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The lower I take the boil, the more of the fresh malt flavor from the mash sticks around through the boil (and into the finished beer). I also boil with a lid mostly on and a very, very low flame and my evaporation is about 6%. I don't get any DMS. You should try reducing your evaporation to...

The sulfur bombs are the result of overdosing on SMB :) If you're getting sulfur bombs then it means you should decrease your dose. The tricky part is that each system is different and requires a different amount of SMB. So it takes some dialing in for your individual process. Once your system...

AJ, I've measured my water after heating with a DO meter and heating alone doesn't remove the majority of the oxygen, at least not quickly. The water coming out of my tap measures 11-12 ppm and if I heat it to 150 F it will read between 5-8 ppm. It's possible in general to have dissolved gas in...

I agree, and think that biological acidification is a big part of getting the authentic flavor of German lagers. If you like sauermalz, you have to give sauergut a try. It tastes even better to me. Nowadays I keep a permanent culture going in mason jars. I use about 2/3 of it on each brew, and...

Pilsner, Vienna, the Munich malts, a light caramel malt (carahell for example), a dark caramel malt (caramunich for example), and a roasted malt (carafa) is all you need to make the full range of German lagers. Try starting out with Vienna in the 10-20% range and Munich in the 5-15% range and a...

I think that the unique hop character of NEIPA is entirely due to low-oxygen hopping techniques (hop stand post boil, dry hopping during active fermentation) and minimizing O2 pickup post-fermentation to a much more obsessive degree than most.

DO NOT DO THIS! The oxide layer on your pot is stable only down to a pH of 4.5-4.6 and fermenting beer quickly drops to 4.2-4.4. You will end up with aluminum leeching into your beer which is poisonous.

I don't know about removing the copper oxide layer. Originally I thought it might be a good idea but then I realized that it's just exposing the copper underneath which is sure to leech. The aluminum oxide layer should be stable down to a pH in the 4's so it might be okay. Don't try any...

Sorry, didn't see that he's racking onto dextrose. It should be less of an issue then - my experience was relevant only to racking fully fermented beer.

I pour some beer from a picnic tap as quickly/gently as I can into a glass and measure the DO as fast as I can. There is bound to be some O2 pickup this way, but as a point of comparison my measurements from spunded kegs are 0.0 ppm

Measure with a DO meter and you will be surprised. I ferment in a corny keg and I run my gas out through the liquid out post of what will eventually be the lagering/serving keg, then put my PRV on the gas post of that keg to function as the airlock. The receiving keg gets purged with over 25x...

It all depends on your tastes. I used to like craft beer, but now I can't stand to drink 99.9% of it. OTOH, really well made macro lagers on draft like Peroni or Kirin make my mouth water just thinking about them. And Bavarian Helles is like my ambrosia. To my palate, those beers capture the...

Come on, it's not like I'm the first person in this thread to have said something to the same effect. If you don't want to read controversial opinions, don't read this thread. Funny that you completely ignore the rest of my post and just latch on to that quote.

You know, back in 1894 most helles was probably a semi-sour beer. The first pure cultures of brewing yeast were isolated only a couple years before that. For thousands of years, every beer ever made was a sour beer. We didn't have non-sour beer until about 100 years ago. Interestingly, the...

A dab of keg lube on the O-ring of the spunding valve's seal will help. That said I don't bother with a spunding valve anymore and just rack with enough residual sugar to carbonate.

For what it's worth, the textbooks used by the German brewing universities like Narziss and Kunze all caution against shredding the husk because it releases a larger quantity of undesirable enzymes like LOX and PPO which can then work to create increased quantities of staling compounds, which...

With the yeast method I think you need a DO meter to verify that it actually worked. Sometimes the yeast is stale and doesn't work, some strains have been found to work slower than others, etc. The biggest advantage of the preboil method is that you don't need a DO meter. When you see it...

Right, but they are often boiling under pressure for a very short amount of time (~30 min) at hotter than 212F and following up the boil with a scrubbing process to strip DMS and other undesirable volatiles. For a conventional boiler like a homebrew kettle, 4% evaporation is probably too low...

Not with my recirculated system. I am sitting right around 95-100% conversion efficiency (meaning I get 37-38 P/P/G in my mash). My brewhouse efficiency is a bit over 80% but that's entirely kettle and mash tun deadspace losses. I've heard a few anecdotes from people with non-recirculated...

For what it's worth, I see a lot more color pickup from a hard boil when using a low oxygen process. But I believe that's largely due to the fact that low oxygen wort starts off significantly paler in the first place. See these links if you don't know what a low oxygen process is...