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This got me wondering: After 8 years I would imagine a significant fraction of the ethanol may have evaporated away due to the fact that its vapor pressure is significantly higher than that of water. How detectable would you say the alcohol is in the finished product, if at all?

Just a side note on the alcohol you use to soak them in - I brewed a big mole stout and soaked the secondary additions (dried peppers, cacao nibs and crushed beans, cinnamon, and vanilla bean) in a quantity of vodka. Unfortunately, I used too much vodka and you could feel the heat of it in the...

That's almost certainly a component to it; the batch that fermented at ambient Winter House temps had the taste less strongly, but it was still there. There was a different, weirder off flavor to it though, and I worry that it got infected somewhere along the line.

Thanks for all the info though. I'm glad to hear that the tablets are less of an issue than I thought. I just cracked into several bottles of four of these brews from the basement and here are my findings: -They older three sets of bottles are all over-carbonated. There were no gushers, but...

The DC area water companies discontinued the use of chloramine after some controversy or other several years back I believe, and unless there is a lot of ammonia in the drinking water (ew), the chloramine shouldn't be there in the first place, right?

We were immersing in the appropriate concentration of iodophor, but we switch to Star-san, because of the aforementioned suck-back problem. We usually make one gallon of the Star-san solution in the bottling bucket, using that to sanitize the auto-siphon, bottling wand, and all attached tubing...

Let me regale you with a brewing story and then we'll get to the questions: The brew-girlfriend and I have approximately 15 batches under our belts in almost a year of brewing and we've noticed an absolutely inescapably terrible defect in about five of them thus far: The dreaded taste of...

I hope you named it "The Crushinator"!

There's really no way around it if you don't use a strainer. There are several easy how-to guide on how to build a hop spider (the Beer Review Dude has one on youtube as well) in the DIY forums, if you feel equal to the task and want to start harvesting clean yeast.

Fermentation should produce some amount of heat, but 60 deg F as an external temperature might be a little too cold, depending on your batch size. If you have control on your external temps (jealous!), I would probably dial it in to around 65, but them I'm still on 5 gal batches so you might...

Set-up: We've got a RIS (OG: 1.096, Recipe here [over sparged, heh], pitched with a starter that was a mixture of White Labs Super High Gravity yeast and British Ale yeast, as our Dry English Ale yeast came spoiled in the vial) which has been fermenting for about three weeks now and I have a...

You would think if it were a marketing thing, they would tell you buy more yeast since that's the proper alternative to starters for upping cell counts.

The lady homebrewer and I have had it on tap twice now. It's great! Almost no hope of getting in bottles in DC though...

OK, it still smells like garbage, but banana-ey/clovey garbage. Airlock activity is going strong, which I find a bit weird after 5 days, bit I guess we'll see what it brings in a few weeks.

It's been going for a week and two days as of today. I'll report on the scent once I'm home from work, the last time I checked the airlock was yesterday or the day before.

Would letting it sit in primary for a few weeks longer than normal maybe help the yeast clear out any off flavors produced by bacteria, like single-celled wrecking crews? I would be happy even if it were spontaneously fermented vs. bacteria; at least it would be more likely to be drinkable then.

It's definitely not sulfur; we had a brown that turned out pretty good, but smell like Satan's toilet during most of its fermentation process. We've never had this set of smells before. I should also mention that airlock activity is still going on pretty actively, which is also something...

We've got a weizenbock that we pitched last weekend and I've got some questions because it smells terrible through the airlock. Relevant information: White Labs Hefeweizen (WLP300) pitched @ 70 deg F into 1.071 OG wort, straight from the store-bought vial. It's something like our 8th or 9th...

Just got a bunch of carboys, this would come in handy!

Ah, that might be it. My friend has been watering in the morning and there is a lot of sun exposure on these guys.