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1 willamette, 1 centennial. I had to move my hops to another side of the house, and only had room for 2 plants vs. the 4 I had before. I dug up the other 2 crowns. They're healthy, nice-sized, even budding a little bit. Free to anyone who wants to come get them. Send me a PM.

I've been reading about aging wine and mead. Most people on sites like HBT think that if you want to age wine more than a year or so, it needs sulfites added, or it will eventually start to oxidize and degrade. Is this the same with mead? However, some sites talk more about acidity and...

I'm kind of struggling figuring out a good way to dry hop. Here's my conundrum... Batch has been racked to secondary. One goal of secondary, limit head space to avoid oxidation, so I rack into a 5gal carboy. This severely limits dry hopping options. I've tried just adding pellet hops to...

Thinking about doing a single malt batch to go with my hop harvest (so I'd have a SMaSH with homegrown hops) and looking for suggestions on which malt to use. I'll be using fresh, homegrown willamette hops.

So I have some first year elderberry bushes in my yard that produced some fruit, but not nearly enough to make even a full gallon batch. I decided to ferment them anyway as a test using Jack Keller's uncooked recipe scaled down to about a quart. I was just shy of the amount needed though...

Ever year my hops get aphids. Most of the time I don't sweat it though. I am a firm believer that a healthy, fast-growing plant with plenty of water, sun and soil nutrients will easily outgrow any pests. Plants have plenty of natural defenses against pests and diseases, and insects will...

I haven't experimented too much with wine yeasts yet, despite making wine for a couple years now. Mostly I've stuck to montrachet and champagne from RedStar as they're easy, available, and reliable. Last time I was at the homebrew store though I picked up some Lalvin D47 (recommended as a mead...

I usually mix up a large batch and then keep the extra in jugs to use as needed, sometimes for months. Will this stuff remain effective like that, or will it lose potency over time?

I've noticed a lot of wineries and breweries using brix, rather than SG, on their bottles and websites. Is there an advantage to one or the other? Or is it just a matter of personal preference? Is there an easy rule of thumb for converting between the two?

I want to make a winter-warmer, semi-sweet pumpkin mead with mulling spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves). I haven't found any recipes for mead specifically that match this, but if anyone knows of a good one, I'd love to see it. I have a couple questions... 1) Using canned pumpkin, how...

If you're like me and garden as well as brew, you probably have way too many ripe/over-ripe tomatoes right now, and to keep up you're giving them away to friends, constantly making salsa and freezing tomato sauce batches for the winter. I found a cool recipe in the book "Making Wild Wines and...

Anyone tried it?

I've noticed a lot of people here add fruit to their melomels when they rack to secondary. I've always hung the bag in the primary right at the start of fermentation and squeezed a few times over 2-5 days before removing. What is the difference in the end result, if any? If you do it in the...

Has anyone tried to clone this? I've never tasted anything like it. It was delicious, bold and smooth, with much more honey flavor than I expected. I've made cysers before and never achieved anything close. I've emailed the company and begged for help creating something similar, but...

I have 3 gallons of pyment that I'm going to rack onto oak chips. I've never used oak before but hope it will add some nice complexity. I have both light toasted american oak chips and medium toasted american. Which would you guys recommend using? How long do you usually boil them? How many...

This idea comes from the book Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers by Stephen Harrod Buhner. The book is overall a difficult read (except for the chapter called Alcohol: Aqua Vitae, the Water of Life, which covers the common mythology across the globe surrounding the discovery of fermentation and...

I started my first batch of JAOM 2 weeks ago. Opened it up to take a gravity reading today, and SG is 1.006 and still appears to be working! I thought this stuff was supposed to finish fairly sweet? It was a 3gal batch so I pitched 3 packets of Fleischmann's yeast, so probably over-pitched...

I have seen this mentioned numerous times but I have a couple questions. I have a blackberry wine with some lingering sulfur smell. This will be its second racking. I don't have a wand degasser. So I am assuming that "splash-racking" is siphoning without taking the care to "siphon...

I usually have pretty crappy efficiency, and I was making a really big beer today, with the recipe calling for an OG around 1.080. I decided to do partial mash with half the base malt + LDME. I calculated that under normal circumstances I would need about 4lbs LDME to offset the base malt...

As in, worse than rhino farts (which I've experienced before). This has more of an edge to it, it's sharper, and there's no smell of "normal" fermentation accompanying it. When I opened the bucket to stir it today I nearly got sick. I pitched 1 packet of pasteur champagne yeast (3gal...