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My neighbor seems to drink a lot of Corona, and sometimes Stone IPA. I don't use my equipment that often (5 gallon cooler batch sparge setup), so I would like to offer to him to borrow it, so he can save money, drink better beer, and the equipment would get more use. What recipe should I...

I do worm composting. Mine (~5 sq ft) eat through about ~4 lbs of spent grain/week during warm weather. They will eat any plant based products: newspaper, coffee grinds, etc. Some people even worm compost inside their house.

What's your mash water profile?

One problem I would like to solve with my airlocks is for long term aging of sour beers. During temperature changes I've seen the airlock reverse direction. I could solve this with a long hose into a deep glass of water, but I like the small plastic airlocks on top of the carboy with the...

My homebrew shop told me oxygen absorbing caps starting absorbing when they get wet and continue absorbing oxygen for only 15 minutes. Based on this, I would sanitize them, but I wouldn't sanitize until just before you are ready to cap. Also based on this, I would also store your caps in a...

Is there a flavor difference from sour mashing with verses w/o spent grains? Does sour mashing with spent grains introduce off flavors? I can see how using the spent grains increases the thermal mass, keeping the temperature high longer, making the lactobacillus happier to create lactic acid...

I'm doubting autolysis after a month. Brett can clean up off aromas like autolysis.

I wonder if 25' is better for a gravity-fed ice water setup ( mentioned in https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/wort-chiller-w-ice-water-bucket-how-big-pump-99351/index3.html ): Ice water->mash tun/cooler->hose->immersion chiller->out. I'm going to try this next time. I'll put the ice water cooler...

The cooling water heats up as it travels through the coil. Eventually it will get close in temperature to the wort. Coil length beyond this point doesn't matter. I don't know where this length is, but I would imagine it would be a function of several variables: wort temp, starting water...

After 9 or so Brett sours, I've never got a thick lumpy pellicle. I only get the thin spider-web slimy ones. I use glass with an airlock. The pellicle is more likely to form if the airlock dries out or if I open it and sample it. I also primarily use lactobacillus with decent amount of...

I let the lacto live on, and then I encourage its growth by keeping the ABV <6% and not adding any hops until the sourness has developed. Some of my sours are getting almost too sour.

I prefer bottling to kegging for low cost variety and portability to bottle sharings/swapping. For every flavor of beer I want to have available, I have to spend $25 for a keg, or $0 for recycled bottles. I also brew 2-3 gallon batches for variety. I get bored drinking the same 5 gallons beer...

I want to you do it with 100% Brett C, because I'm curious to see someone else get the same sourness that SteveG got. I was worried I wouldn't get the same sourness, so I pitched a nice sized lactobacillus starter at the same time as the Brett C, and didn't use any hops so the lacto would be...

I've got a 9 sours I have been aging on the lees for 3-15 months. Most of them have little or no saccharomyces, except for two of them. The two that I did primary fermentation with saccharomyces have a rubbery aroma (I think it's autolysis from the saccharomyces yeast bed), that Brett has yet...

Someone with welding equipment needs to buy 100 5-gallon kegs ($20-25 each?), chop them down to 2-3 gallon kegs and weld them back together and sell them on this site for $40-50/each. He/she would make some decent money and make a lot of people happy.

I used some 1yr old LME that was kept in the fridge in a sealed plastic container. It turned darker from age. I used it in a sour beer that turned out great. I would make an oud bruin out of it.

Lacto + Brett (any strain) = Awesome. I also would like to make a fast and good sour beer. As you stated, I can produce the lactic acid fairly quickly, but I have still need to wait 2-4weeks for Brett to eat the residual sugar so that it tastes sour, and then 4-6 weeks for decent flavor, and...

If you ever decide to give up, then you can water it down to 8% and throw in some sour mix and sour beer dregs, then wait 6 months. I did that to an underattenuated autolyzed mess I had one time, and it turned out great. Alternatively, you could brew 2.5 gallons of a 5% beer, then rack your...

I think what he might be saying is that lacto (lactobacillus) doesn't perform as well when the alcohol level increases, thus you'll get more sourness from lactobacillus in the primary. Pediococcus (another lactic acid producing bacteria) also also some alcohol limitation, but maybe it's higher...

I just upgraded to all grain: 8 gallon pot + 5 gallon mash tun + wort chiller was $100 doing it myself. The main reason it took me so long to upgrade was cost. I think it will take me a year to make up the equipment cost. But at this point I had to do it to make a light colored wheat sour...