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So on a total whim, I decided to just throw a recipe together and experiment with 5 different things all at once. I just did a SMaSH. And 2 of those things I wanted to try were a 30 minute mash and a 30 minute boil, both things I had never done before. I was very impressed with how, even though...

Some may have seen my leaky spigot/fermenter thread, but in short, on brew day, when I added StarSan solution to my main fermenter, it leaked from the spigot, so I transferred the StarSan to my backup fermenter, but it leaked too. I tried tons of things and none of them worked, and I had finally...

So I've been using my main fermenter for exactly 1 year now (I started using it in July 2024), and I've never really had any problems with it. But today when I added StarSan solution to it, it started leaking from the bottom. Very slowly, but leaking. I tightened the thing you screw on inside...

I've been brewing since 2014 at a pace of... early on 5 gallons of beer a month, sometimes 10 gallons of beer a month, and more recently 3 gallons of beer a month and sometimes 6 gallons of beer a month (though there were a few years in there where I took a break). In that entire time, I never...

It was 63F yesterday, but it's 90F right now. I have a 3 gallon bottled batch of double dry-hopped sour IPA on the first floor, which is now in the mid 80s. Thinking about how this could affect oxidation, I wanted to put them in the fridge, but there's zero room for 20+ 500ml bottles in my...

So I just took a gravity sample and it read 1.033 when it should have read 1.040 or higher. 1.032 would have been the expected gravity (based off all my batches so far, the grains, and the mash temperature, etc.) if I only mashed the grains, but I added enough table sugar that should have...

It's a pretty common subject that dry yeast is still really viable even after the printed expiration date on yeast, which is often 3 years after the production date. And I have experienced this myself. But I just kegged a beer that I fermented with yeast that was 5-6 months after its expiration...

This is just something I've wondered about recently. My understanding has always been that after fermentation is over, you give yeast a few days at regular fermentation temperature to "clean up," which is mainly reabsorbing diacetyl, though I know there are some other minor things yeast does in...

I'm going on a flight to Hawaii and since it's more than 9 hours from Tokyo to Honolulu, I needed something to read on the flight, so I went to both a used book store and a normal book store. At the used book store, I bought a massively huge book on Belgian beer. At the regular book store, I...

This will probably not be my next beer since I kind of want the ambient temperature a bit warmer before I make it, but I do plan to brew it within the next few months. I'll probably brew an IPA and maybe a stout before getting to this. Saisons are one of my wife's favorite beers, but oddly...

So, since my wife tends to really dislike a lot of sours (though it's the one overarching beer style where I can never tell whether she'll like something or not since sometimes she'll love an "accessible sour" and sometimes hate an "accessible sour" and sometimes love an over-the-top aged...

So I've brewed hundreds of gallons of beer over the years, but I've never brewed a lager before. Part of the reason is that A: lagers are the most widely available style of beer (so I can literally buy them just about anywhere), and B: Lagers take longer and require colder temperatures. But as...

So the entire time I homebrewed in the US this wasn't remotely an issue. In fact, I had the opposite issue. When I first started homebrewing in 2014, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area where it was mid 60s to mid 70s in the winter (15C to 26C or so) and was in upper 60s to upper 80s in the...

Kinda going for something Northern English style along the lines of a Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale kind of thing. Not a clone or anything remotely like that, of course. Just as a general idea of the ballpark I'm going for. It's been quite a few years since the last time I brewed a brown ale, but...

So I did a closed transfer of my newest beer today. And while technically it was the third closed transfer I've done, it was the first fully successful closed transfer, though maybe that's even not true since the first one lost about 100-200ml in leakage from the way I connected the two...

As some of you might have noticed from my previous threads, before starting to do kegging, I was paranoid in particular about the safety of CO2 tanks. Although I've come to be a lot more "reasonable" and realistic about it, I am still quite paranoid. I've been keeping both my keg and CO2 in the...

Just wanted to ask about this since there seems to be a lot of contradictory stuff all over. For the entire time I brewed in the US, I used PBW. I already thought it was a bit expensive in the US, but with it more than 10 times more expensive here, I never really considered it an option...

With my previous recipe, I mainly just wanted to check if I was overlooking anything and I got some good advice about some water chemistry adjustments. This time there are more larger parts of the recipe and process I want feedback/advice on. My girlfriend loves dark beers in general and...

So I intend to do a closed transfer from my fermenter to my keg, but I just now realized something. The hose size that fits perfectly on my beer quick disconnect is the beer line, but it is WAY too small to connect to the spigot on my fermenter. I actually have the perfect sized hose to fit...

I know this topic has come up a bazillion times so far, and I've read tons and tons of articles online about it, but I still don't really have an answer. In the past I never really worried much about oxidation because all of my fermenters had very small openings on the top (whether glass or...