Recent content by mcbar

That's a fair point, although many of us find that wrapping a blanket or sleeping bag around the kettle during mashing is enough to limit heat loss to an insignificant amount. Having one less piece of equipment to wash is a definite advantage if you're lazy like myself :) If you already have...

+1 for BIAB. Cheapest and easiest way to start all grain brewing. Even with a smaller kettle, you can do a partial boil and top up in the fermenter with pre-boiled water.

Beer and time are like matter and anti-matter. When they collide they both cease to exist. :cross:

I asked this question recently and got some good advice. One suggestion was to mix your tap water with distilled or RO water from the store. The other is to add 1-3 percent acidulated malt to your grain bill depending on what you're brewing. Here's a really helpful thread...

Maybe whoever put the kit together was hoping to increase ester production? It might be the case that rehydrating dry yeast isn't as important as it's often been made out to be (see here), but it's so easy that I'll continue to do it.

I ended up finding one last bottle in my stash! Here's what the finished product looked like.

Following.

See if you can get your hands on some Wyeast 3864. You could try adding or substituting a bit of wheat DME. You might also play around with some orange peel or coriander. Good luck!

I did an American wheat with peach in it. I let the beer ferment for two weeks, then I heated 4 lbs of frozen peaches to 160F on my stovetop for about 20 minutes and added them in a mesh bag to the primary. I let that ride for another week or so then bottled. The initial sample had a definite...

Neat experiment. It would have been super interesting to either use the same speciality grain in all or the same hops in all. You would have a really good basis to compare the ingredient you are changing.

If you've already bottled the beer, it would be extremely difficult to get it back into the fermenter without major oxidation. Drink twice as much and make a stronger batch next time :mug:

Cool document! Does anyone use anything similar when sharing home brew with friends, who may or may not be craft beer drinkers? It would be awesome to get feedback from friends and family other than "This beer is good". I think my wife is getting tired of me asking her what my beer smells like...

OP is not describing oxidation. No mention of off flavours. Later in the thread, he says that the beer tastes OK. What is being described is beer that hasn't carbonated after 2.5 weeks in the bottle. 5 oz of priming sugar is definitely sufficient. Give it another few weeks and see if that...

An English style porter, stout or bitter might be your best bet.

Thank you for the additional suggestions! This is turning out to be a very productive thread for me :) I should have read more carefully and played around with the calculators before my previous post. With some tinkering I found that adding 2% acid malt (as suggested as a baseline in the post...