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DISCO KING
Oct 30, 2012

STILL
TRYING
TOO
HARD
My incredibly hot take on seasonal specialty beers is to buy a Lindeman's instead, every time.

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Toebone
Jul 1, 2002

Start remembering what you hear.
I'm trying about brewing the Black Pirate stout from radical brewing (it's got molasses, coriander, allspice, black pepper and orange zest). Has anyone tried it? It sounds good but I don't want something that's going to need a year on it to not taste like a scented candle.

Marshmallow Blue
Apr 25, 2010

Toebone posted:

I'm trying about brewing the Black Pirate stout from radical brewing (it's got molasses, coriander, allspice, black pepper and orange zest). Has anyone tried it? It sounds good but I don't want something that's going to need a year on it to not taste like a scented candle.

I have had horrifying experiences with pepper. Other than that it sounds good. Like any big stout though, you'll like it at 6 months more than you did at 2 months. If you want ti ready for the holidays, maybe cut the ABV down some (not sure what the original ABV is, just guessing it's on the higher side)?

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013
That's a 1.070 OG. So it's not particularly big. I haven't made it myself, but it only uses 1/2 tsp of black pepper in 5 gallons. I'd probably just use 2g of cracked peppercorns (crack it and not grind it) and not a literal 1/2 tsp of black pepper. You'll probably end up tasting more of that 1 tsp of Allspice. That and the 1.5# of black patent malt.

Nothing about the spices really suggest that you'll need to age it for a long time unless you like to leave your wort in your boil kettle for a long time after knockout. Use whole spices that can be filtered or put in a teabag and you'll have even less of an issue. You can always add more in a tincture at packaging.

Sinbad's Sex Tape
Mar 21, 2004
Stuck in a giant clam
This is killing me, but I'm looking to find the recipe for a holiday braggot I brewed about 10 years ago. Just off the top of my head it was just a simple extract brew with LME, 2-3lbs honey, and anywhere from 1-5lbs cranberries.

https://www.brewtoad.com/recipes/holiday-ale-22
That's the closest thing I could find to it on brewtoad, but I swear there used to be a similar recipe site where I found this and I only found it because it was top rated.

Marshmallow Blue
Apr 25, 2010
I added 2 tsp of uncracked black peppercorns ot a mead once, it was vomit inducing. Maybe I'm juts sensitive to pepper in beverages.

eviltastic
Feb 8, 2004

Fan of Britches
If adding black pepper after the boil, like in secondary or something, be aware that the flavor extracts really, really fast compared to a lot of other spices. It'll be easier to vary the amount by doing multiple infusions than it will to put a whole amount in and taste test over time. Unless you're doing multiple tastings over the course of the first day or something.

eviltastic fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Oct 23, 2018

Glottis
May 29, 2002

No. It's necessary.
Yam Slacker
I'm happy to report that dry hopping in a keg with a Clear Beer Draft System + screen and whole hops works awesome as long as you chop up the hops a bit. My super Azacca ale is tasting awesome.

DISCO KING
Oct 30, 2012

STILL
TRYING
TOO
HARD
Red or pink peppercorns can be very floral right off the tree. I made a very plain and dry clover honey mead with pink peppercorns from my neighborhood (1/4 cup for 1 gallon). It did not taste like pepper. I'd like to try black peppercorns but I don't know where I'd pick them.

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013

Marshmallow Blue posted:

I added 2 tsp of uncracked black peppercorns ot a mead once, it was vomit inducing. Maybe I'm juts sensitive to pepper in beverages.

How big was the batch? That sounds like a ton of pepper and I like pepper.

LochNessMonster
Feb 3, 2005

I need about three fitty


Jhet posted:

Congrats! Hopefully it turns out well enough for your drinking pleasure.

You can get fancy temp probes and automatic switches, but really they're just doing the same thing you're doing with a thermometer. I've been running on my system now for 3 years and I still just use an electric handheld thermometer to measure temps. At this point I almost don't have to check often and just know by feeling how much time has passed, but I still measure it.

I have a false bottom and a valve at the bottom of both of my kettles. While I have two kettles, you could make a mashtun out of a water cooler and add a false bottom to it. There are a lot of guides on the internet, and some shops sell their own kits for doing it. Then you can heat the sparge water in your kettle while the mash is happening. I have a cooler for my hot sparge water, so it's easiest if you have some way to have 3 vessels in use at a time. You could easily make two of them coolers (one for the mash, one for the sparge water). Then you can lauter straight into your kettle. I start the heat after I have a gallon in the kettle so that it cuts down the wait time. I'm usually at about 190F and nearing a boil by the time I'm done lautering.

Having those extra vessels isn't entirely necessary, but it does make it less of a dance and would get you back to temp and closer to boiling sooner. What I'd recommend avoiding it spending a lot of extra money on things while you're starting and figuring out where you can increase your own quality of life for your brew day. You can certainly use other vessels, like small wooden barrels or heat tolerant buckets. But figure out which solution works best for you and then work from there.

After some googling I (finally) understand what you mean. A mash tun looks like something that’ll definately take away few of the issues I had and might be a nice DIY project.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me.

robotsinmyhead
Nov 29, 2005

Dude, they oughta call you Piledriver!

Clever Betty

LochNessMonster posted:

After some googling I (finally) understand what you mean. A mash tun looks like something that’ll definately take away few of the issues I had and might be a nice DIY project.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me.

It's worth looking into Brew in a Bag as well. That's what I use on a 5gallon scale and it's nice.

Skellyscribe
Jan 14, 2008
See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

LochNessMonster posted:

After some googling I (finally) understand what you mean. A mash tun looks like something that’ll definately take away few of the issues I had and might be a nice DIY project.

Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me.

I made mine with braided steel hose jacket instead of a false bottom and it's worked without problems for two years now. Huge brewing level up for me.

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013

robotsinmyhead posted:

It's worth looking into Brew in a Bag as well. That's what I use on a 5gallon scale and it's nice.

Dang, I entirely forgot about that. That would mean you'd only need the one vessel mostly too. Definitely look into Brew in a Bag options too LochNessMonster.

Marshmallow Blue
Apr 25, 2010

Jhet posted:

How big was the batch? That sounds like a ton of pepper and I like pepper.

2.5 gallons, It was uncracked peppercorns so not nearly as much surface area as cracked or god forbid ground pepper. Either way, it was one of my only dumpers.

robotsinmyhead
Nov 29, 2005

Dude, they oughta call you Piledriver!

Clever Betty
Brew is a Bag is pretty nice, but like anything there's a tradeoff.

I still use a cooler (tall orange igloo), but it's unmodified. Efficiency is really good and you can mill down really well and don't have to worry about stuck mashes (I clogged mine once using corn masa/flour).

One of the trickiest bits is lautering. You need to hold or hoist the bag over the collection vessel, which can present some problems, but it's not that bad. Cleanup is extremely easy.

Eeyo
Aug 29, 2004

Skellyscribe posted:

I made mine with braided steel hose jacket instead of a false bottom and it's worked without problems for two years now. Huge brewing level up for me.

How do you clean the braided hose jacket? I saw that braided hose was common but it looked like a nightmare.

Skellyscribe
Jan 14, 2008
See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

Eeyo posted:

How do you clean the braided hose jacket? I saw that braided hose was common but it looked like a nightmare.

After dumping the spent grain I spray it out with water then dry. Every 3rd or 4th brew I PBW soak the whole mash tun. Haven't had any problems with grain husks sticking to the hose if that's what you're thinking. Any moisture left in a closed mash tun between brews will cause problems though.

rockcity
Jan 16, 2004

Skellyscribe posted:

After dumping the spent grain I spray it out with water then dry. Every 3rd or 4th brew I PBW soak the whole mash tun. Haven't had any problems with grain husks sticking to the hose if that's what you're thinking. Any moisture left in a closed mash tun between brews will cause problems though.

Yeah, I always give all my brew gear a couple of days to dry out before I put anything away for storage.

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot
Hmm, my latest mixed fermentation sour saison had a hint of roughness in the acid profile, similar to BFM v225. I hope I just gave the bretts a bit too much oxygen exposure and I don't have a acetobacter problem. It's drinkable for sure, but I don't want to have to throw out my culture.

thotsky fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Oct 24, 2018

Kaysette
Jan 5, 2009

~*Boston makes me*~
~*feel good*~

:wrongcity:

Eeyo posted:

How do you clean the braided hose jacket? I saw that braided hose was common but it looked like a nightmare.

I just use a bazooka screen instead of the braided hose and it's been fine. I think the bigger gaps mean I need to vorlauf a bit longer than other people but it's super easy to clean. I used to worry about it not extending the length of the cooler but people online seem to not find that an issue.

Glottis
May 29, 2002

No. It's necessary.
Yam Slacker
I don't think I really understand the point of vorlaufing. I stopped doing it a while back and haven't noticed a difference in my finished result, but I use whirlfloc and on rare occasion gelatin when I want something crystal clear.

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013

Glottis posted:

I don't think I really understand the point of vorlaufing. I stopped doing it a while back and haven't noticed a difference in my finished result, but I use whirlfloc and on rare occasion gelatin when I want something crystal clear.

It sets the grain bed so that you can lauter consistently through the entirety of it. If you do it right, it's where you keep channels from forming and running through the bed too quickly to keep your efficiency in a good place. If you're not having any issues, then there's no reason to change what you're doing. Once I got this step down better, my efficiency went up about 10% and I'm frequently pushing 80% on my mash efficiency now. The only time it's lower is if I'm doing a particularly high gravity brew.

I've not had issues from tannins from getting grains through to the boil and I'm not quite certain that it really impacts beer clarity any as most everything that you'd get will settle out. I could see those as possible issues for larger scale production, but probably won't impact on the small scale we do.

Toebone
Jul 1, 2002

Start remembering what you hear.
There's a Brulosophy experiment that compared a properly vorlaufed batch to one with a big scoop of spent grain dumped into the boil kettle. He said that at first the spent-grain batch had a strange twang to it, but the differences faded in a few weeks and the survey was unable to detect a significant difference. I still vorlauf anyway, but I wouldn't worry about a bit of grain particles ruining the batch

rockcity
Jan 16, 2004
Yeah, I'm not crazy about some grain making it over either. If they start to float up as the wort comes to a boil, I'll usually just take a strainer and give it a quick pass or two and snag some of it, but I'm not stressing about it. I switched over to a Grainfather a couple of batches ago and that has a finer mesh than my false bottom so a lot less seems to make it though.

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot
There's a brulosophy experiment where they tried mashing gravel instead of grains; unfortunately it failed to meet statistical significance, but it does open the door for some very interesting future experiments with alternative fermentables.

I want an experiment designed to see if Brulosophy has had a negative or positive effect on the hobby as a whole.

robotsinmyhead
Nov 29, 2005

Dude, they oughta call you Piledriver!

Clever Betty
I like Brulosophy to an extent. My one takeaway from them as a whole is that the "traditional" ways that people have been homebrewing for the past 20years or so needed to be examined, and I'm glad they've knocked out of a lot of myths that I know I've personally been told were truths.

Especially for hop schedules, I have completely eliminated any hop additions mid-boil. Everything I add now is 60min bittering additions and flameout-or-later.

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot
I think their heart is in the right place, but there is nothing about their experiments that lead me to conclude that they have debunked much of anything. That's not to say that I believe in the absolute validity of the popular practices the community has adopted over the years, I am just skeptical of Brulosophy. Their sample sizes are way too low, and they frequently read things out of their results that they have no basis for.

Homebrewers are geeks, and everyone loves feeling like they have "science" on their side, but this is an amateur operation being seen as an authority in a world where even proper studies done by big actors frequently turn out to be flawed or biased.

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013

Biomute posted:

Their sample sizes are way too low, and they frequently read things out of their results that they have no basis for.

This is the biggest problem with it. There's no power to the statistics, and there's no way to replicate the experiments in any fashion because you can't control all the variables being used. That and for subjective subjects there's a whole different level of examination for which a simple triangle test* cannot begin to account. It's unfortunately armchair statistics, which is a bummer. There's a lot of reliance on brulosophy and their experiments in the homebrew world from various conversations I've had with people from around mostly North America, and for me it's about as trustworthy as worrying about what Denny Conn has to say about things on experimentalbrew.com (which is also not a great idea).

The truth about it is that homebrewers can tinker with beer, but we don't have the resources or scale to properly study the chemical and biological mechanics of what happens in our beer. That doesn't mean we should stop screwing around, but we need to stop talking like we've got some big scientific secret that no one in hundreds of years of brewing hasn't stumbled across before.

Basically, just do what works for you. Because it's just as likely to not work for me, because many reasons. A big reason we have this "you must brew in this way" thing is that it's what worked for the brewers who first really became influentially commercial. Which is great, but that doesn't make their beer any better or worse than anything you brew (or maybe it does). It's just different and taste is subjective.


*Subjective tests over do use a triangulation methodology, but that's just using three different methods of research and then comparing results of your survey, interview, observation, etc. Just tasting three beers doesn't do much of anything except hopefully get you one step closer to a good night.

robotsinmyhead
Nov 29, 2005

Dude, they oughta call you Piledriver!

Clever Betty
I never read Brulosophy as some sort of statistics database for homebrewing. I get that their findings aren't going to hold up to any sort of real scientific scrutiny, but lacking any other sources on the matter, it's better than nothing?

rockcity
Jan 16, 2004
If you listen to their podcast rather than reading the results they are almost always super reserved about concluding pretty much drat near anything. They're very aware how limited of a scope this tests are and most of the time they admit that the results aren't going to change how they are already doing whatever it was they set out to test. The problem is that a lot of homebrewers will immediately take whatever the results were and trust it to be solid fact rather than a tiny bit of information.

I haven't really changed much of anything as a result of any podcast of theirs I have listened to but some of them were super interesting to me. I was really intrigued by the one they did on dark grains specifically.

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot
My argument is that claiming it is better than nothing is giving it way too much credit. Hell, it could even be worse than nothing if it leads to people treating it as gospel. It is, more or less as good as any old stuff home brewer's come up with. Which is fine; if you think it is an interesting read then that is plenty of value right there.

thotsky fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Oct 26, 2018

ChiTownEddie
Mar 26, 2010

Awesome beer, no pants.
Join the Legion.
I am of the opinion that, like most things, the reality is in the middle. Taking it for gospel is just as bad as actively campaigning against it. That said, I think the only thing I've actively changed based on anything they've written/podcasted about is how I use my dark grains in stouts. I started cold steeping the dark grains and can taste a massive difference (for the better imo) in my stouts and really that's all I care about.
E: Slight addendum, I get the point that by providing this STATISTICAL METHOD LOLOL that people may buy in too hard. Those people probably would fall for a different blog with some other dumb premise tho, heh.

Tibalt
May 14, 2017

What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee

So I think the wild yeast in the cider has stalled - I let it sit for a few days unmolested, and checked on it this morning. It looks like a small krausen developed because it left a little bit of scum, but the krausen itself is gone. I gave it a gently swirl in an attempt to spark something, but i'm debating what to do next if it doesn't start back up.

Currently, i'm leaving towards letting it sit for the rest of the week, then test with the hydrometer to really see what's happening.

Marshmallow Blue
Apr 25, 2010
Wild cider looks like it might be growing some brett. Looks like this batch is in it for the long haul.

Marshmallow Blue
Apr 25, 2010

Tibalt posted:

So I think the wild yeast in the cider has stalled - I let it sit for a few days unmolested, and checked on it this morning. It looks like a small krausen developed because it left a little bit of scum, but the krausen itself is gone. I gave it a gently swirl in an attempt to spark something, but i'm debating what to do next if it doesn't start back up.

Currently, i'm leaving towards letting it sit for the rest of the week, then test with the hydrometer to really see what's happening.

What temp is it at? It could just end up being the yeast that was in there wasn't super great for fermenting and died when the ABV got to like 2-3%. Gravity check is the way to go.

Jhet
Jun 3, 2013

ChiTownEddie posted:

E: Slight addendum, I get the point that by providing this STATISTICAL METHOD LOLOL that people may buy in too hard. Those people probably would fall for a different blog with some other dumb premise tho, heh.

That's the problem with it. People see the numbers and forget that part of the scientific method is repeatability and proper methodology. The samples are constantly too small to have any significance anyway, so why put numbers on something at all? If you were to repeat the test with a large number of participants it might start to hold water, but even then you're dealing with subjective results and the findings are going to need to be taken as nothing more than introductory.

However, there are people out there conducting proper analysis of the chemical behaviors that the ingredients in our favorite field of hobby. It's just most people don't find it entertaining to sit down and read 20+ page scientific papers about the chemical reactions between (for example, this is entirely made up) cohumulone and Brettanomyces claussenii at 62F and 68F or the phenolic pathways that are available when you do something else. Because it's heavy reading and it won't impact our processes in any realistic ways until the science disseminates into a useful method.

That next big jump in brewing science may be out there, but the chances are good that it won't be done by someone in their garage brewing two batches and covering one with a lid to check for DMS. The results are anecdotal, but by 'testing' them, it gives them psychological weight that they're something better than that. So you're right, people will fall for it. Spend half an hour on the homebrewtalk forums and you'll see exactly that happening. (Unless it's about whether or not you MUST secondary ferment your beer or it will turn out with tons of autolysis.)

Tibalt
May 14, 2017

What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee

Marshmallow Blue posted:

What temp is it at? It could just end up being the yeast that was in there wasn't super great for fermenting and died when the ABV got to like 2-3%. Gravity check is the way to go.
I have it in the basement and we've had a cold snap, so it's been yoyoing between 55-65°F down there.

I suppose the question is, do I keep on with my happy little accident, or do I pitch some more yeast?

Marshmallow Blue
Apr 25, 2010
Bring it up to room temp to see if it kicks back up. Then, if still nothing pitch more yeast.

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thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Jhet posted:

However, there are people out there conducting proper analysis of the chemical behaviors that the ingredients in our favorite field of hobby. It's just most people don't find it entertaining to sit down and read 20+ page scientific papers about the chemical reactions between (for example, this is entirely made up) cohumulone and Brettanomyces claussenii at 62F and 68F or the phenolic pathways that are available when you do something else. Because it's heavy reading and it won't impact our processes in any realistic ways until the science disseminates into a useful method.

That next big jump in brewing science may be out there, but the chances are good that it won't be done by someone in their garage brewing two batches and covering one with a lid to check for DMS. The results are anecdotal, but by 'testing' them, it gives them psychological weight that they're something better than that. So you're right, people will fall for it. Spend half an hour on the homebrewtalk forums and you'll see exactly that happening. (Unless it's about whether or not you MUST secondary ferment your beer or it will turn out with tons of autolysis.)

yep yep yep

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