You'll be fine. Just remember to make sure you've hit your FG before bottling. 1.045 after a month should be plenty of time, but it's good to get in the habit of checking.
If you were taking a sample, I'm assuming your beer has been fermenting a bit? If so, I think you're ok on this since you said the plug was sanitized. Others might provide a better opinion but my thoughts are that you have a potential to do more harm transferring it than leaving it. I could be...
Holy crap...what's up with slamming this guy? He's new, running into issues and posted a legit question. Great job making him think this forum is full of a-holes.
OP - ignore the terse remarks. 99.9% of the people on here are very helpful and understanding. Keep the questions coming and...
I've got those same Hogue grips on mine - they're fantastic. Great for managing recoil! I also dropped in a Videcki trigger, so the pull is smooth as butter.
When it gets bad like that, I run a blowoff tube. Actually, now I just run one everytime cause I figure, why not? Unfortunately, I can't remember what size tubing I used to fit in my carboy bung but I know I just dug through tubing I had laying around and found one that works. Then just run the...
Ha! I just got that email too! Called my buddy at work over so I could share the ridiculousness of it. "Give as a gift" - Like you'd ever see those bottles again!
I've never done it, but it would seem to me that it's just like racking to secondary but a bit early in the process. Just make sure everything's sanitary and see what happens. Or look at a blow off tube - but that may not work if you have no headroom in the carboy.
Take a look at BM's Centennial Blonde - do a search in here and you'll see it pop up all over. It's cheap, good and provides a pretty good base to experiment with down the road.
I agree with BM's Centennial Blonde. It's cheap (I just did a 10 gallon batch for maybe $30 - 5's are around $22 for me) and it's very straightforward. And it's quite tasty. It's also a quick flip - when I've mismanaged my pipeline, I can have this from brew to keg in just over a week (sure it's...
Also Blichmann. I had the basic turkey frier and it was fine getting a boil with the pot it came with, but I upgraded to a 15 gallon pot (how do you control boil overs? get a bigger pot! Ha!) and even doing 6 gallon boils, the performance was abysmal. I did a brew in February and with a slight...