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That is a question of temperature. If you have dropped the temp down to pitching range, go ahead and pitch. The aeration doesn't change anything there.

I thought this piece of equipment could use a second recommendation. I actually have a couple of these in my system. I use one to areate on the way into the fermenter. I also use one in my mash tun while recirculating. It would be very handy for fly sparging too if I did that. For the $2.99 you...

I haven't noticed any problems. Are you concerned about hot side areation, here? I don't think that really comes into play until you get the wort really hot, like in the boil kettle. Many of the breweries I have toured have a continuous stirring action on the mash, so I figured a good vigorous...

When I add strike water to the grain, I fill the mash tun from the bottom, up. I don't know if this helps fight dough balls or not though, because I use a paint stirrer on a cordless drill to stir the mash. I can get the entire 10 gallon batch of mash spinning in the mash tun with that thing...

Sounds great. That's about what I would have done as well.

Well, for a Scottish ale, you might pull off a small volume to a 2nd kettle and hit it pretty hard with the heat, but since you are already doing a partial boil for this batch, the recipe designer may have thought it would be OK to just add a little caramelization in the main boil. I should...

It is possible that the True Brew instructions intentionally call for a smaller boil because they think you should have some kettle caramalization from the extra sugary wort. I personally don't think that's quite to style on an Oktoberfest, but I could see how it might be kind of tasty.

You might want to bleed off pressure every now and then, just to make sure. You can always re-carbonate it if it turns out to be infection-free. Personally, I carbonate for 2 weeks or so at 10psi. I figure it will take that long for the beer to finish aging. By the time the beer is ready to...

It might not be an infection. When I first got into kegging, I was way overcarbonating my beer and the resulting carbonic acid can taste pretty sour. Can you describe your carbonating process? If you are force carbonating at high pressure and then backing it off for serving, you could be getting...

So here's the problem. Most yeast strains are alcohol intollerant. So as your beer attenuates, it inhibits the yeast from doing their job. Bumping the temperature a bit towards the end of attenuation will help the yeast finish the beer out. The 2 pounds of corn sugar in the recipe is going to...

You could get yourself a cornelius keg and lager in that. The bonus is that you already have a start on the equipment for when you start kegging.

For a banana bomb, ferment it a little warm. By the way, you are going to want a blow off tube. Hefeweizen yeast takes off like a monster and foams like crazy.

Hefeweizen is about the easiest batch you could do. Very fast to ferment and you don't generally condition them too much, mostly just to carbonate. If I do an extract hefeweizen, I'll usually just use wheat DME and hops. No steeped grains are really necessary, although sometimes I'll steep some...

I have used those before. They don't hold as much as you would think. I tend to keep less than 1/2 oz of pellet hops in them otherwise the hops in the middle are kind of dry and I imagine underused. I'm currently trying to incorporate 3 or 4 of those into a hop-back though. Maybe once I finish...

2 packs should be good for a 5 gallon batch at around 1.055. I'm not sure where the 6 packs number came from. If you are going to have to buy the yeast and have it shipped to Lithuania, I would consider buying several of these at a time and then building up a yeast starter every time you brew...

Melanoidins maybe?

That looks like a partial mash recipe to me, so you probably should mash them. That isn't really the same thing as steeping longer though. You need to have the right water to grain ratio (1.25 quarts per pound is good) in order to get the enzymes released at mash temperatures to convert the...

You could do a starter of fresh wort and add that to the keg after a day or two. That would likely clean up any acetaldehyde assuming that is the problem. You have already racked the beer off the yeast twice now, and Nottingham is fairly floculent, so you probably don't have a large quantity of...

You said you had the grains in a bag. Was the bag pretty full? Is it possible that you had the bag drawn too tight and you didn't get much/any water to the grain in the middle?

I assume you have a glass carboy that you are using for a secondary? If so, I'd probably keep it inside in the coolest place you can find. At the very least, find something to block the light from getting to your beer. A zip up hoodie works very well for me. Letting it sit for a long time will...