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To answer your question, when referring to 2g gypsum per gallon, it's referring to the entire volume of water. Treat it all together. Put minerals in purposefully, not randomly. Why would you add sodium to a pale ale? Use your water software of choice to see what the mash pH is estimated to...

I'm going to be cynical for a moment based on my own experience, which seems to vary from what other people talk about. I have never, ever gotten a successful trub cone from a whirlpool. It always spreads out, and always approaches the kettle drain. It's probably my fault in that I hate...

The yeast flocculated nicely for me, but I'm sure a swish of it gets pulled into the keg to do its business. I leave the Anvil's dip tube pointing straight down, which works great. I had no problems. In each case I crashed in the fermenter to 40ºF for two days. Then I racked into a keg on...

Another trick to serve different beer styles with a single regulator and psi setting is to naturally carbonate in the keg. Yes, it adds 2 weeks to your wait time. Yes, the beer needs that anyway. :) And it allows you to prime each one pretty much exactly to the carbonation level you prefer...

If you are kegging, then cold crashing in the fermenter is a superfluous step. Just rack to the keg, put it in the cold and apply gas immediately. Waiting has no benefit. That way it carbs, clears, and conditions all at once.

Oh man, if I had a cask and beer engine I'd be over the moon. It's nearly impossible to get a real one here in the U.S. for a sane price, and the DIY versions seem dodgy to me. So I just get by with letting my ales warm up and de-gas in the glass. Not the same thing of course. Although...

There are a couple ways of doing this. It also depends a lot on the sequence of things. For example, if you have your pilsner at 12 psi already, you can do exactly as you propose. Shut off the manifold to the pils, lower the pressure to 7 psi, and allow the stout to carbonate. If you don't...

Congrats on your good luck! I could drive blindfolded down my street and possibly not hit anything. But if that happened, it certainly wouldn't prove that it was safe to keep doing it. :)

Good to be honest with yourself. :) Nothing wrong with appreciating the bling and extra features of these products. The Flex+ seems exceptionally, er, flexible which is clearly the point!

Definitely. Utilize a stainless hop canister or bag in the fermenter. Or take the scenario I described where you purge the serving keg during fermentation, and put the hop canister in the serving keg at the beginning, before any beer is present. Rack on top of it and leave it there for the...

If you keep O2 out of your keg (or bottles, of course), they will last a long time. I am exactly in your shoes. I am the only drinker, and before COVID I could claim to be drinking 1 or maybe a wee bit more per day. Now I'm stressed and stir crazy and definitely at 2, but the point remains -...

You will definitely generate more viable yeast cells if you run a starter on the harvested yeast. If the gravity was only 1.053 when you racked, the yeast was likely in high gear anyway, and not depleted.

You can buy 2.5 gallon or even 1 gallon (!) kegs. There is no need to bottle just because of a smaller batch size. With a small batch, the Anvil 4 gallon fermenter, while not a conical, is super easy to use. It seals perfectly. You can purge a keg with fermentation CO2 using an airlock and...

It does sound like you're already adding the right water treatments, including acid. <sigh> Go with distilled water. It's cheap and a reliable blank slate. Will cost you almost nothing and rule out a major factor. Regarding the bottling technique; we're again picking nits. A few minutes...

The benefit is that it keeps hop gunk out of the fermenter, and out of pumps and certain types of chillers if you have those in your system. The negative is that it may, stress may, impact hop utilization, and the stainless canisters are a pain to clean. If you have an effective means of...

Hop utilization is partially dependent on the gravity of wort in the boil. For that reason, I would assume you'd want to boil for the entire time with the full amount of sugar in the recipe. Since DME + water is equivalent to what you would normally collect with a mash, I would stir all of the...

^Yup... that's what you do. Attach tube to a standard airlock stem, no modifications required.

You're going to get a bunch of answers all over the place, from people bottling as soon as possible, to others who keep it in the fermenter for weeks out of an abundance of caution. In a professional setting, beer that has reached FG and the degree of warm conditioning (clean up) that the...

Two weeks cold conditioning is the bare minimum for me, after which I'll at least pour a half glass to sample it. But I don't tap it properly for another week (3 weeks total after being kegged). I have more than enough kegs and bottles on hand so that I always get to taste things as they age...

To expand further, perhaps more than you need: :) During fermentation while CO2 is still being produced, the amount of CO2 that stays in the beer varies with temperature. The colder it is, the more CO2 stays in solution. As fermentation warms up, more CO2 escapes into the headspace. CO2 that...