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Couple things. Most (not all) banana peels have a generous amount of amylase enzyme, so you could experiment with using banana peels to convert the starch in your oats to sugar. You want the kind of bananas that get sweet when they ripen and not the type of bananas that stay starchy forever...

In a similar situation, myself. +2 on malting your own. Go to a feedstore or other agricultural type place and look for the best quality, unprocessed barley, wheat or oats you can find and malt those. I'm attaching a how-to for malting wheat and barley to get you started. Next...

I stopped worrying about "stuck-sparges". I grind my malt as fine as I can while maintaining some visible pieces of husks in the grist and run with it. And I'm finally hitting my efficiency goals. Woohoo! :ban: Besides, if I did actually get an honest-to-goodness stuck-sparge, I'd just sparge...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0eF6Nm6JEg

Holy crap, guys, I just thought of something! What if the president is a regular here on the HBT forum?!

Guthrie: "We are in the Whitehouse kitchen where, among other things, you brew beer." Obama: "We make beer. First president since George Washington to a ... to a ... make some brews in the Whitehouse."

To me it all boils down to this: Either you're the guy who says: "What my customers don't know won't hurt them." Or you're the guy who says: "I care about the things that are important to my customers enough to inform them about what I put in my beer so that they can make an informed...

My suggestion would be to contact Volkman Seed Company. They have a contact email address on their website. They should be able to tell you exactly what's going on with the grain you purchased. Because there is definitely a discrepancy there. Either it's "malting barley" or it's "not for...

Good stuff, Greg. Thanks for sharing.

+1 on the thermometer. Been there, done that. Now I check my temps with at least two thermometers every time. And if there's a discrepancy between two thermometers, I check with a third thermometer, figure out which one is off, chuck it and buy a new one to replace it. And the "iodine...

I cellar mine just long enough to get it carbonated. :ban:

I'm thinking: if you have a life-plan that includes you brewing for the rest of your life, that might be a good angle. But show them that you are going to do it, with or without them. Tell them about your own personal 5-year brewing plan, your own personal 10-year brewing plan, etc. You want...

I took to doing this, and I feel like I'm picking up about two liters per 19/20 liter batch. Thoughts on this Method of Bottle Conditioning/Hopping? Basically I've stopped "dry hopping" in favor of making a "sweet hop tea" and adding that at bottling time. Instead of losing a liter of beer...

Cool. Yeah, keeping the hops under the boiling point would probably be a good way to go. And then the sealed jar would probably help with the extraction process as the air above the liquid cools and creates a vacuum. REALLY cool. Thanks.

I'm thinking if a person was leaning more toward aroma, they could do a minimum boil of the hops, but with the lid on, so as to keep the aroma from evaporating. Maybe that way, more aroma could be extracted from the hops, compared to adding them to cold beer and simply allowing them to steep for...

I'm sure there are probably guys already doing this, but I searched through the forums and other sources, and I haven't found any mention of this particular method of bottle conditioning/hopping before, so I thought I would toss it out there. One of my biggest motivations with this is the...

The best advice I can give you is to rope-in a helper. You're going to learn a lot of things on your first run, some things about the process and some things about your system. Where the helper really comes in handy is when you're hot-and-heavy in the process, and, say, you start...

While you're in the Netherlands, try to learn everything you can about malting barley/wheat, growing your own hops, and culturing your own yeast. In many parts of the world, they have brew shops on every corner where people can stroll in and buy 15 different types of malt, hops and yeast. But...

Welcome boicutt. As far as bottling versus kegging your first batches, I would lean toward bottling. I'm sure for awhile your brews will improve with each batch. If you had a keg tied up with an earlier batch, and you make something you like better later, you'd probably be tempted to dump...

Wow, Mysobry, that's a brilliant bit of fabrication. :rockin: And I think that's a good idea that you are doing some manual malting. You will probably learn of few things doing things manually that will make your automated malter even better.