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I just got a new chiller and I'm testing it out. Previously I used a cooler filled with 4 gallons of water + five 2-Liter bottles of ice, with a submerged pump. I finally made the change after years of swapping out those 2L bottles in & out of the freezer had worn me down. With that process...

I recently made a beer with this at a Big Brew Day event, where a local brewery donated yeast slurry to brewers for beers brewed on-site that day. I made a pretty plain American Pale Ale. The flavor is very drying on the palate, almost chalky. I'm not a big fan of it, but it is very distinct...

This is most of a Blichmann BrewEasy setup that sells for $2000 new. But this does not have a heating element, pump or controller to be a complete functioning BrewEasy setup. However this has a lot of extra add-ons. Altogether: - 7.5G mash tun - 10G boil kettle (or could be a mash tun if...

I keg my beer, but frequently share batches with friends/neighbors. So I bottle some and give them out. Bottles cost ~$0.50 apiece from the homebrew shop, and no way I have patience to peel labels and soak off glue from commercial bottles. So I reuse/recycle the bottles back from the ones I...

I've made a Baltic Porter recipe a few times, and I keep getting a low attenuation in the fermentation (the "Apparent Attenuation" that Brewfather calculates). I see it come through as higher than predicted FG. The recipe originated from a BEERMKR Kit. That's a whole other story, but I made...

I'm on Day 20 post yeast pitch on a Kolsch. I started cold, around 56f, as I've had good luck with that before. After about a week, it was looking like things were finished, but as I kept waiting for my Tilt to show 2-3 days of flat SG, it just keeps slowly dropping. I was initially thinking...

Blichmann plate chiller. Used only a couple times, but I'm not a fan of cleaning it afterwards (recommend you use a hop spider if you use a plate chiller). Includes quick release mounting plate/bracket and Thrumometer to see wort temperature as it circulates through it. Price new for...

This has been a great unit for me. Top RIMS solution I feel over other RIMS tubes on the market. The Blichmann RIMS Rocket holds a larger volume of wort and has a lot of surface area on the heating coil- both meaning decreased chance of scorching your wort. My homemade mounting stand is...

I ran into this a few years ago and forgot about it until it re-appeared this week for me. On a schedule of ibuprofen to address some long-term ache, and my beer didn't taste good. But this week, it was on a much more grand scale. I've got a summer party coming up and my beer is the...

I'm evaluating two different Alkaline beer line cleaners. The manufacturer suggested a good way to compare strength was to take a volume of water and add the cleaner to it and see how the pH changed. I'm trying to make sense of my results. I started with 2 quarts of water, it measured pH of...

I recently noticed a trend on 3 different beers I brewed, all having this slightly chalky taste to them. Not enough to spoil the beer, but distinct enough of a bite that it annoys/distracts me. I then realized that all 3 were brewed to the same target water profile. Two were British Bitters...

I have a sack of Weyermann Munich I malt. I hit a gap in my brew schedule and I've got a bunch of that grain left now (11/15/2023) even though it has a Best By date on the sack of 1/13/2023. I've got a brewing experiment I plan to do, to try to quantify the effect of a process variable in some...

I am working with a BrewEasy Classic. It has a standard mash tun and a boil kettle. Mash tun is stacked on top of the boil kettle and uses gravity to bleed off wort from the mash tun via a tube with a fixed orifice. The water gets heated in the boil kettle and then pumped up to the mash tun...

I made a Rye IPA recently. Poured the first pints off the keg and it has this "thick" haze glow to it. Taste is fabulous, and I love the look, just the haze took me by surprise. I don't have any wheat or oats, which is typically how I get haze when I want it. And it's just using Wyeast 1056...

The BrewZilla comes with a 6-foot power cord. Of course the objective is the lowest resistance cord possible to minimize voltage drop, and hence allow maximum power at the brew unit. But the 6-foot length is a bit too constraining for me, and I'm looking for something like 8-foot. Kicking off...

I've got a BrewZilla Gen4 and have been brewing with it the last several batches. Really digging it. I do a lot of step mashes, so was instantly thrilled that when setting up a mash profile I could either set it up to just step to a temperature over a fixed amount of time (typical) or start...

I brew on a 3 vessel system most of the time. The problem I've been having lately is getting a consistent sparge rate/time when pumping from mash tun to boil kettle. And I get significant variation on mash efficiency, depending on that sparge rate. I run the flow out of mash tun through a...

I recently got a CIP spray ball, curious if there was some magic there that made cleaning my kettle or fermentor easier. I've tried it once so far, and realized that as simple as it seems, it definitely needs the right process to make it worthwhile. In my attempt, I was hauling buckets of...

I might be remembering this wrong, but I thought one of the HSA-reduction process techniques was a low vigor boil. But as I was doing a low rolling boil yesterday, I also remembered @Bilsch mentioning that boiling water gets rid of all dissolved oxygen. So that had me thinking that vigorous...

I haven't really thought about this in a long time since I keg everything, and I'm not buying Corona from the store any more... But I recently got a couple FermZilla All Rounders and love them. In my basement, the beers don't ferment in an area where they'd ever get direct sunlight, but it had...