BeerTools Discussion Forum

Excellent feature. I'm frequently playing with my hop weights a little at a time to get back to the same number when the AA% changes.

Try finely chopping your lemon grass and soaking it in vodka for a day to make a tincture. Add that to you secondary. About two stalks of lemon grass and enough vodka to cover. When you like what you taste/smell in the secondary, rack to a tertiary if you still need conditioning time or go ahead and...

Hi Jeff, welcome to the hobby. You should check out the Lehigh Valley Homebrewers club.

PM me for details. Plenty of people to help you out.

Don't forget to insulate your bucket if you go this rout. You're going to lose a lot of temperature otherwise.

Biggest tip is to use light DME and steep your specialty grains to achieve the colors and flavors you want. You don't know what grains were used to create that dark DME, so you have no way of knowing what flavors you're going to get.

I've never seen gas make a beer sour. I'm pretty sure your beer is infected, probably happened either in the keg or while kegging.

DO NOT DUMP IT! There's nothing wrong with it (probably). Vigorous fermentations are not that rare. Look into a blow-off setup for your next batch, less messes.

Both of these cover my setup(s).

HLT or Stovetop Kettle + Direct Fired Combo Mash/Lauter Tun + Boil Kettle
HLT or Stovetop Kettle + Unheated Combo Mash/Lauter Tun + Boil Kettle

The odds are pretty good, that something was out of sorts when you did your initial calibration. Maybe the mash tun was really colder than you initially thought and calibrated at? Anyway, if you're confident that you took accurate temperatures during your mash, you can adjust the heat capacity and h...

Assuming there were no flaws during fermentation (infection, stress, etc), you can use that yeast again. I don't wait any longer than 1 week before re-pitching.

Kevponce, Don't sweat the "exact water" thing too much. A lot of my brewing friends live in rural areas and we all use our well water to produce our beer. The primary thing we do with our water, is bring the pH down. 5-Star makes this stuff called 5^2 Buffer or something like that, which d...

OK, so kettle volume is the reason you can't collect more wort right from the start, which is a pretty good reason! Just about everybody in my homebrew club boils pilsner malt for 90 minutes because of the DMS potential. Of course, that is the full volume of pilsner malt wort. Your situation is a sm...

What is the volume of wort in you kettle before the boil, and how much do you want after the boil?

Rather than adding wort to the kettles after you've boiled some off, why not include it right from the start?

I buy just about everything from a local shop. If there's something I'd like that they don't have, they'll get it for me.

The entire Safale/Saflager yeast line is a really good line. I've used the following with great success: US-05 - American ale S-04 - English ale S-23 - Lager (German I think) WB-06 - Heffeweizen All of these yeasts perform extremely well and should be part of ever homebewer's arsenal. No, I do not w...