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I recommend Omega Yeast Labs Lactobacillus blend. It's a beast and can easily sour your wort at lower temps like 70-90F. Works well every time I've used it. As for the recipe, 50/50 pilsner and wheat is an easy, go-to grain bill for beers like this. If you do use the Omega Lacto, be sure to not...

Yes, I believe your fear is irrational. As far as I know, Brett cannot fly. As long as you don't pour that Brett beer all over your new equipment, you should be fine. I second @TheMadKing also. If I had to guess, your friends likely did not clean their equipment properly between uses...

That actually sounds perfect. I would leave the fermenting beer in the basement around 62-65 for the first 4-5 days, then bring it upstairs to finish up for about a week or two.

I think what m00ps is saying is that most, if not all, commercial beers will say on the label what style of beer it is. IME, that is true about 99% of the time. I have come across a handful of commercial beers that don't say what, exactly, they are. A quick google search should tell you, though.

http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/style/ Click on any style and it will bring up several commercial examples of the style.

If you want the hops to be as present as they possibly can be, do not rack it to a secondary. Any introduction of oxygen to the beer once fermentation has finished can only damage your final beer's hop character.

Another option is to just add the whole beans in a sanitized bag directly to the fermenter (like a dry hop) a couple days before you plan on packaging the beer.

That's good that it has gone down to 1.029 but that still seems very high, especially for a DIPA. I would probably wait another couple days and take another gravity reading before bottling just to be sure it's not still fermenting. A DIPA at that FG is going to be very sweet and the hops will...

I've always just mashed all of my grains together, including roasted barley. All of my stouts turn out nicely. Never too astringently roasty. However, I am curious to try the late addition of the roasted malts into the mash just to see how it turns out. According to what I've been told (and...

If you're not able to get any roasted barley, I would say your best bet w/ what you have would be Chocolate malt. Just expect a less roasty, slightly less dark finished beer. Do they have black patent malt? You could use a little bit of that instead, but a little less than however much roasted...

Pellicles are formed when there is contact w/ oxygen in the fermenter. If there is any headspace, you will likely see a pellicle. That's been my experience so far, at least.

I really like experimenting w/ hop combos so I tend to brew an IPA every other batch. I find myself wanting to try a new style every other brew.. IPA - Oatmeal stout - IPA - Barley wine - IPA - ESB, etc.

Yeah I should've asked OG and batch size, good call brewprint. Looks like 1 oz of Columbus should do the trick. 2 oz at 60 mins is gonna get you 90-100 IBUs, while 1 oz at 60 mins will get you 40-50 IBUs. I tend to aim for 50-60 IBUs for IPAs, which is right around where you should end up after...

That should take care of the bitterness, but now I'm worried about the flavor/aroma if you're really going for a true IPA. If you only have 4 oz of the Crystal, I might do 2 oz at flameout and 2 oz dry hop. I would suggest getting even more Crystal and doing 3-4 oz at flameout and 2-3 oz dry hop.

I would suggest that you do add brett. I have one going in secondary right now that smells scrumptious, and another saison that I added 6-8 drops of Brett at bottling that has an awesome brett character to it. I have a culture of Wyeast's Brett C mixed w/ Orval dregs that I keep in my fridge...

Forgot to add... Most people will tell you not to worry about efficiency, as long as your beer turns out tasty, efficiency isn't that important. I agree for the most part, but 50% efficiency seems too low. I get 65-70% and I'm satisfied with that.

The crush is one of the most important things to check when you have poor efficiency. Read this thread (or the first post, at least) : https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=334813 What size batch are you doing? If I'm assuming a 5 gallon batch, I would say your water volumes are a...

I just dump it all straight into the fermenter. Gets the most wort in there as possible, plus it gives it a little bit of aeration which promotes yeast health

Lol whoops. Didn't even look at the date of the OP.

I use this calculator and it has never failed me : http://www.brewersfriend.com/beer-priming-calculator/ According to my reading, it makes no difference whether you use corn/cane/DME carbonation-wise. You just have to use different amounts of each to hit your desired level of carbonation...