Search results

Thanks for the mineral oil suggestion. I can see how that would help and I never heard of it before (or never paid attention for whatever reason) Does mineral oil need to be sterilized?

If you can store it without contaminating it will last for quite a while. When I use a partial packet I dump the rest in to a sterile plastic centrifuge tube and store in the refrigerator. I've used it 6 months after opening the original packet and it was still viable made in to a starter.

Cold crashing is where you refrigerate a flask of starter yeast before pitching to get the yeast to settle down and fall to the bottom. Also used to accomplish the same thing in a fermentor, make any yeast and sediment fall to the bottom before transfering the beer.

Maybe if you post the recipe and style it would be a little easier to make recommendations.

I looked in to the water storage a while back. There's several labs down the hall the work with S. Cervisiae for various research including bio fuels. Basically for the water storage you are creating a nitrogen free enviornment and this causes the yeast to sporalate. The yeast spores can...

Could you post the exact recipe and OG?

Your electric range hasn't shattered one yet? I had the worst luck when I had an electric range. To the OP, if it makes you feel more comfortable you can first use tap water to bring down the temp and then use ice water.

11. Other Technique A good technique will take in to accout all of the important variables as well as those adjustments for your brewhouse conditions.

I go ahead and sterilize the 10, 50, and 500 ml in either an autoclave or pressure cooker. Boil the 2000 ml or use pressure canned wort. Has worked great for me for years. If I was only relying on boiling for 10 ml and 50 ml steps I'm not sure that I would even culture yeast. There's nasties...

Usually our autoclave doesn't smell from the nutrient agar but from who ever processed either media or waste and spilled something inside the autoclave. That stuff kind of burns and carmelizes in there for a while. When I mix up an agar and wort solution it only makes the pressure cooker...

You could add boiled and cooled water when you bottle but that will lower you ABV and water down the flavor. I wouldn't water it down, just calculate for the difference in priming sugar needed for the lower volume.

Now that we're completely derailed...I remember that show. I always wanted to know where the local bar got its booze. Did they every explain that?

Now if you have some ammonium nitrate lying around, dump that in the bucket, you could potentially turn the whole bucket in to an ice block.

To save some money I'd usually freeze blocks of ice myself several days before brew day. Four Coolwhip sized plastic containers, I'd bust the blocks a little with a hammer in the sink, so about a gallon of ice (8 pounds?). And I'd use a 5 gallon bucket drilled with a spigot. No problems with...

I either freeze or pressure can starter wort. When I'm getting to the point of needing starter wort I just scale up a high gravity beer slightly so that I'll have about two extra quarts of wort left over after I boil. Water down those two quarts to about 1.030 and end up with anywhere from a...

With option #2 it doesn't even take a full size wort chiller for the pre-chiller. I've got a little one I use made from about 10 feet of copper tubbing. Fits nicely in a small bucket. When I lived in the deserts of Arizona my tap water was way too warm as well. A little trick I developed...

Over the weekend I was having a few brews. My wife made a little bet with me and she lost. So she had to go to Del Taco and pick up some munchies. Talk about some posterior munitions! I think I could have powered a hot air balloon yesterday. A word to the wise..."flatulence of death"...

I've been using this grain mill set up for about the last year. I live in an apartment and everything must be dissasemblable for storage in a closet. Pardon my spelling, I've had a homebrew or two. Anyway, heres the grain mill as a whole: It is designed to come apart in to two halves...

I've had better success with cutting slits in to the manifold than drilling holes. For me the slits provide less stuck runoffs and better clarification during vorlauf.

^ I'm in agreement. I started reading this post thinking that someone was doing what I've been doing which is more of a hybrid method. I didn't read through all the pages so maybe someone already mentioned the method below. I use a copper manifold instead of the braided hose. And I...