Recent content by tloveland

Here's my enclosure. I used a cheap PVC housing from Menards.

I batch sparge, so the cheap stainless branded hose works great for me.

Here's what the beer has looked like since kegging. This was a picture during the first week, so it's cleared up a little bit more, but not much.

I brewed this about a month ago and have been enjoying it thoroughly. I did alter the hop additions, bringing the 30 minute addition up to 10 minutes and the 10 minute addition up to 5 minutes. I think this helped boost the flavor and aroma of the Galaxy hops. I ended up running out of room...

It turned out pretty damn good. The beer is a hazy blonde/orange, and the thimbleberry jam didn't seem to really have much of an effect on the color. You get a nice, tart taste right at the front from the thimbleberries and then you taste the typical hefe banana and clove flavors. You can...

Update: It's been 4 days since adding the jam and all is going according to plan. By day two the beer was slowly churning with activity and the airlock was bubbling about every 5 seconds. Seems like it just needed some time to get the yeast back in action. Here's what it looks like now...

Sorry about the picture quality, but the layer on top is just seeds and some fruit matter that floated up. No apparent krausen.

Hey everyone, I brewed a Hefe three weeks ago (the sample I took last night tasted awesome), and I decided that I'd do an experiment and add two 9oz jars of thimbleberry preserves to see if I could infuse any of the fruit flavor into the beer. I racked the Hefe to secondary, and then...

I brewed this today and ended up with about 6 gallons at 1.086. Attached picture is about 10 minutes after draining the brew kettle into the carboy. Stuff was still settling out. I pitched two smack packs of Wyeast 1056, and I have the carboy in my fermentation chamber set at 67°. Using a...

Hey Gavin, Thanks for the quick reply! Being my first lager, my primary goal was to get my feet wet with the lager fermentation process using a dual-stage temp controller and produce a decent tasting beer. I have no intentions of entering it into any competitions or sharing it with anyone...

I brewed this 16 days ago, and now that it's been sitting around 32° for two days I'm ready to keg tonight. This is my first lager, so I'm curious about the wait time before consumption. With ales I've brewed, I usually like to drink them quite young. I'll usually keg after 3 or 4 weeks and...

I believe there is a sufficient blanket and continuous production of CO2 at this point that taking one reading via wine thief from my narrow-necked glass carboy is not going to oxidize my beer. Risk of infection is a non-issue as I am overly thorough with sanitation and have never had an...

I brewed this on Sunday and ended up with 1.080. Smells and looks great! I've never used S-33 before, MAN does it ferment quickly and vigorously. Within 2 hours of pitching the two packets I saw slow bubbles from the blowoff tube. The next morning, the blowoff container looked like a...

Just transferred to secondary (with vanilla/vodka extract) and WOW. I think I like the uncarbed sample more than any mainstream pumpkin ale I've tried. Spices are perfect, 1/2 tsp of each is perfect for a 5 gallon batch. I also only added probably under 1.5 oz of vodka with 1 vanilla bean that...

Brewed this over the weekend (5 gallon batch, so 1/2 ingredients). I used 2 cans of organic pumpkin in the mash and it seemed to add a decent amount of pumpkin flavor to the wort. I ended up with a high pre-boil volume so I extended the boil to 90 minutes and ended up with a SG of...