Search results

Recently I had a heating device fail at boil, leaving me with a very watery hefeweizen. Then yesterday I mistakenly turned the heat to the wrong setting on another beer. Which all leaves me wondering.... Is there an ideal rate of boil-off, or perceived boil vigor? Are there effects of...

So I cooked up a batch of slants a while back and have been collecting and reusing yeast happily for a few months now. Until I recently had a problem crop up. I store these in the coldest part of the fridge, and up until now have had no issues. I think the fridge had slowly been turned warmer...

I made mine with NSF approved plumbers epoxy putty, but I tried to mostly "seal it from the inside" and seal the threads so there wouldn't be much expoy-to-water contact either way. I suffered reliability problems because of that, and had to add epoxy a couple times to the threads and/or ground...

Ok, thanks to the copious great suggestions, I feel pretty confident that I can get sediment-free beer into my kegs for transport to the wedding. But I'm still struggling with the serving setup. Since we occasionally go to events where we might also want a serving setup, I'm extremely torn...

wedding is in Nov. so there is time to plan. cold crash and xfer could work well, but I have a tendecy to find ways to xfer the crud anyway.

My Fiance and I want to serve only our homebrew at our wedding this fall. Esp. because whatever we would have budgeted for beer otherwise can go towards whatever ingredients and equipment we need to make it happen. But we're struggling with how best to transport/serve it. We're...

Update - The NSF rated expoxy putty I was using on my heatstick started giving me trouble but lasted about a Dozen all-grain brews. For whatever reason, I think that heating the water for mash/sparge was harder on the stick than in the brew itself. (though it could be a thermal expansion...

I second the WLP380. My second batch ever was a Hefe, fermented cool, with WLP380 and it just took First Place for German Wheat and Rye in the big local contest. IMO it's a much more pleasant flavor profile, without being bland like an American Wheat

I did an Amber ale that wasn't perfect but when drinking I thought "this would make a nice base to an IPA" So basically I took the grain bill for that beer and kicked it up a little in weight, lightened the color a bit, and then tossed in some honey malt which I imagined from the start to give...

bottled 2/13 so well over a month now. Waiting does seem like the simplest solution

I have a whole batch of cider bottled up that is just not carbing. The juice itself was cloudy so I guess I couldn't tell the yeasties had all left the building. Since it's already primed, I'm thinking two solutions.... 1) loosen the caps carefully and toss a few grains of dry yeast...

Interesting theory, though they were covered with a towel the whole time, in a fairly dark room. I get the impression from some more searching that you might expect to age this IBU longer. I guess I was expecting similar results to the simpler recipe, which had almost the exact same IBU but...

65 environment the whole time. Sometimes the kitchen is warmer but the storage room is solid 65. Thanks Bobby, that is essentially what I did, and I brewed an Oatmeal Porter this weekend that hit the temp marks from my "adjusted calibration" pretty well. Unfortunately my fittings were a...

So this is regarding my 3rd batch of beer and it's quite odd. First batch was very similar and came out nicely, 2nd batch was a hef. that is quite delicious. 4th and 5th batches were darker but simple all-grains that are now on tap and quite tasty. But this one, was in primary for 11 days...

I've been using one called Oxo-brite from "earth friendly products" http://www.ecos.com/oxo.html#spec It's fragrance-free, and both the web site and container list only sodium percarbonate and sodium carbonate as the ingredients. It seems to work really well for cleaning, and bottle...

Sort of by accident, I ended up with Pilsner Extract for one of my very first batches, an Extra Pale. Now I'm sort of hooked on this idea, as it was 90% of the way to an elusive brewpub beer I had once apon a time. Now I've done a couple all-grain brews, and I want to work on this style...

I thought I heard somewhere you could "ramp them up" to higher gravities in the starter. But you're right, everything else I've seen says to stay close to 1.040 So if I set it to intermittent shaking (which is my method), it recommends 1.5 qt. Though that is for fresh yeast packs, but I...

A week ago, I was trying to harvest the WLP005 I had used to brew an english bitter. I had a really hard time separating the yeast from the trub. This was one of our first all-grain beers and for whatever reason, there was a lot of trub in this beer. The WLP005 is highly flocculation, so I...

unless you were just "fudging" the numbers somehow with a recipe/schedule open, calibrating with a mash wouldn't be super accurate either I'd think because the amount of grains varies... Also, looking at some of the other packages and calculators, they look for "thermal mass" which I have...

Well I did post this over at the BTP forums, but they look like they're pretty sparse traffic and there seems to be a good number of people over here using it. I'm trying to get my Mash Tun calibrated, after missing various targets on mashes several times. Obviously sometimes I could just...