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London tap water will be too alkaline to get into the correct mash pH. Diluting tap water with Tesco Ashbeck or Asda mineral water (both from same source) is one option. I use my water undiluted but add phosphoric acid to reduce the alkalinity. For 38L of total water I add about 14ml of 70%...

What's your mashing and sparging method? Stuck mashes seem to be more of a problem in fly sparge systems than batch sparge and more of a problem in batch sparge systems than brew in a bag/mash in a bag. If you're using a bag the You should be fine without. If you are fly or batch sparging I'm...

I've found a number of references to brewing with unmalted barely in the scientific literature. There are a number of reasons that commercial breweries might want to do it. Cost, water and energy saving being the principal ones. This one compares various proportions of raw barley, rice and...

I'm trying to cover all the bases with my hopping schedule. I put hops in at 10 minutes, flame out for a 20 minute steep, then cooled to 65°C and added more hops for another 20 minute steep. I've now added my first dry hop and will add a second one before bottling.

I made a plum porter recently and added plums late in the boil. By the end of fermentation I couldn't detect any plum character at all. If you want any flavour from the raspberries then I would add them in secondary.

I guess I will find out! I dry hopped this evening 54 hours after pitching the yeast. I'm going to dry hop again 4 days before bottling. I've never had a yeast work this quickly before. It is down from 1.060 to 1.019 in two days. The krausen has already dropped so I'm hoping there is still...

One other thing to consider is the amount of dead space in your system. Every time you leave wort behind you are lowering your brewhouse efficiency. My last brew I set 77% efficiency which is what I expected for a slightly larger grain bill. I hit my expected OG spot on but i also managed to...

I'm brewing my first NE IPA. I know that it is often suggested that you dry hop when primary fermentation is still going but is two days in too early? I'm using the Sussex 1 yeast strain from Brew Lab, a UK brewing supplies organisation. They say it is a fast fermentor but less than 48...

Thanks for the air pump suggestion. I don't know why I've never considered this. Something about leaving it hanging around in my fermentor for a while makes me worry about infection but I suspect this is isn't a big issue in reality. I'll look in to it. I'm definitely not suggesting adding...

I would have thought you would want a more balanced water profile, with less sulphate than a Burton water profile. Old ale favours a malty rounded taste which would require more chlorine and less sulphate. As a guess I'd go something like Ca 100ppm, Mg 5ppm, Na 25ppm, Su 50ppm, Cl 50ppm...

Thanks for the replays. My intention was to collect any off gassed O2 in a bottle and then feed it via a tube through the bottle lid into the FV headspace. I'm certainly not intending to add it directly to the wort! My fear was that it would not release enough oxygen. When I've used it for...

This may be a completely idiotic idea (and I'm entirely prepared to believe that it is) but I'd like to explore the idea of generating oxygen to aid wort aeration from sodium percarbonate. My current aeration methods are fairly standard. I let the wort flow from my boiler at a height, into...

I bottled this yesterday and had a little sample from the trial jar. It was very nice with plenty of hop aroma/flavour and a prominent Belgian yeast flavour too. It is a little more heavily weighted to the yeast side than I was aiming for but I did let it ferment fairly warm. I think if I...

I have not tried this but I recently had a De Ranke Saision De Dottignies. It was fantastic. Really nice crisp bitterness and a surprising amount of hop flavour/aroma. I really enjoyed it.

It may not be a good idea during the sparge but could help during the mash. Many of the commercial single vessel systems, like the Grain Father operate on the basis. The main difference is that they have an internal heating element and controller which maintains the mash temperature as the...

I can't guarantee that the bottling strain is the same but to my taste they are identical. Either way, it doesn't matter to me as it has given me the flavour that I was after. Apart from the flavour the yeast shows other similarities such as very high attenuation ~84% and low flocculation.

I tasted the starter a couple of times during the process of building it up from the bottle dregs. It is definitely the same yeast. Very distinctive and exactly what I think of as the Duvel flavour. Actually the the unhopped starter was really quite nice to drink and I had about half a glass...

Just thought I would update to say the brewday went well, although I ended up quite a bit over volume and under OG. I could have boiled for longer but it was already midnight when I was 60 minutes in to the boil and I wanted to get to bed before 3 in the morning. Also the golden syrup...

I'm definitely not going for something with Belgian/European hops flavours. I've only tried one example of a Belgian IPA by Stewart Brewing and it was delicious. Lots of fruity hops but also a bit of dankness. They say they use a combo of 6 new world hops but don't give any clues. It is 80...

I'm about to brew my first Belgian IPA today and wondered if anyone has any tips. I've harvested yeast from Duvel bottles and have a decent sized starter ready to go. I don't want to lose the character of the yeast amongst all the hops. I also want the dry finish of a Belgian beer so I'm mashing...