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This is an excellent thread as my RO system should arrive in a couple of days. I used to brew on relatively soft city tap water and just had to worry about removing the chlorine. I moved and now have a well with extremely low pH water (hence the lime, softener, filters, etc.) and I can say that...

I haven't been able to find any Simcoe. Needed 4 oz this weekend but looks like I'll have to live with the 1 oz I had in my freezer. My two local shops both said it was out until harvest. Looks like a yummy recipe, especially with all those hops. They all go well together and I'm salivating...

Did you stir really well before taking your pre-boil gravity? I've been fooled before by sampling off the top with my refractometer and getting insanely low readings. I ended up making a few of my first AG batches "imperial" by trying to compensate with DME when my real problem was wort...

Total Dom. clone, a CDA and an American Wheat, 10gal each 25,333.5 + 30 = 25,363.5

Could you be getting air in the line? One of my buddies had that problem. He couldn't see any air bubbles, but ended up clamping the hoses at the pump since he kept having to re-prime. No more re-priming but I think he's moving to quick connect. I have had a lot of grain go through my pump due...

I have a UV light. Works OK though it's probably time to test again since it went out and my lines are probably all contaminated again. Spendy bulbs but I never priced out a chlorine system + carbon filters. Also have a calcite tank and water softener and am always futzing with the salt usage to...

I didn't see any discussion of the carbon fixing provided by hop & barley growing. Then again, I couldn't finish reading it. Not quite my cup of tea. Hmmm. I wonder how much it costs to bring in teas from overseas.

Thanks for all the feedback. If you catch any errors or have any suggestions for improvement, please let me know (via my webpage or a PM here). As I plan to use it myself (this weekend, in fact), I'll keep it updated.

Did you have the grain in the tun when you added the strike water? I used to do this but had a really bad dough ball problem. My efficiency shot way up (~50% to 75-85%) when I started adding the grain to the water. Besides, my son likes stirring that way a lot more.

I use a picnic cooler MLT and never could keep my target temperature until I started filling it with a couple of gallons of hot tap water (near 150 deg. F) for 1/2 hour. I had just been throwing in a gallon of boiling water about 5 min before throwing in the grain, but that wasn't long enough to...

A little while back, I made a cheesy home brew calculator for my iPhone. I released it to Apple and now it's on the App Store for download (free!). Just search for HBCalc. If you download it, let me know if you have any problems, questions about calculations, suggestions for improvement, etc...

Just re-submitted the app to Apple. They didn't like the fact that I was calling it a beta. I'll post on a new thread when I get approved. Maybe it's just the vanilla porter, but I feel pretty good about this one.

I just found this thread. I submitted my Homebrew calculator to the iTunes store for approval yesterday. I used it for only one brew so far, and it's pretty much a kludge, but it's free. I'll post again when it's available on the app store. That reminds me - I have to post some more info about...

What was the recipe/mash schedule?

I often enjoy picking out a random hop (well, not so random, actually) out of the freezer to add at flameout. These days, though, I'm not "spending" my hops as freely until the new crops get well established & yield.

First off, I usually use 1/2 qt/lB for water retention, but some of that also accounts for dead space in my MLT. Second, I'd think that there would still be enzymes available in the grain and the liquid in the grain for conversion, though you might want to rest a little longer than an hour if...

I had my porter (5 gal) sitting on top of 2.5 of split vanilla beans for 2 weeks in the secondary. It was overpowering at first but has mellowed quite nicely and is very enjoyable to drink. I didn't soak the vanilla beans in vodka, though, and also kegged/force-carbonated the porter. The vanilla...

30 gal beer 5 gal wine Looks like I need to work harder this year. 10 gal in process right now.

Twitter / hazzmatazz

I had Panther and now have Leopard and X11 was different between the two. Have you tried starting X11 ahead of time (Applications/Utilities/X11)? I'll have to check out Seashore. Looks like it might fit my needs on the Mac a bit better than gimp.