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Yeah, for my primary fermentation I use a 30l plastic bucket. Damejeannes are mostly for bulk storage (they're nice to look at), so perhaps size isn't much of an issue.

Actually, they're 6-gallon. I found an online ad for someone selling damejeannes and brewery bottles very close to me. A... tad on the expensive side, but probably negotiable. Dunno size and condition yet, they forgot to include pictures of it... Sent them an e-mail, anyway. Also, I have two...

How 'bout this I looked at the first recipe suggested here (solely from extract): http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter1-1.html and I thought that if I scale it down to 2/3, I have the necessary equipment as far as boiling goes. That would make 3.3 gallons of beer, which is still a lot.

I took a hydrometer measurement again today. Original gravity was a bit higher than I expected (dues to size constraints I couldn't measure it while adding the sugar, I went halfway between Jack Keller's 2 recipes), it was 1.110. Current gravity is 1.040, meaning a percentage around 10%. If I...

Uh, last time I checked, yeast cells can not break the second law of thermodynamics. The yeast can only multiply with stuff that's in the wort, and any added oxygen.

Lol, I was thinking of making somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10-15 liters. But I think I may start off brewing from extract anyway, just to get a feel for it.

I don't think there's much of a risk of me making a 13lbs of malt recipe in the near future... I'd probably make two different batches instead.

Let's see... - Put them in something that keeps the cold well - Make sure there's as little headspace as possible in the bottle. This will make it hard for the CO2 to condensate, since it requires compression of whatever's in the bottles (and liquids are essentially uncompressable) - If...

An immersion chiller is basically just a copper tube in a spiral which you immerse in a cold liquid, right? Seems easy to build and copper tubes are dirt cheap. A burner, interesting, never thought of that before. Well, that removes one issue, that of pot size, and a modern induction tray would...

So far, I've made an apple wine and am halfway through a plum wine, all more or less done from scratch. I'm primarily, however, a beer enthusiast, and long to get into that. The fermentation, bottling, racking etc processes are all easy to me - the difficult part is the mashing. I'd like...

Alcohol and water are prett similar in terms of solubility. From what I recall from chemistry, alcohol can dissolve some fats with very weak van der Waals action (i.e. short carbon chains) - however it is mostly hydrophilic and dominated by the hydrogen action of the OH group, which is why you...

That sounds like a good and reasonable alternative. (for the record, I was going thinking of using liquid glass, which is sodium silicate, not isinglass which is collagen [a protein, makes up much of your skin, muscles, sinews etc] and in practice the same thing as gelatin)

Ah, so your point is that the only upside to waiting for it to clear before bottling, is that you won't have the sediment in the bottle? That makes a lot of sense, and I think I can live with having the sediment there. Right now I've got it in one of those buckets - I've got some glass jugs of...

I have about 2 gallons of plum wine (from Jack Keller's recipe, made with garden plums) which has been fermenting since Friday, meaning primary fermentation is all but done, though I haven't gotten the glassware I need for secondary vessels quite yet. All well so far. However, there's this...