Recent content by JimmyC-BYOB

Those cheap meters are worthless. Incidentally, it has nothing to do with the pH glass but the electronics. A pH meter is only as good as the electronics and the temperature compensation algorithm. Go to eBay and buy a good brand name lab meter (Mettler-Toledo, Orion, Hach just to name a few)...

@augiedoggy - Please don't use RO water for storage. RO water does not have enough ionic strength and can poison the reference of your sensor causing an offset. You can calibrate the offset out but the more you do it the more you take away from the accuracy. Ideally, you want to use KCL...

Sweet! nicely done!

Hmmm. You know, I may have to with Aristotelian on that. That usually happens across the entire open surface but if you have isolated colonies that is what a "start" would look like. If it takes over the entire top then you know what you got there. Time will tell. ;)

It takes up to 2 years for the final flavor profile. Did you see Zootopia? Brett is kinda like the sloth at the registry. Painfully slow. You can do what beergolf mentioned. bottle it up after 3 months and enjoy the change in flavor as it ages. Brett is a pretty fascinating strain. It just...

Thanks for all the replies. I thought there might be some interest but wasn't sure. I will try and do the write up this weekend but to put it in a nutshell... All items were bought on Amazon. All coming from one source? Honestly, No. But one-time order and done. Yes. All the items reached me...

ACbrewer is right on. It's all about insulation. You just have to slow the loss of heat. You can make that as complicated or as simple as you want. I used to wrap by buckets with a couple layers of metal backed bubble wrap I found at home depot and that worked great.

Brett is a pretty hardy strain. You should be fine. Key here is the same as any other fermentation and that is consistency in temps. If you're going to drift more than 5C I would find a better option. I wouldn't. While it will give the Brett a boost you are also opening up the door to for...

Just a quick correction. I meant to say Fungus will have a spongy texture, not mold. Bacteria and yeast bud when they multiply. So while you can have a very complex matrix they maintain their single cell appearance. Mold actually falls into that category too. Fungus on the other hand, grow from...

Thanks for the welcome everybody!

If you're referring to European laws it really isn't regulated. Per ACBrewers comment, only the Germans created a law (Reinheitsgebot) on what is considered beer and that was mostly because beer was competing with bread for yeast and grain and religious orders were concerned herbs used in beer...

That's pretty high temp for saccharomyces cerevisiae. The mortality rate changes drastically over minutes let alone hours. This all depends on the what the gravity of your beer was when it happened. If it was high the shock would have been minimal as yeast has a safety mechanism and take up...

I may actually be a fungus. Mold will spread out and not build upon its self. Fungus, on the other hand, does and can do it quite rapidly. Honestly, yeast can do the same same thing though it tends to spread out a bit and then build on itself. The only true way to tell is to get it under a...

@andrewmaixner: yes it's similar. I had looked at that and it ticked all the boxes. But even the 15A version was pricey. Especially for what it is. Don't get me wrong, that's a business and you need to make money but after a little research I could tell that their margin is at least 100%. (can...

Hello all you fellow homebrewers, I recently decided to go all-grain. The problem I have is time and space (me and most others) and I wanted to buy a pre-made system that fit within my budget. I was also looking into a better way to ferment that was also stainless. Main reason was it's easy...