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Wow, yes the house is drier in the winter, but I've only had to refill airlocks on longer term projects like meads & wines. Did you keep the airlock caps on?

Not sure exactly what you're suggesting, but to make it clear, if you sorbate and backsweeten, you cannot use the yeast to do your carbonation. That does not stop you from force carbonating where the source is a C02 tank. So "kreusen", no, bottling from carbonated keg, sure.

As long as you attend to the yeast health, and are infection-free, you can go on indefinitely - Fermentis does this for a living.

You should read some software reviews on this forum - there are some good choices. If you're into stone-age web-based freeware, there's always http://hbd.org/recipator/ P.S. I like stone-age web-based freeware, but it has limitations...

PS Not obnoxious questions. This should hit pretty close to your target OG, but that is a lot of hops for the typical %a.a. for Warrior, Centennial, Simcoe. AAU is %a.a. x # of ounces. E.g., 3 oz. of Nugget @ 10% a.a. would give you 30 AAU.

Use a recipe calculator! That will answer questions 1 - 5, and guide you to make adjustments. For dry-hopping, people usually just give it a certain period of time, depending on their experience. I like ~ 2 weeks.

For a Hefeweizen, you want one of these strains: 3056 - Bavarian Wheat Blend 3333 - German Wheat 3638 - Bavarian Wheat 3068 - Weihenstephan Weizen I used to shop all the time at Hearts when I lived in Orlando, and they aren't too bad a brewshop. I'd be surprised if they...

1. Pitch more yeast 2. Add Fermaid yeast nutrient 3. Add O2

Many/most of the wines/meads I make smell sulphury at some point in the ferment, but I never noticed it with beer yeast. Never used WP400, though. I wouldn't worry.

"Born to be Mild" With your pic. Lots of room for ideas.

Your yeast will be fine (as long as it was OK to begin with).

+1 each on the later extract addition, and additions of Fermaid + O2. I like the idea of keeping the wine yeast in reserve - as Dos Amigos (nice name - I almost took it, but my brew partner's wife didn't think it quite fit us...) notes, most ale strains will get the job done if you treat them right.

I never hesitate to taste wine (or beer or mead) at any step of the process - you just need to keep its youth in mind in judging what you taste. You can get a very good idea of the sweet/acid balance, as long as you can put aside the funky other flavors that will go away with aging. I don't like...

Sounds interesting. One suggestion would be to reserve the sugar - boil in a small amount of water, cool, and add after the fermentation has slowed down. This "feeding" techniques is often used in strong wines (and sometimes beers) to avoid shocking the yeast with the very high OG.

The obvious question is, if you're storing such small quantities of specialty grains, why not just get them from the brewshop the day before? If you live far from a brewshop, I think those small size rubbermaid/tupperware containers work well. You can keep the grains in vacu-seal bags inside...

Filtering is probably overkill - just careful racking into the bottling bucket should do it.

If you're planning on the extra 18 months anyway, it's not too late for the oak.

Just the obvious: 1. Settle for low carbonation. 2. Chill, open all bottles, add calibrated amount of priming solution to each to make up the difference & re-cap. This assumes you lose little of the existing carbonation. 3. Open all bottles, dump into bottling bucket, add the full 5oz priming...

Waiting? That's what beer is for... Seriously, though, having the yeast poop out is usually a bad thing (there are some exceptions). Stressed yeast can leave bad flavors, so it's usually better to control the ferment with the amount of fermentables.

For a simple ale, you don't even need to do a secondary. If you are doing a brew that needs a short secondary, well-sanitized plastic is OK (whether a pail or water carboy). But a glass carboy (or ss keg) is what you really need for extended bulk aging (lager, barleywine, mead, ...), and it's...