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<Grabs popcorn> Just here to see what happens :D

I think it might be an interesting experiment to brew the same beer with a large head space and air lock and one with little to no head space and a blow off tube. It seems like that would effectively do what the OP is talking about, that is, not allowing the krausen to fall back into the beer...

I stretch a balloon over the mouth of the carboy when cold crashing.

Slip a plastic bag into the carboy with the handles hanging out. Turn carboy upside down and let the bung fall between the bag and the side of the carboy. Pull bung out with bag using friction. Google it, it's awesome.

Has anyone made this, or anything with honey/sugar and had problems with a harsh bite at the end? I've been reading that if you add honey/sugar to the boil, the yeast eat that up first and are "tired out" when dealing with the rest of the fermentables. I'm wondering if anyone else has had this...

Make sure you don't have an infection somewhere. For example, I remember reading on brulosophy that a friend of his was having diacetyl problems and it turned out the bulk head and valve on his kettle wasn't getting hot enough to kill bacteria and when he took it apart to clean it, it was black...

Adding sugar (pure or extracted from grains in the mash) raises the abv. If you have a yeast strain that won't ferment past x%, you're right, it won't make a difference. Although I don't know what yeast strain can't do better than 5%.

It's more work, but it might be worth it to you to look into krausening. On brew day, you save 10% of your wort and 10% of your yeast and when fermentation is winding down in the main batch, pitch the yeast in your 10% krausen batch and let it get going and then add it to the main batch a day...

If you are bottling anyway, wouldn't adding priming sugar at bottling time accomplish the same thing?

I've heard it can add a cider taste if you use too much. I have not experienced this though.

Ah I see, I was looking at the thumbnail of your pic so I couldn't see that the input was bigger. I thought it was all 3/8". Anyway, it was definitely a job. Total time spent was probably way more than 7 hours. I didn't do it all in one day. But I like building things so it was fun for me...

I think the flow will be restricted since the input is only one 3/8" pipe. This might not make it much better than a single 3/8" pipe. I made one based on the jaded brewing hydra design (3 pipes, not 2). My input was a 1" copper tube and i used a cap on the other end with three holes drilled...

You can get distilled from the store. I used spring water for a while but the results were inconsistent. You just don't know what is in it and it might not fit the style you are brewing.

setting timers for mash and boil on my phone was a minor annoyance that i'm glad is gone. i'd have to stop what i'm doing, find my phone, make sure my hands are clean, bring up the timer app and set the timer. then to check the time, i'd have to repeat. obviously not that big of a deal, but...

I made one. It is admittedly much uglier, but it works great.

Just compacted from the cold crash. As soon as they warm up and wake up they will get busy.

I second the dip tube. But I think oxidizing isn't as big of a concern on the homebrew level. I had a siphon problem once with an IPA and it pumped bubbles through the whole batch and kept happening every time I thought I fixed it and the bottles turned out fine. Never done a cider though.

If you are using a bucket, they ALWAYS leak for me so there is no air lock activity. If you are watching for krausen, I've had one batch have no krausen at all and still ferment. It only happened once, but apparently it's possible. My guess is it's fine, leave it alone for a few weeks.

Yeah, lessoned learned... Don't just trust everything you find on the internet :) Thanks for the input. I think I'm just going to let it ride and see what happens.

Hopslam recipe: https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/352338/bell-s-hopslam-clone I used that recipe and plugged it into beer smith and scaled it from 85% efficiency to 80% and from 12 gallons to 5.5. The link above provides the water profile as well, so I plugged the unscaled 12...