps skunking but doesn't...

So, I'm trying to design a recipe in BeerSmith and I have a very weird issue with the mashing step. I click on the "Mash" button, and it tells me to mash with 48 qts of water. The thing is, my recipe is a partial mash with only 2 lbs of grain. So I click on "Edit Step", and change the...

Thanks for the reassurance, guys :) It's hard to wait, but I'm looking forward to popping the top on one of these once it matures for a little while!

Physicist here :) This may be TMI, but I can shed some light on this. So, the thing is that color only has a direct correlation to temperature when you're talking about "blackbody" radiation. Blackbody radiation refers to the glow that something has simply due to its temperature. For very hot...

Eh, no one can ruin something for you unless you let them. Stuff that hipsters like is only really important to other hipsters, because they're the ones concerned about whether something is "played out", and whether they need to find some hip new thing that you haven't heard of to latch on to...

The ambient temperature during fermentation stayed in the 72-74F range the whole time. Which seems a little high in general, but from what I understand that saison yeast has an ideal temperature range up to about 77, and some people run it even warmer.

Hello, HBT! Long time listener, first time caller. Before anything else, I'd like to thank all the members here for all the wonderful information I've found on this forum, especially those who took the time to write up the guides and stickies that I have found totally invaluable in the...