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Should I have anticipated a higher grain absorption rate with 35% of my grist bill being flaked oats and wheat? I came up significantly short on volume for a typical, well calibrated mash/sparge that utilitizes mostly malt grist bills.

So here is the scoop. My wife is having a wedding shower for her brother at our house in July. The theme is supposed to be ltalian since they are going to Italy. I like to pride myself in making a beer for the occasion but since Italy is really lager country and I am not in the lager brewing...

Well, I thought I would be clever and catch some native yeast to ferment out a belgian pale ale. Apparently, I was not so lucky. I thought I had trapped some wild yeast in some smaller samples. It made for a very fruity smelling sample and what appeared to be some floccuation. When I compiled...

I am getting a distinguished bitter salty after taste on my rye pale ale. Its a clone of Terrapin's. I have my suspicions that it may be the tap water as this is the first batch at my new house so obviously it could be the pipe, water heater, etc but before I damn the water I want to rule...

Brewed a saison for the beach and will likely force carb it. Typically, I turn the pressure up to 20 PSI and roll the keg for 20 minutes. However, since I am driving to the beach and I have a tow basket on my car, do you think it would work if I hook up the keg and stow it on the tow rack...

The other day, about 45 days into a new keg, it sputtered when I filled up my growler to take to a party. I thought that was awfully quick to run out of a keg. Has anyone had this happen before? The beer tasted a bit bitter but not unbearable.

First of all, I have some Paulaner Premium Lager trying to assure myself that I want to make 2 gallons of this stuff. What is crazy is that after the first taste, I feel like I am drinking Bud Light but with each subsequent taste it gets a little sweeter. So I'm in. I know that the recipe...

Planning on doing a Saison and from all accounts it sounds like I should ferment as high as I can get it 70+ degrees. A couple of questions first. I have a regular fridge that I use as a fermentation chamber and have a two stage controller hooked up to the fridge and a small space heater...

Is there any concerns with getting grains cracked at the local homebrew store and keeping them for a week or two before brewing? I keep them in a closed bucket in the freezer portion of my fermenting fridge. The freezer is turned off so it tracks at or a few degrees warmer than the fridge (65 deg).

How is it done? I have been cloning a lot of stuff I like and then bumping up alcohol content probably no more than 1%. I typically do this through DME additions or base malt increases. But my big beer batches are having a hint of the "hot" phenol finish. One was a winter ale and the other...

I brewed a brown ale with rye cloning the brown ale part from SN Tumbler. The beer has the dry and crisp taste from the rye that I was looking for but it really seems to drop of the cliff without any finish. Looking for some help in getting the rye taste a bit more forward and following it up...

For conditioning in the keg is it sufficient to just purge the air in the headspace without sealing the keg under pressure. I only have a hand charger available at the time and certain that I cannot get a good seal with it alone. Will there be enough residual gassing off that would prevent...

Left town for the Thanksgiving holiday and head out to the garage fridge to get a beer tonight only to find the beer line frozen, keg partially frozen, and tank gone. There was a jug of water that was also frozen but every other bottled beer, food item, etc was no where near frozen. I live in...

Hopefully this is simple. When using a temperature controller on a fridge for a fermentation chamber is there a perferred setting for the fridge's internal temperature setting (i.e. coldest or warmest)? Are there any advantages either way? I would assume a fridge doesn't provide any colder...

What is a good experimentation size? I have about a dozen partial boils under my belt starting with extract with steeping grains and moving onto partial mashes. Spent much of that time getting familiar with the equipment, mashing, kegging, water chemistry, styles, etc. Before I go all...

This might be stupid but here I go. Is there any reason why you should not mash one day and boil the next? I have only partially mashed once before so I running through the steps in my head and can't think of any reason considering a boil is to follow regardless of the day. Every brew day...

Pulled a kolsch partial mash recipe off the internet somewhere not here. Was my first partial mash, second lager overall but first lager since learning to make starters. So, I was really keyed in on making the starter and setting up the partial mash. Here is the rescue part. Take a look at...

I am about acquire or at least borrow some kegging equipment from my neighbor and I would like to keg up some beer to take to the beach this summer. What kind of issues will I run into attempting to pull this off? I presume I would need to carb it up before I leave since I will only be at the...

For my third brew, I tried a Bohemiam Pilsner with WLP833 yeast (the Czech Budvar yeast). I pitched my yeast on 4/7 at room temps and did not see any activity for 24 hours. Woke up on 4/9 (32 hours from pitching) with some blow off and moved the fermenter from room temps to a fridge where I...

Picked up a Bohemian Pilsner kit that had a dry hopping option with 1 oz of Saaz hops. Currently, the beer is coming out of its diacytel rest and ready to hit the lagering phase. Now I am thinking I will want to rack to a secondary (i.e. get the beer of the yeast) and start bringing the...