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I was up on top of the cabinets a few weeks back and found a several years old bag of "Mr. Beer" mix. It's a "Red Lager" mix with dry malt enough to make 2.6 gallons, as I recall. I quit playing with "Mr. Beer" many years ago and I guess this bag just got left behind. I'm toying with the...

Argh. Why do people ferment in plastic buckets? Large glass bottles are more sanitary and come in enough different sizes that you could make tiny little batches -- 1/2 gallon or gallon -- with little trouble if you're not all that into drinking beer all the time.

Well ... off flavors can also come from entirely too much chocolate and peppermint extract, too! Don't discourage experimentation. If people didn't make mistakes, they'd never learn how to do anything other than what people have always done.

If you MUST lock with something other than water, I strongly encourage tequila. It seems to be the gloppiest of the high ETOH liquors on the market. I've filled airlocks with rum and vodka before and they didn't seem to "last" as well as using tequila. As for the comment about 15ml of...

Different strokes for different folks. After a few years and many, many batches of beer, you'll get tired (very likely ...) of kit beers and other people's recipes. Then you'll be one of the people suggesting all sorts of things to add to beer. One of my two current batches has orange zest...

If I were faced with too much Peppermint flavor, I'd try to get fermentation going again in the hopes some of it would be off-gassed. In his case, it's a winter season beer and we're not that far from winter. But yeah, peppermint extract is VERY potent, as are most anything else in extract form.

If you're looking for a fireside beer, and not a "drink with meal or while watching football" beer, it may be fine as is. And the comments that it will mellow with age are mostly right -- age works wonders on a beer. That said, in my experience, the more total volume, and the less restricted...

It was plenty enough -- both gallons have completed primary fermentation and produced otherwise drinkable beers. The gallon without Sparkeloid is ready for bottling and secondary fermentation, it's the gallon =with= that's causing me fits. With experience, you can make a starter from just...

Go for broke -- start another carboy WITHOUT the added flavors, then mix prior to secondary fermentation. While I'm sure some of the flavors will mellow greatly with age, my guess is you're stuck with too much chocolate and peppermint. And for future reference, when trying experiments, think...

I making a batch of a dark ale from a yeast I "found" in a bottle of a Belgian style ale -- Zon, for anyone who knows the beer. Zon (with a "long o" symbol over the "o") is an unfiltered beer, and I wanted to try knocking off the recipe myself. I drank all but perhaps a few tablespoons, then...

You can cheat a little on the carbonation by adding UNDISSOLVED cut tablets. Might be fun for the cider makers in the bunch to try putting Kmeta and/or sorbate into gel caps with a bit of sugar for filler and let the two race to see which wins -- yeast gobbling added sugar to carbonation or...

I agree on the "don't push things" and disagree on underpitching -- I've made starters from next to nothing, and pitched next to nothing. So long as you allow the yeast to make new yeast babies nice and easy like, you'll be fine. That said, you're pushing things so hard and fast that it sounds...