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WLP003 is a German ale yeast which unfortunately will throw sulfur notes to the point where you’d swear you had a bunch of frat guys farting in your fermentation chamber. This will however, dissipate with some age and at a little higher on the temp range for the ale strains. Most lager yeasts...

So it’s pretty safe to say your beer is sitting comfortably at about 70* which is completely appropriate for most strains and especially for someone just starting out in the hobby. Nice job with the insulation. It sounds like you are doing everything right with just a few minor oopsies that we...

Johnny I know quite a few home brewers mostly in the Bay Area who operate in a clean room environment, professional grade nano systems, and who regularly plate samples due to culturing yeast strains. While this is not the case for the majority of homebrewers, it is common amongst those who...

Food grade bucket from Lowe’s? I’m skeptical being that I’ve never seen a food grade bucket sold at Lowe’s. If it’s the typical blue bucket found at the end of each aisle, that’s not even close to food grade. As for wasted sanitizer, so long as star San’s PH doesn’t change it is still...

Beerlover is 100% correct which is why the FDA would not allow Five Star Chemicals to call star San a sterilizing agent. However, if you look at what star San does to a microbe under a microscope it’s pretty phenomenal. It literally explodes the cell like a little mini nuke just went off.

This really depends; is your ambient temp 70.2 or is the inside of your fermenter 70.2? If you are only measuring your ambient temp you only have half the equation. We want to make sure we are getting a good reading on the internal contents of our fermenter. We will often find that especially...

The difference being oxyclean or PBW (both being similar in oxygen activated cleaners) will not kill 99.9% of bacteria, therefore it can’t be deemed a sanitizer. I would challenge you to plate both samples, one slide with a scape from equipment cleaned with oxyclean on agar and the other on a...

Star San is pretty cheap when you compare it to lost product and time due to poor sanitation or pitted stainless due to the use of bleach. Use the right tool for the job and invest in a 4oz bottle of star San for 7.00. This kind of reminds me of the customers who walk in my shop and say they...

Recipes scale very easily especially if you break down your original to percentages. I use my 15 gallon recipes to build our 5 gallon kits that end up on the shop floor and just scale them back and convert them to extract. Also brewing software such as beer smith will help with this and make...

What category is German Pale Ale? Sorry had to be that guy since I am a huge stickler for brewing to style. Now that that’s out of my system, your grain bill is actually very close to what we see in the west coast IPA’s (also not a style), but it is a fad. The idea is to use a small amount of...

Drop them right in and let them ride. If you want to run to your local homebrew shop and grab a hop bag there is nothing wrong with using one, but you’ll be equally fine just tossing them straight in. Hop bags make cleanup a little easier. Some argue hop bags drop your utilization a bit, but...

According to BJCP, guidelines wet cardboard, paper, stale, wine like are all signs of an oxidized beer. I’ve sat on many panels where beers have exhibited these flavors, and we mark them down for oxidation. The AHA, BA, BJCP, and Brewer’s Guild have determined such off flavors are due to...

Oxidation is a huge deal to us to the point where we even try to minimize oxidation on the hot side to much controversy on the topic. On the cold side oxidation is very evident when judging beers on a panel. It’s not uncommon for us to enter 20 or 30 beers into NHC or club comps which are well...

Get it into bottles as quickly as possible and you should be okay. In the future ditch your secondary fermenter and keep your beer in your fermenter until it’s time to bottle.

Why are you transferring your beer in the first place? There is no reason to move your beer into a “secondary fermenter.” As for any transfers, you should purge each vessel with C02 prior to transferring and do your best to conduct a closed transfer.

This is a good example of there being no need to transfer to a secondary fermenter. It does absolutely nothing to clarify your beer unless you run a .5 micron filter in-line. To remove yeast you need to go down to 1 micron. To remove chill haze causing proteins you need to go down to at least a...

Simple answer: yes, you need a cleaner and a sanitizer. Anything that claims it cleans and sanitizes in a single step I avoid like the plague and won’t stock in the shop. We only carry five star products because they work. You must must clean something before you can sanitize it. A no rinse...

It really depends on the recipe. We use a hop spider so for beers that get a FWH but no boil hops, we pull the hops after the sparge before the boil. 99% of the time we pull the hops at flameout and add our whirlpool for 5 minutes while the wort is on its way to the chiller.

Lol a three piece air lock is about 2.00 at your local homebrew shop. It might be about time to bite the bullet on 2.00

Any German lager yeast will get you pretty close. I would suggest wlp800 as a good substitute. I’ve used both and both are great yeast strains creating a crisp clean fermentation with a slight yeast bite found in a German pils.