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I’m doing a Vienna lager at the minute and we’ve ended up having 24C weather. I pitched at 13C (low as I could get the wort with tap water using my IC). It rose to 17C overnight, but just by surrounding the FV with four 2L bottles of frozen water I’ve managed to sustain it at 11-13C, so still a...

I’d imagine he means that you should just throw more grain in the mash tun to begin with to avoid undershooting OG.

I’ve got a cheap eBay solar pump, had it almost three years - still works a treat. I used to recirculate my mash with it. I say ‘used to’ as I don’t care for over complicating things these days, so it’s not been used since before Xmas. I might dig it out for my next brew, just because.

I’d go with Saf-04, it’s got the right attenuation for the style and subtle esters. Nottingham tends to attenuate too much and is a bit boring (neutral).

I just add some DME if I’m under gravity, but I normally have the opposite issue (over gravity). I deliberately scale my recipe efficiency so that I have a little bit wiggle room on the higher side as it’s easier to liquor back, or accept a slightly higher OG. I didn’t have any DME when I...

In the two breweries I’ve worked at, we tested for alkalinity each brewday and made adjustments to the water treatment when required.

Unless you have the valve fully open, you shouldn’t get a compacted mash. Maybe try knocking back your flow rate. The problem with reversing the flow is you will disturb the grainbed that has formed in the mash and your wort will run cloudy with bits of grain. I don’t see any benefit in doing this.

My main beef with this murky beer craze isn’t with NEIPAs, because that is now a stand-alone style. It’s with all beers that you seem to get now in the PA/APA/IPA category marked as unfiltered that look like dishwater and are not NEIPAs. I prefer a clear beer as the flavours are crisper and...

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If you halved your crystal malt additions, that would still give 6.7% C15 and 4.4% C60. That’s still a good chunk of crystal malts in a small’ish beer. I’d say that’s the upper limit for the beer you’re making. I’d leave out the C60 and use Amber malt along with C15 innthe percentages above.

You might consider yeast nutrient when repitching old yeast in the future. A drop a zinc works well, or you can buy ‘off the shelf’ vials from the likes of white labs. A tsp if marmite is said to do roughly the same thing, but I haven’t tried this myself. Maybe an exbeerment in the making.

Yes, this is what I was referring to.

As previously mentioned, you have hard water but that water report does not give you the necessary data to improve your situation. Chances are, you have great water for brewing stouts (with whatever water-softening equipment bypassed).

Bottled British beers are always more carbonated than cask beers. A good trick is to pour the initial amount (till the foam fills the pint glass) from a height to knock out some carbonation, then top up when the foam settles.

No Belgian beers, but we brew a good range of traditional British beers.

1.5 quarts/lb converts to 3.75 litres per kg. That’s quite a thin mash. In the UK we work on a mash thickness in the 2.5-3 litres per kg. At work that’s the range we use for all our beers.

There was a BeerSmith podcast about independent craft maltsters. I think this is the one... http://beersmith.com/content/malt-sensory-analysis-with-andrea-stanley-and-lindsay-barr-beersmith-podcast-170/

Zinc is added for cell reproduction - that’s the only thing we add in respect to yeast health. I doubt that zinc in and of itself is responsible for ester production - I could see a case for arguing a lack of zinc could cause off flavours, due to unhealthy/underpitched yeast.

It’s the old Scottish & Newcastle yeast strain. However, we’ve had it since 1996, and I’m not sure when it was put on slants at Brewlab, so it could have morphed into something else since then. It’s a beast of a strain - fruity, rips through the wort, high attenuation, flocs great, and tolerant...

If there was a downside to pitching hot we wouldn’t do it. Our beer always comes out great. We don’t always pitch above 25C, but sometimes during the summer it’s unavoidable as the heat exchanger won’t get it down any lower with the size of CLT we have. We have glycol chillers, so it’s easy to...