Recent content by jparrette

There are lots of ways to make all-grain wort. They all work great. Extract works great too. It's all in the ferment.

The dry yeast companies tell pro brewers who use their yeast to rehydrate. They tell homebrewers to pitch the yeast dry. They must think we're too challenged to properly rehydrate. You're going to lose around 50% of your viable cells if you pitch dry. There are 20 billion cells per gram of...

This is an old Brew Strong podcast about metals in your equipment. John Palmer is a metallurgist in real life. http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/post441/

Accounting for evaporation. I boil on my stove, which on its most powerful burner boils off 10 gravity points in 90 minutes for an average strength beer. That is to say that 1.055 pre-boil ends up at 1.065 after a 90 minute boil.

I boil EVERYTHING for 90 minutes. I use the time to clean up my mash equipment. To me the time savings isn't worth the chance of DMS.

I used 1" pink foam board and double-stick carpet tape. Works like a million bucks.

Instead of using a space heater, I use one of those dip-sized mini crock pots. They're dirt-cheap, and warm the inside of the fridge enough so the temp contoller can do its job. I've left them on for weeks at a time with no problems at all.

I too emailed Northern Brewer about this, and I got the same word-for-word canned response from Craig B. If the answer to "are you now owned by AB-InBev?" Is "no", then they would be saying "no". I take their answer as a "yes". On a separate, and probably related note, Northen Brewer...

Two of my favorites are Mitch Steele's IPA book and Stan Hieronymous's Brew Like a Monk.

Ditto to what baulz said. I do my best, most error-free brewing when I start early in the morning. And NO drinking until the fermenter is in the fridge!

Very nice!! Star-San and PBW are not interchangeable. PBW is a cleaner (Powdered Brewery Wash). Star-San is a sanitizer. It won't clean anything, but it will kill bacteria. Both are great. PBW first to clean. Then rinse. Then Star-San to sanitize. Dig back in The Brewing Network...

+1 to no secondary. The less you move your beer the better. Instead of duct tape, I insert the stopper and immediately wrap it to the carboy with 6-8 inches of Saran Wrap. It's not oxygen permeable, and keeps dust and crap (=bacteria) from settling on the carboy lip. It also won't leave...

It seems to me that with a pound of lactose in the recipe, it wouldn't get down to 1.013. I'd raise the temp to 70f or so, and give it another week. In the end, if it tastes good, don't sweat the numbers.

You're fine. You're going to want the airlock assembled as fermentation slows. When I use airlocks, I give the base of the plug a quirt of Star-San and then wrap the plug and the carboy opening in Saran Wrap. That keeps the risk of infection down when you take off the airlock.

Making your own sounds very unrepeatable and time consuming. I use the Belgian candi syrup, which comes in different lovibonds, is totally repeatable and relatively cheap, and quick.