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I brewed a medium strength blonde ale a few weeks ago. It was literally all exctract: 3lbs of hopped DME, 2lbs extra light DME, 2lbs of fresh Breiss Pilsen LME, 2 oz of hops, and I pitched dry yeast (US-05). I let it sit in the bucket for 9 days, and went straight to bottles. After a week...

So I made a big barleywine 6 months ago. I pitched a champagne yeast during secondary, and I added a lot of dextrose (a pound at a time) and fermentation continued for a long time (weeks). So I stopped adding anything, and let it sit. I went to bottle it a week and a half ago, and to my...

Interesting. I was always looking for pyrex ernies...didn't know you could buy off-brand borosilicate for that cheap. Good to know! Also really good to know! I've never aged a brew in a plastic bottle. I'll stick with glass, I think! Thanks!

And just where the heck do you get a 2L ernie flask for 30 bucks?? RIP, ernie. Has anyone ever used plastic amber screw-top bottles? Most of the ones you can buy come in 500ml. Like I said before, I always use a clean 16-oz Propel Zero bottle for use as a carbonation tester, and it never...

I'm experimenting with a barleywine recipe. It started at a very high gravity wort (1.114), and before the ale yeast stopped doing its thing, I added 4 lbs of inverted sugar. The fermentation kept on strong for another two weeks, using US-05. In the mean time, I added another 4 lbs of...

It's been 7 weeks since I've bottled my imperial stout, and the carbonation doesn't seem to have increased at all. I've roused the yeast cakes at least 3 times over the past month, and nothing. Should I crack open each bottle, add a pinch of dry ale yeast, and re-cap? Or should I keep rousing...

Not all bottled beers are carbonated at 3 weeks. I have an imperial stout that's been bottled for 5 weeks now, and it's still flat. The plastic bottle has been slowly getting harder to squeeze. When it's extremely hard to compress the bottle, I know that my glass bottles have had enough CO2...

Does anyone else use one or two 12-16-oz PET bottles when they're bottling 12-oz glass ambers? I've done this since day one of my brewing career, and I think it's awesome. I always fill up the plastic bottle exactly halfway through the bottling process, and cap it with its screw-top lid. As...

Just 24 hours too late. Damn. Thanks for the tip--I'll use this one next time I brew a heavy Belgian! Not that this beer's going to be bad, by any means. T-58 is a good yeast. Nice phone, BTW.

That little bit of liquid is your wort/beer that's been pushed through the tube via active fermentation. This is to be expected. The whole point of having a blow-off tube is to depressurize a fermenter that has a wort or yeast that results in > 100% attenuation per volume of the vessel. By...

I'm going to brew another HG Belgian-style quad with T-58 tomorrow. The last batch did not taste very Belgian-y or Trappist-y. This time, I'm going to try fermenting at a significantly higher temp (23ºC). Hopefully, that will help. I can't think of anything else that would make my beer...

You guys are awesome. Thanks for the great advice/insight! Now, I'm going to rack them both this weekend. There has to be a lot of unfermented sugars in each beer vat right now, thanks to gravity and inertia. Shaking things up (ie. transferring them gently to carboys) will most likely result...

Basically, I didn't have time to rack my beers, because I'm too busy with life. I brewed two very high-grav beers about 3 to 4 weeks ago (stout and black IPA), and I haven't had ANY time to rack them. Right now, they're still sitting in the primary fermenters, with 0 activity in the...

I made a great pomegranate wheat beer using an extract kit honey-wheat beer recipe. I changed the recipe by adding 1 bottle of pomegranate molasses during secondary fermentation. Here's the stuff I used: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006ZUALAI/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20 It's very cheap...

The recipe called for Red Star Champagne yeast during the secondary. I've brewed this one twice before, and for each batch I could not taste or smell the ethanol. For barleywines, I believe that some degree of ethanol aroma/taste is important. Thus, I'm trying a more alcohol-tolerant yeast...

You guys are really the experts. Thanks for the advice. I've decided to just bottle what I end up with, rather than try to spread the wonderful beer flavors across just one more 6-pack. After all, strong beers aren't about alcohol, they're about the awesome flavor profiles. Diluting it with...

I've got a 5-gallon (wort) batch of barleywine that I just transferred to secondary, and I've now got about 4.5 gal of liquid. After secondary, I'm expecting to have about 4.2 gallons (added premiere cuvee yeast). Can I compensate for the loss of volume by adding an appropriate mix of vodka...

Well, I just finished making a nice amber barleywine from a kit that directed an OG of 1.116, but I also added 2 lbs of corn sugar to it at the beginning of the boil...for personal reasons. BLUF, if you can tell me what my OG/Brix is by adding 2 lbs of corn sugar to a beer that's OG would have...

From what I've gathered emperically from this thread, true Belgian Abbey ales are fermented at moderate termperatures (73ºF+). Perhaps I could have salvaged my last two brews by fermenting them at higher temperatures, but that will never be known for sure. The next time I brew a Belgian...

My last two attempts at a Belgian Abbey ale ended up not tasting one bit like a real Abbey Ale (a brune ~10.5% that sat for 5 months, and a blonde ~9.8% that carbonated in two weeks!). The blonde was drinkable, but it did NOT taste like a Belgian ale! It was not bitter enough, and the...