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I tested positive for COVID three weeks ago and fortunately didn't have any major symptoms, but I still haven't fully recovered taste and smell. Have any other homebrewers found ways to deal with this? I've had plenty of beer since then, and it doesn't taste bad like it did at the start, but...

I've got these weird streaks on my 3 gallon carboy that don't go away no matter what I do. Have run PBW a bunch of times. Saw a reference to acid treatment so I poured some lactic acid (had some lying around) over them. I've rinsed, washed and scrubbed with brushes, and they always come back...

I'm trying to make a bourbon barrel porter-type brew but I'm often wary of that style being too sweet, especially by the time I've gotten to the bottom of the glass. I like the bourbon and oak flavors but I want something more like a stout in terms of flavor profile. I've done a few things to...

I've tried a few times to malt popcorn and they've all gone terribly wrong, always ending with some dank-smelling mold growing on them. The last time I tried it, I hadn't even gotten through the soaking phase and the stuff already had a cheese like smell to it. I had pasteurized the water I used...

I love the flavors of dubbels, both the esters from the fermentation and the overall maltiness of them. But I'm finding them a bit cloying, and was trying to figure out a way to get the same combination of flavors with a final gravity about 10 points lower. I've already been making "low-gravity...

I’ve always loved Abbey ales but am not a huge fan these days of heavy, cloying, alcoholic brews. I wanted something that gives me the flavors of Abbey yeast plus brown malts, but doesn’t finish too sweet or much above 6.5 pct. So I took one that looked like it was going to finish around 8 and...

I’ve been trying to make bone dry mead, but the last few points just don’t ferment out (recipe below). I’ve gotten it down to 1.004, which is decent but still in semi-sweet territory based on most metrics. I’ve tried everything I can think of. It sat for a while at around 1.012, so I made a...

I've always loved abbey ales but can't really handle 8 pct brews these days, so I tend to knock the gravity down a bit to keep my sobriety up. So I've basically taken a recipe that would probably end up in the 8 percent range at least and diluted it down, without changing many of the...

For a while I've been looking to do an IPA that doesn't include the usual American hops, and came across NB's Spring Heeled Jack IPA Extract recipe. I've got the ingredients for it, but the gravity of 1.078 is much higher than what I'm looking for. They show this one settling at 1.022, which I...

I'm trying to use the hops in freezer plus the extract on my shelf to make a decent, low-gravity, hoppy pale ale. I'm guessing this will attenuate out a little better than Beersmith is expecting, but the idea of using Munich as a base malt is in part to give some malt heft to a low-alcohol beer...

I love S-05 as a clean fermenting yeast that gets the job done quickly, but the lag times have always been a bit of a drag. I usually don't see fermentation taking off in much less than 48 hours. This normally wouldn't be a very big deal, but I've got some kind of airborne contaminant in my...

Hi everyone - I stuck an Australian Cabernet RJS kit into a fermentation on Saturday night and it's still not showing any signs of life. I followed the instructions pretty much to the T, though may have slightly botched something at the end. I started with 4 liters of sanitized water, added...

Hi everyone - I'm a homebrewer just jumping into the world of wine, I've just done two one-gallon test batches that are frankly tasting pretty bad and I'm trying to sort through what went wrong. My guess is that they've oxidized. I'm using a Little Big Mouth Bubbler which has a 1.4 gallon...

I've got a Peace Crack Coffee Stout that I fermented with US04 from 1.062 to 1.020 that seems about stuck where it is. That seems a shade high to for a stout of this gravity, I think I'd want to knock at least five points off of it. My usual method of dealing with this - rack onto another cake -...

I'm a homebrewer looking to make my first forays into winemaking, I've got my first one-gallon kit in the mail. I'm thinking of eventually moving up to 5 gallon batches, but I'm about concerned about ageing in the wine in the hot climate where I live. The air temperature is generally about 75 on...

I've rinsed yeast before but am stumped on my recent attempt to rinse from a batch of porter. In this case I racked to secondary, added water to the yeast cake and poured it off into three containers. Usually I see what people show in the "How to rinse yeast" videos, which is three layers of 1)...

I made a nut brown ale about a week ago, chilled it to about 65 and pitched with rehydrated Nottingham. Nothing happened for nearly four days, until I started to see signs of krausen forming. Now there's a nice healthy crop of krausen on the top, but I just got a really strong whiff of acetone...

I have a fairly primitive cooling system so I can brew more than about 2.5 gallons if I want to keep it at any decent fermentation temperature. It occurred to me that I could make a beer of higher gravity and then water it back down to the strength I want when bottling. Has anyone done this sort...

My last two brews have kicked off fermentation with healthy krausen that dropped of suddenly within about a day. I could see that fermentation continued, as there were enough bubbles coming to the surface that at times it looked almost like boiling liquid. I've tasted neither beer, but I don't...

I smacked the smack-pack on Sunday morning hoping it would inflate, and it never did. So yesterday I made a 1 liter starter @1.040 and shook it up a bunch to get it going (I don't have a stir plate because I rarely manage to get my hands on liquid yeast). There's no krausen, and no bubbles apart...