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I just use my dishwasher for sanitizing bottles. The only issue is that I have to wear work gloves while pulling them out after the dry cycle.

The real secret to getting a dubbel or tripel right is the attenuation. Such high gravity beers tend to stop fermenting above 1.020. A second yeast addition will get you below 10.015

I think you may be underpitching your yeast a bit. With starters, as with other things, its not how big it is, but how you use it. With yeast, its the cell count and not necessarily the starer size that's important. For a 10 gallon batch, you need at least a 1500 ml starter to get the...

I've just sent my brew off to my first competition. I'm glad to see that there's decent feedback. Without a local homebrew club, my feedback so far has been "Dude...this is good shiz!" from my bros.

Yes...you should refrigerate them. If you're going to this much effort to save your slurry, you should consider attempting to harvest yeast and save it in either plate or slant form. Less than $100 will get you all the kit you need to become a proper yeast rancher. To reenergieze your slurry...

Offer to let him borrow part of your rig for his brew days. Be honest about you wanting to brew alone, but then offer the temporary solution of letting him use your kit.

I want to throw a sales pitch for kegkits.com . I bought two of these growlers from them, and one showed up broken. Tom, the proprietor, got back to me very fast and had no issues sending me a replacement. The price was about the same as I've seen everywhere else ($30ish), and their customer...

For the money, I still use bleach as my sanitizer. You just can't use it in kegs (I have a bottle of StarSan just for kegs) and you have to make sure you're wearing clothes you don't care about. You will get bleach stained.

Never, ever, ever buy empty bottles. Instead, buy a case or two of a beer you like and then slowly empty them.

mulled wine is pretty tasty and a good thing to do to that cheapish case of Burgandy you got from Trader Joe's or BevMo for a christmas party. Chances are that you don't have a case of cheap beer anywhere near you and you would strongly resent someone mulling up your homebrew. Save your beer...

I've read a bit about homebrew's health benefits as compared to a larger brew: the lack of filtering increases the ammount of complex B-vitamins that you consume. However, now that my beer diet has turned to majority-homebrew, I am noticing that I fart alot more. Does anyone have anything beyond...

Anyone know where I can find some 330ml bottles? I'm talking the funky curvy kind that Duvel and a few other Belgian ales come in. The obvious answer would be to buy lots of Duvel and drink it...but I don't have that kind of time or money. Any help would be great...

I just brewed up a root beer batch and put it in a host of different bottles. I used 2L and 500 ml soda bottles, wide-mouth 500 ml Gatorade bottles, and 500 ml water bottles. The water bottles worked ok at keeping the carb, but their thinness caused the bottom of the bottle to push outwards so...

My dishwasher does a pretty good job of steaming the labels off of bottles. It also sanitizes on its dry cycle if the bottle is actually clean. The only bad part is I have to reach way back and pull out the mass of soggy labels from the drain filter.

I'm happy to help. I spent last summer in Afghanistan and I really missed having a nice beer to cap the night off... Here's some random stuff that the wife sent that made my life better -DVDs. While sitting alert, there wasn't much to do...DVDs from home were great -Jerky -It ships...

Realize that English Cider and Strongbow are two completely different animals. English Cider uses ale yeasts, is often not very carbonated, and is served at English room temp (60ish F) -very much like a proper Real Ale. Strongbow and its competitors are what the riff raff kids in England drink...

Yeah...my plan is to replace the evaporator with 50' of coiled brass tubing so that there isn't any solder below the water-line in the wort. Using it as a pre-chiller still commits me to using 5-10 gal of extra water and that's not the goal.

The recirculating ice-water method is certainly cheaper. However, it also uses 5-10 gal of water plus ice each batch. I live in the Mojave desert where it rains less than 4" a year...I'm trying to see how water-friendly my brewing operation can get. I get seriously guilty when I use massive...

Just a silly check...make sure you have a 115VAC pump. There are 230VAC March models out there.

I should have posted this earlier. I accomplished the experiment about two weeks ago. I boiled up 5 gal of water, transfered it to a bucket and set up the AC rig in my garage. In doing all of that, the water had cooled to 185F (most of the temp loss happened when I dumped the water from my...