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actually, most of my 5 gallon carboys are smooth sided and I have never seen a flexible glass container :) the extra room is probably a good enough reason for buying 6's if you are in a position where you have to buy

you want spigots - 5 gallons of hot wort is not something you want to be moving around in an open top kettle - and 10 gallons may be nigh impossible for mere mortals

I generally use a bucket for primary and a 5 gallon carboy for secondary - the only reason for that is I happened to acquire a bunch of 5 gallon carboys cheap when I started brewing from a water company that was switching to plastic. I have never used a 6 gallon carboy, but I don't think...

in practical terms, the pectin from fruit in your boil will not lump up, but it will make a haze you cannot get rid of but not to worry about orange peel - no pectin there

buying in michigan, most stores handle all the returned bottles the same way - typically they go into a machine that reads bar codes and prints a receipt that you take to the cashier. Inside the machine is a hopper - all the bottles go together - regardless of the type - miller lowlife or heavy...

around here, no one wants the bottles back - the deposit merely keeps them off the side of the road. Stores typically crush them. So don't let your conscience bother you about keeping them.

you could always put the peel in a small amount of water and add a camden tablet - then throw it into the secondary. Anything added to the primary gets scrubbed pretty well by the fermentation - you can generally get cleaner flavors by adding anything that does not need to ferment after...

Okay, this is not beer, but there is no forum for 'other potables' except the mead and cider forums In case you are interested, Fred Eckhardt, the foremost authority on homebrewed sake in the USA, has a recipe for sake here: recepty.veruska.cz/_sys/eckhardt-sake.pdf It is a PDF file. (I...

it is very difficult to get a reliably tight seal with twist-off bottles - don't waste your time and take a chance on flat beer!

I used to keep bottles, but they just took up way too much room - so now I have a bucket on top of the beer fridge that I toss a cap in. One day I might organize them according to color and make a mosaic mural with a beer-related image (my Starr bottle opener puts only a small dimple in the...

cranberries have almost no sugar in them and are very acid - if you use them for flavor, you can make very good stuff, but you are definitely going to need another source of sugar. Frozen cranberries are still available at my local grocery

I use a wallpaper tray also - it is great for anything long and skinny that won't fit in the bucket - racking cane, bottling wand, stirrers... it is also easier to get other small stuff out of than the bucket - my rubber gloves do not come far enough up my arm to dig to the bottom of a full 5...

it is not so hard to find - many homebrew shops are now carrying a kit that contains the 'seeds' of koji and sake yeast you will need. In addition to the kit, you will need plenty of rice, of course. If you want complete instructions, google 'homebrew sake' - there are a few sites out...

I did a porter many years ago, and cannot recall a lot of detail about it - but I made a basket of freshly ground espresso and poured the hot wort through it before cooling it - sort of an express drip method, as it were. I used decaf because I had a lot of it around and did not want to be...

I enjoy making labels almost as much as I enjoy making beer. Perhaps I will post the one gallon recipe there - this is a brew that folks may want to test before they commit to a full 5 or 10 gallons of. I imagine that most people can easily multiply the quantities if they are interested in...

if you boil the fruit, you will develop pectin and it will always be there as a protein haze in the finished product - it will not clear. I generally use campden tablets - crush them up in a little water and put them in the must and let it sit for 24 hours - then pitch your yeast. The campden...

I use the tap water I have never had a problem with it and it makes excellent beer so I've never felt the need to fiddle with the chemistry.

my favo bottles are german wheat beer bottles - love that tall shape and they hold a good sized portion still, I generally keg - it's just a hell of a lot easier for anything you aren't planning on keeping forever - I prefer to drink the brew than save it - just the way I'm wired :cool:

there are a few out there, you could try Williams Brewing - they have a kit here but it is really so simple you can pick up a couple of things at your local homebrew shop, get some honey from your friendly neighborhood apiarist and take it from there. Either way, remember Charlie's...

Crystal malt is malt which has been "mashed in the husk" by being heated to saccharification temperatures while it is still wet. The process is carried out in such a way that saccharification is complete, converting all of the starches into sugars. The malt is then kilned (dried), causing the...