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For some reason which is beyond my understanding, SWMBO was never happy with my glasses, mugs and pints sitting around the house at random places. While her point "Why should one have more then one vessel for beer?" has a right to exist, it completely fails to recognize the variety of beer...

Sorry if it had to be posted elsewhere, but since the brew under question is all grain, I decided to to try it here. The story is simple - when I was shaking the cooled wort in a carboy to give it its five minutes of aeration, I accidentally pushed the rubber plug too far, and it fell right into...

Liquid yest gurus, please help! After about twenty successful (to my taste) brews with dry yeast, I decided to try the liquid form. It was an AG Double Chocolate Stout, The yeast is WL London Ale 013. It came to me by mail, the ice pack melted of course. I made a starter with DME, and although...

Sorry for the dumb thread title - I put these two things together because I tried them both for the first time yesterday :-) It was an all grain AHS Double Chocolate Stout. About 10 lbs of grain total. After playing with spacers, I got the mill perform as needed. I am not quite sure whether...

I was reading the other day a book about homebrewing, published in Russia in the late nineteenth century... Overall their approach was very close to what people are doing today. Obviously, they did not have any Rubbermaid coolers, so they had to use oak barrels to mash, and wrapped it in cloth...

While it is too early to compare taste, I see the difference between extract/mini-mash and AG right on the first day of fermentation. This is my first AG brew, and it has the best looking (out of 13 non-AG brews) kraeusen. Hard to explain, but it just looks much better - shiny and full of...

After 13 batches of extract and mini-mash brews, I finally made my AG conversion :-) Today I brewed a nut brown ale (the recipe comes from internet). The only issue I ran into was that it started raining about 10 minutes after I put the kettle on fire - so I killed the fire to bring the burner...

I will be brewing my first AG beer (nut brown) next weekend, and I need some advice with the volumes. I have a recipy which calls for 11.75 lbs of grain (total). Mash volume is 14.69 qt. I doubt that my 5 gal cooler is big enough for it. Upgrading to a 10 gal cooler is not an option for now. I...

Preparing for all-grain full boils, I realized that my two-stage chiller is not enough efficient. It was made of 3/8" copper tube (20' coil in a bucket with ice and water, and another 20' coil in wort) could bring the temperature down to 75F in 15 minutes, but it was only 2.5 gallons. Also, I...

After about 15 batches I started thinking about all grain. I had a 5 gallon cooler with a plastic spigot, which I used for mini-mashes (malt was in a bag and I never had more than 3 lbs of it). Now I wanted to add a ball valve and a copper manifold, but for some reason the hole was too big -...

On my first brew I tried to simply pour the extract from the plastic can into the boiling pot. I didn't like it though because it was too thick and took forever to come out of the can. So I started diluting my extract (3-4 lbs) with 1-1.5 gallons of water, and then adding it to the wort before...

OK, this NOT another "is my fermentation stuck" thread. I am just curious about how different these two brands of dry yeast are. Here is some info. For several times I have brewed a mini-mash kit of AHS Ordinary Bitter Ale (aka "lawnmower's ale"), and it turned out great. I played with...

Hi guys, I got a temporary job in Atlanta, GA, and will spend a year in this area. For the last ten years I have been living in Texas, and enjoyed a great selection and service at the Austin Homebrew Supply. I know that I can still use it through mail orders, but I would appreciate any advice...

Yes, I know, many folks would say that Roscoe's Ale is not a good beer. It is rarely rated higher than 2.5 out of 5. Still I find it interesting, and want to brew a clone. Has anybody any ideas on what goes in? I mostly brew mini mash, but would appreciate any recipe, including AG. Or maybe...

Hey gurus, I was going to bottle today, but decided to ask first, because the beer looks somehow strange. This is my 11th brew. It is a minimash AHS Ordinary Bitter ale, very fast, very light, a perfect lawn-mowing beer for a Texan summer :-) I have made it twice already. This batch sat for...

My wife took this picture when I was brewing an AHS Ordinary Bitter a few days ago. Looks like a good wallpaper for me!

Hi guys, I am making a minimash NXNW Black Ale from AHS. The recipe calls for 1 oz of Cascade (60 min), but I decided to go with Centennial. The reason is simple - they didn't have leaf Cascade, and I don't like pellets. Now, the question is: if alpha number of Centennial is twice as much (10...

I live in Central Texas, and cedar allergy (aka cedar fever) is a big thing here. Many people suffer from it in winter, and when you are done with the juniper, there is always something in blossom around that makes your life miserable. Sometime ago I have heard from somebody or read somewhere...

I've just measured the gravity, and it is way lower than expected (or better to say, lower than instructions suggest): instead of 1.012 I have 1.006. The OG was also lower than it had to be - 1.035. I don't care much about alcohol, but I did not want this porter to be so dry. Is there any way to...

I am trying to find a correlation between beer style (from the most pale to the most dark) and the activeness of fermentation. In other words, which beer ferments more actively? I know that it is always different, but still - based on experience, is it possible to say, for example, that some...