|
Thinking about it again, would it work to basically just unplug the heating element from my temperature controller? I'm in Texas right now and my garage probably won't be getting cold enough to warrant heating the freezer for awhile. Maybe set the +/- at a decently large amount and tape the probe to the fermentation bucket with some insulation over it?
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 19:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 23:31 |
|
|
I need a good basic yeast-washing primer, if anyone has a good one handy. I'm going to be brewing on Saturday, and while I could drop the beer right on the yeast cakes in the fermenters, I find that leads to bland beer. I'd like to harvest enough yeast to make a good starter from if I can.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 19:43
|
|
|
I opened one of the remaining 7 bottles of my first attempt at unblended lambic, and the off flavors are gone! I let it chill in the fridge for 48 hours before pouring and made sure not get any of the sediment into the pour since previous pours have been cloudy and gross. It has a nice funk and almost hints at smoke on the finish somehow. I'm excited to chill a bottle from the fruited portion (sour cherries, sweet cherries, sour cherry juice, mixed berries, primed with more sour cherry juice).
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 20:01
|
|
|
Jo3sh posted:I need a good basic yeast-washing primer, if anyone has a good one handy. I'm going to be brewing on Saturday, and while I could drop the beer right on the yeast cakes in the fermenters, I find that leads to bland beer. I'd like to harvest enough yeast to make a good starter from if I can. Here's a long Chop and Brew video with Don Osborn about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYEj-wlWmaE
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 20:04
|
|
|
Jo3sh posted:I need a good basic yeast-washing primer, if anyone has a good one handy. I'm going to be brewing on Saturday, and while I could drop the beer right on the yeast cakes in the fermenters, I find that leads to bland beer. I'd like to harvest enough yeast to make a good starter from if I can. I like the method of making a bigger starter and pulling part of it off, then saving it in a mason jar much like with yeast washing -- except it didn't go through a ferment and you don't lose anything to trub.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 20:10
|
|
|
Thufir posted:Here's a long Chop and Brew video with Don Osborn about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYEj-wlWmaE Only partway through, but those guys are surprisingly un-annoying. Thanks for posting it. I'll give it a try - probably kegging the beer tonight, and I'll try washing late tonight or tomorrow.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 20:42
|
|
|
Jo3sh posted:Only partway through, but those guys are surprisingly un-annoying. Thanks for posting it. I'll give it a try - probably kegging the beer tonight, and I'll try washing late tonight or tomorrow. Chip Walton shot and edited BrewingTV when it was good/existed so his Chop and Brew thing is pretty ok in terms of content and polish. Also Keeler and Dawson make appearances sometimes.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 20:56
|
|
|
Thufir posted:Chip Walton shot and edited BrewingTV when it was good/existed so his Chop and Brew thing is pretty ok in terms of content and polish. Also Keeler and Dawson make appearances sometimes. Any idea why they changed the cast on BrewingTV? I was abit upset because it went from cool, layed back but informational with out all the beer snob/fedora/annoying stereotypes I came across on a lot of other brew videos. The newer format is just abit... I don't know tried to watch the first new one and I just found something about it really annoying.  Chop and brew is pretty good though yeah, wish BrewingTV stayed the way it was.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 20:59
|
|
|
Chip was the main dude running it and he left Northern Brewer to do his own thing.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 21:04
|
|
|
Dawson also left at about the same time to work for Wyeast.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 21:05
|
|
|
Michael Dawson is the only one involved in any brewing internet/show thing that I can stand to watch. Glad he seems to be loving his job at Wyeast. Has to be a weird change of scenery for him.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 21:05
|
|
|
Fluo posted:Any idea why they changed the cast on BrewingTV? I was abit upset because it went from cool, layed back but informational with out all the beer snob/fedora/annoying stereotypes I came across on a lot of other brew videos. The newer format is just abit... I don't know tried to watch the first new one and I just found something about it really annoying. Dawson and Keeler both had some sort of undisclosed falling out with Northern Brewer and quit and then Chip left a while later. fullroundaction posted:Michael Dawson is the only one involved in any brewing internet/show thing that I can stand to watch. Glad he seems to be loving his job at Wyeast. Has to be a weird change of scenery for him. He keeps a brewing blog still http://thebeerengineblog.com/
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 21:06
|
|
|
Fluo posted:Any idea why they changed the cast on BrewingTV? I was abit upset because it went from cool, layed back but informational with out all the beer snob/fedora/annoying stereotypes I came across on a lot of other brew videos. The newer format is just abit... I don't know tried to watch the first new one and I just found something about it really annoying. I think there was a falling out with a lot of the staff there and management. Not just BrewingTV but Northern Brewer in general, I only say that because a lot of 'background' folks where suddenly gone/missing after the BrewingTV shakeup as well. Chip's the only one who really commented on why he left and he pretty much just said "I was getting asked to do more than video, but was hired only to do that." This was also around the same time they dropped free shipping and rumbles over lovely customer service (reddit/HBT). The strangest video was the awkward owner of NB going to HopUnion right after they left.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 21:07
|
|
|
fullroundaction posted:Michael Dawson is the only one involved in any brewing internet/show thing that I can stand to watch. Glad he seems to be loving his job at Wyeast. Has to be a weird change of scenery for him. I think I've said this in this thread before, but I'd watch Dawson read the phone book. That decoction video is one of the best brewing videos I've ever seen.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 21:27
|
|
|
more falafel please posted:I think I've said this in this thread before, but I'd watch Dawson read the phone book. That decoction video is one of the best brewing videos I've ever seen. Definitely my favourite classic Brewing TV episode. It makes me wish I was standing outside in 20 degrees over a kettle with a mash paddle.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 21:36
|
|
|
Apparently the trick with carared is to also use 1% roasted malt of some kind (carafa, whatever) which gives it the red highlights to make it not brown. Alternatively, melanoidin + a bunch of medium crystal
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 22:06
|
|
|
Jo3sh posted:Only partway through, but those guys are surprisingly un-annoying. Thanks for posting it. I'll give it a try - probably kegging the beer tonight, and I'll try washing late tonight or tomorrow. OK, just got done watching (had stuff to do in the middle). It looks like I'm going to be a little rushed to keg and wash the yeast tonight, and then build a starter on Friday for brewing Saturday - but it doesn't look like it's impossible or anything, just that I probably won't get that nice tight settling fully done. Those of you who wash in a method like this: assuming I do as they did, and get 4 Mason jars out of it from one yeast cake, do you feel that the 1/3 inch or so of sedimented yeast is good for a 2L starter to pitch 10 gallons of wort?
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 22:35
|
|
|
more falafel please posted:I like the method of making a bigger starter and pulling part of it off, then saving it in a mason jar much like with yeast washing -- except it didn't go through a ferment and you don't lose anything to trub. I did yeast washing for a long time but kept getting inconsistent results so I just switched to this method. I'm taking one vial/pack of yeast and making a 1.5L starter with it then splitting that into 4 mason jars. From there I'll make another 1-1.5L starter depending on what I'm doing. It's working great so far, I already did some French Saison like this and am currently doing a starter of Brett Trois as well.
|
|
#
?
Feb 24, 2014 22:48
|
|
|
illcendiary posted:Today I decided to finally check the accuracy of the temperature probe (an STC-1000) in my fermentation chamber (a chest freezer). I had the probe set in a small mason jar of water as shown below. The heating element is a small ceramic space heater from Amazon. What size freezer is that?
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 00:50
|
|
|
This might be a bit 'Homebrew 101', but excluding Northern Brewer and their gimmicky poo poo they're selling all of a sudden, and Midwest's CS and stock monitoring being awful (I refuse to give them money any longer), should I add any other homebrew stores to my list below? Brewmaster's Warehouse William's Brewing Adventures In Homebrewing Austin Homebrew More Beer Label Peelers Bonus points for useful products that are unique (William's Brewing is good for that), shipping that isn't exorbitant, and CS that replies in a somewhat reasonable amount of time to any questions.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 00:52
|
|
|
BLARGHLE posted:What size freezer is that? It's 7.0 cf, GE brand from Home Depot.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 00:59
|
|
|
I use northern brewer but I'm buying grains and hops and stuff instead of kits. Its that 7.99 shipping that pulls me back as negligible differences in prices of grains per pound don't equal up to how much i save on shipping. Anyone know of better shipping deals than the 7.99 flat rate at NB.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 01:25
|
|
|
So I had what I thought was an original idea a few months ago, to make a batch of beer out of maple sap. I have some maple trees on my acre of land and was planning on trying to make some syrup... and in doing research for that I learned that sap ---> syrup is about a 50:1 concentration of water to sugar. That told me it might be interesting in beer since wort is pretty much all maltose sugar and that's what the yeast eats... so fuckit... might as well give the yeast some maple sucrose to eat, too. Then I can have a batch of beer, and be able to say, "Yeah, this beer came out of that tree over there, no big deal." Bought some spiles and flow tubes from amazon, waited until the weather was correct (above freezing during the day and below freezing at night), and tapped my trees.   (hosting mine) The bigger the tree, the more taps it can safely take. On a good day I am getting about 1.5-3 gallons a day, depending on how optimal the temps are. I went ahead and bought a beer kit... I was experimenting with sap, and in order to reduce variables I just bought an "American Light" kit from Brewer's Best. I had brewed this one a few years ago when I was first learning, I knew it tasted pretty much like an extra-good light beer, and I knew it wasn't extra hoppy or robust so if the sap was adding anything to the flavor I would be more likely to notice.  Brewed it up, it's in the bucket, and it started bubbling a few hours ago. That's my top-off water on the left, I boiled it to kill any wild yeast that may have been introduced during sap collection. Cooled it before it went into the wort, obviously. Gravity was a little above the optimal range for my batch... 1.044 instead of 1.037. We'll see how that works out. Should be fine. Important thing is that my batch is 100% maple sap, no water. I actually had a fear about 6 hours before it started to bubble... what if maple sap has some sort of enzyme to inhibit fungal growth, and thus my experiment was doomed from the start? But then it started bubbling and it should be fine. After I had already jumped into the deep end I decided to do a little research, and it turns out maple sap beer used to be done in Vermont back in the 50's, but by the 80's it was pretty much done. Some microbrew out there brought it back a couple years ago. Article from the 80's talking about it. If this turns out well I will make a maple sap batch every year at this time... I think it really is neat to get beer from a tree. I will return to this post after it is tasted for the after action report. Update 2.26.2014 - Moved the maple sap beer to secondary, tonight. Bubbled for 2 days but had slowed down to one bubble about every 45 seconds. Using Nottingham ale yeast at ale temps, so it was about time to do it. Will bottle in 2 weeks, or so. Update 4.28.2014 - Cracked the first one about 2 weeks ago.... it is very excellent and has been well received. I will be doing this with a batch or 2 every Spring, from now on. (Now... making maple syrup... the end product was good, but it took me 15 hours to boil down 12 gallons of sap. Waaaay too much work.) GORDON fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Apr 29, 2014 |
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 01:41
|
|
|
I'd tap that. No seriously, this sounds fun! Do you have to boil down the sugars or anything or are you just adding malt extract to the sap instead of water?
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 01:47
|
|
|
^ That is awesome, be sure to keep us updated. I have a slight predicament, maybe someone here has someone insight. I have two autosiphons, one for sour and one for clean beer. I'm just starting to experiment with 100% brett fermentations (have a patersbier going now and doing an IPA next so not sour brett beers) and I have no idea which siphon I should use.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 01:49
|
|
|
Marshmallow Blue posted:I use northern brewer but I'm buying grains and hops and stuff instead of kits. Its that 7.99 shipping that pulls me back as negligible differences in prices of grains per pound don't equal up to how much i save on shipping. Assuming you don't have a decent LHBS (best shipping is no shipping), MoreBeer ships free if you order more than $60 worth of poo poo. Which isn't hard to do if you buy ingredients for several batches at once or buy that random gadget you've been "needing"  Austin Homebrew has cheap shipping too.I actually thought NB shitcanned their flat-rate shipping and everyone got mad. Did they bring that back? Haven't used them in a while because my LHBS owns.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 01:49
|
|
|
There's RebelBrewer.com which is based here in the Nashville area. I've never ordered from them (my LHBS is great) but I met a dude who worked for them and he seemed cool. They don't normally do flat rate shipping but if you live in Tennessee/Alabama/Kentucky you'll probably get your order really quickly.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 01:50
|
|
|
Paladine_PSoT posted:I'd tap that. An old recipe I found talked about boiling it down 50% to concentrate the sugar, and some peeps recommend adding a bottle of loving maple syrup for flavor (sounds like cheating, to me... this experiment is about the process to see what the end result will be) but the kit I bought has both liquid and dry malt extract, so I figured my sugar concentration would be just fine with straight nectar from the maple dryad's teat.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 01:56
|
|
|
Dude has loving milk jugs sucking from the teets of trees to make brew. This thread is getting hardcore.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 02:39
|
|
|
wattershed posted:This might be a bit 'Homebrew 101', but excluding Northern Brewer and their gimmicky poo poo they're selling all of a sudden, and Midwest's CS and stock monitoring being awful (I refuse to give them money any longer), should I add any other homebrew stores to my list below? Would it be ok to do a  list too? As I feel there is there some site I'm missing and a handful of Brit brewers.  Here's the Brit ones I know and use/used: http://themaltmiller.co.uk/ http://www.brewuk.co.uk/store/ http://www.hopshopuk.com/ http://homebrewbuilder.co.uk/index.html http://hopandgrape.co.uk/public/catalog.asp?catid=GET20262137
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 02:43
|
|
|
wattershed posted:This might be a bit 'Homebrew 101', but excluding Northern Brewer and their gimmicky poo poo they're selling all of a sudden, and Midwest's CS and stock monitoring being awful (I refuse to give them money any longer), should I add any other homebrew stores to my list below? I find Homebrew Finds to be really good at finding useful stuff at really good prices. It's all short lived due to the nature of sales and such but there have certainly been some good finds there.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 02:49
|
|
|
Fluo posted:Would it be ok to do a gently caress yeah, it's OK. Thanks for that. I'd love to get a  list, too. Any Canucks want to take a stab?
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 03:08
|
|
|
Do you guys have any experience dry hopping in a keg? Room temperature? Hop bag?
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 03:26
|
|
|
Glottis posted:Do you guys have any experience dry hopping in a keg? Room temperature? Hop bag? If you're using pellets, DEFINITELY use a hop bag or your beer out post will clog every 0.002 seconds. I'd probably use one for whole hops too but I have no direct experience with how they behave in a keg.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 03:42
|
|
|
While not nearly as cool as tapping a tree,I did bottle my brett/lacto saison earlier today. 46 bottles!! I made it from the second and third runnings of my American Strong Ale. I finally bottled it after a 3.5 month primary. It tastes just slightly tart with a lot of funk from the brett. I'm hoping the lacto will sour it more in the bottles.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 04:09
|
|
|
Jo3sh posted:It's not really a Mild, nor an ESB, but my house beer is the Colt .177 v.2: Well, the loving it up turned out not to happen. I just kegged this, and it's loving delicious, even without any gas in it. It might be even better than the benchmark version. This is one of the times that I feel like homebrewers are the luckiest people alive.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 04:11
|
|
|
illcendiary posted:It's 7.0 cf, GE brand from Home Depot. I've been looking at those, especially since they're on clearance. It looks like it only holds one full size fermenter, and could maybe fit 2 kegs in there as well? Jo3sh posted:Well, the loving it up turned out not to happen. I just kegged this, and it's loving delicious, even without any gas in it. It might be even better than the benchmark version. That's good to hear, because my ashburne/burton mild is fermenting steadily.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 04:29
|
|
|
BLARGHLE posted:I've been looking at those, especially since they're on clearance. It looks like it only holds one full size fermenter, and could maybe fit 2 kegs in there as well? I think it holds something like three ball locks if you want to make a keezer out of it, with a 10 lb CO2 tank on the hump. Could be four, can't remember. There's a nice mega thread on HomebrewTalk that shows the capacities of a bunch of chest freezers (the guy sketched it up in CAD software).
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 05:38
|
|
|
BLARGHLE posted:That's good to hear, because my ashburne/burton mild is fermenting steadily. There's nothing wrong with the ingredients. If I did manage to gently caress it up, it would only be my own drat fault for not paying attention while the sparge was going on. Surely anyone with more skill than my own could make good beer from the recipe I posted; it's only my propensity for fuckups that would have ruined it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 05:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 23:31 |
|
|
internet celebrity posted:^ That is awesome, be sure to keep us updated.
|
|
#
?
Feb 25, 2014 06:05
|
|
