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crazyfish posted:Bottled my key lime wit today Got the recipe or a hopville account I can 'follow' you? I'd like to brew this one day. Maybe a cream ale variant...
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Nov 7, 2011 23:56
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2 questions: 1) Anyone have any experience using fenugreek to add "maply" flavors as per Mosher? I'm going to be adding a kilo of jaggery to a barleywine and would like to further accentuate the maple flavor it imparts. I'm thinking 2-3 teaspoons crushed - roasted and then added to secondary. How long should I toast for and at what temp? I may get some maple extract as a backup. 2) I'm planning on using the White Labs Dry English yeast - anyone with barleywine experience care to recommend something else? I can't really get Wyeast locally so I'd be limited to White Labs and Saffale.
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Nov 8, 2011 01:41
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Super Rad posted:2 questions: WLP007 is a pretty good English Barleywine yeast. Its ester character isn't particularly pronounced and it ferments out pretty well, its reliable and it floccs like a brick.
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Nov 8, 2011 01:47
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Jacobey000 posted:Got the recipe or a hopville account I can 'follow' you? I'd like to brew this one day. Maybe a cream ale variant... This is off the top of my head. I posted it earlier in the thread, but here's what I actually wound up brewing: code:
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Nov 8, 2011 01:48
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Super Rad posted:2 questions: I made the jaggery IPA from the book, I think I crushed the seeds and added them at the end of boil, no roasting. It added a nice maple flavor, though it faded away after a month or two. I was washing out my aluminum turkey fryer pot in preparation for a brew tomorrow, and found a tiny pinhole in the bottom  I guess I know what I'll be asking Santa for Christmas.
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Nov 8, 2011 01:58
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Toebone posted:I guess I know what I'll be asking Santa for Christmas. A TIG welder? Maybe he will bring me one too.
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Nov 8, 2011 02:23
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Is it a hassle to learn to TIG weld and get access to the equipment to do it? I think I might actually be able to get my work to pay for classes, I'll have to look into it.
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Nov 8, 2011 02:28
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SO I've been brewing since July, and I have kind of a stupid question. I haven't seen anyone ask so far, but is there such a thing as wort being too aerated before pitching the yeast? I'm gonna make the Brewer's Best Hopnog this weekend, and I was gonna try to do a whirlpool and siphon the wort from my brewpot to the fermenter to minimize the transfer of poo poo and let it splash around a lot. Would too much oxygen be added to it in that case?
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Nov 8, 2011 02:36
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indigi posted:Is it a hassle to learn to TIG weld and get access to the equipment to do it? I think I might actually be able to get my work to pay for classes, I'll have to look into it. I've never learned, but there's a vocational school near me that has a pretty good and respected program. I've thought about doing it myself, but it will have to wait until I finish this degree (and maybe another one after that). At least at the program near me, a few hundred bucks gets you basically unlimited shop time and access to tools for six months, I think it was.
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Nov 8, 2011 02:38
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Whodat Smith-Jones posted:SO I've been brewing since July, and I have kind of a stupid question. I haven't seen anyone ask so far, but is there such a thing as wort being too aerated before pitching the yeast? I'm gonna make the Brewer's Best Hopnog this weekend, and I was gonna try to do a whirlpool and siphon the wort from my brewpot to the fermenter to minimize the transfer of poo poo and let it splash around a lot. Would too much oxygen be added to it in that case? It's possible to add too much oxygen, but you need to literally be injecting pure O2 from a tank. There is no way you will get to harmful levels just from shaking/splashing, the density of O2 in the atmosphere isn't high enough.
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Nov 8, 2011 02:39
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Um, I made an oopsie. I think my kegerator door didn't get closed all the way and now both kegs are frozen because it kept running trying to cool it down. What is the best way to let them defrost, or is the beer pretty much shot at this point and I should only be concerned with the equipment being damaged?
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Nov 8, 2011 03:17
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TheCIASentMe posted:Plastic buckets are more oxygen permeable than glass but the difference has been proven to have no appreciable difference when it comes to storing beer. You'd have to store the beer for a year to have a demonstrable difference. Your typical homebrew bucket leaks 23 cc/L of oxygen per year while a glass carboy with silicone stopper leaks 17 cc/L of oxygen per year. Your numbers are off here. Sourcing the chart in Wild Brews a homebrew bucket leaks 220 cc/L per year, your carboy numbers are correct. So more than 10x the oxygen permeability in a bucket versus a carboy is a significant enough difference to worry about. quote:Stale flavors in beer are typically caused by a compound called trans-2-nonenal which is generated in beer naturally around a rate of .5g/L per 5 months at room temperature. At 0.35g/L of trans-2-nonenal a beer is generally considered stale. You're pretty much missing the point here. The thing I was refuting in your original post was you basically said if you let a beer sit for more than 3-4 months it goes bad, which is not true. While there are compounds that cause off-flavors over time they clearly aren't present enough in your average craft brew or homebrew to seriously affect the flavor after 3-4 months. If they were the majority of craft beer people buy would be stale/have noticeable off-flavors from it. Do I think the majority of average gravity beers are better the fresher you can drink them? Of course. Do they 'go bad' after a couple months? Absolutely not. Josh Wow fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Nov 8, 2011 |
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Nov 8, 2011 03:38
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So I'm racking my brain thinking about a way that I could go all-grain in my apartment, and I think I have a couple ideas to get around my main two problems (full boil volume and chilling). I don't have space for a propane burner so I can't do full boils that way, but has anyone tried supplementing their stove-based boils with a bucket heater like this?: http://www.amazon.com/MARSHALLTOWN-Premier-742G-Bucket-Heater/dp/B000BDB4UG/ref=pd_bxgy_petsupplies_img_b By putting the pot over two burners (I could probably boil 5 gallons on my stove right now but not the 7ish that full boils need) plus this heater, I think I might be able to sustain a 7 gallon boil. The other problem was chilling the wort, and I think this one is less of a gray area, because I found a garden hose adapter for my kitchen faucet and I can hook up an immersion chiller that way.
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Nov 8, 2011 03:44
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That's definitely doable. Some people actually go all-electric, and it seems pretty easy and cheap. I'm sure if you google all electric brewing you'll find some easy how-to guides.
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Nov 8, 2011 03:58
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CaptBubba posted:Um, I made an oopsie. I think my kegerator door didn't get closed all the way and now both kegs are frozen because it kept running trying to cool it down. What is the best way to let them defrost, or is the beer pretty much shot at this point and I should only be concerned with the equipment being damaged? Oh god I just pulled some beer from the keg, and I forgot the whole "alcohol thaws at lower temps" thing that chemistry does. I just drank some beer concentrate and it was not pleasant in any way.
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Nov 8, 2011 04:10
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CaptBubba posted:Oh god I just pulled some beer from the keg, and I forgot the whole "alcohol thaws at lower temps" thing that chemistry does. I just drank some beer concentrate and it was not pleasant in any way. Quick, call BrewDog and tell them about your new abv record-setting process
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Nov 8, 2011 04:19
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Lately, I've been day dreaming of ways to to cool down hot wort quickly. Just as a thought experiment. One idea I had: What if I were to hack apart an old window A/C unit to use as a wort chiller? From what I've been reading about how A/C units work, I could hack apart the unit, place the coils carrying the evaporated refrigerant into the wort, then turn the thing on full blast. I would think this would work. The whole air conditioning process shouldn't change that much. Only difference is that instead of the coils absorbing hot air from a house, they'll absorb the heat from the wort instead. Has anyone ever heard of a homebrewer pulling something like that off? Whenever I try to search for something like that, all I seem to get is results for electric brewing.
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Nov 8, 2011 05:08
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Dolemite posted:Lately, I've been day dreaming of ways to to cool down hot wort quickly. Just as a thought experiment. One idea I had: What if I were to hack apart an old window A/C unit to use as a wort chiller?  build a wort chiller with copper tube and avoid the toxic refrigerant. there are probably a million DIY plans on the internet
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Nov 8, 2011 05:18
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Plate chillers are also pretty good, and you only expend cooled water in roughly the same volume as the cooled beer. Get your intake on the plate from a cooler of ice water and it'll work even better.
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Nov 8, 2011 05:22
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CaptBubba posted:Um, I made an oopsie. I think my kegerator door didn't get closed all the way and now both kegs are frozen because it kept running trying to cool it down. What is the best way to let them defrost, or is the beer pretty much shot at this point and I should only be concerned with the equipment being damaged? This has happened before to one of the guys here, although the issue was a curious toddler fiddling with buttons. Just let the beer thaw and it will be okay again. Room temp will be faster, but you can just leave it in the fridge with the temp set correctly and it will eventually go back to liquid. You may have some issues with carbonation for a while until it rebalances, but the good news is your beer is fine.
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Nov 8, 2011 05:51
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That's pretty far out there. There are a ton of practical problems such as sanitizing the coils and getting them into a configuration where they could be immersed in the wort. All that and it really wouldn't be all that quick. Assuming a relatively portable 10k BTU/hr A/C unit it is only about to move heat at the rate of 3kw. With 19L of wort to cool it will take it around 6 minutes to pull the wort down to 80F assuming perfect performance across the entire temperature range (which would never happen). You can get not too dissimilar results using a standard immersion chiller. If you need quicker cooling a plate chiller and a pre-chiller for the incoming cooling water would work just fine.
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Nov 8, 2011 05:52
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I'd be afraid of how the coils and refrigerant would tolerate near-boiling temperatures.
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Nov 8, 2011 08:13
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Does anyone know ANY of the ingredients Speakeasy uses in their beers? The Big Daddy IPA and the Prohibition Ale in particular. It's time to start making my first recipe and they're one I'd like to know what's under the hood. On their site it just says "3 varieties of northwestern hops", and that makes me think of Cascade, Chinook, but there has to be more growing up there... Morbid Florist fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Nov 8, 2011 |
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Nov 8, 2011 15:42
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CaptBubba posted:That's pretty far out there. There are a ton of practical problems such as sanitizing the coils and getting them into a configuration where they could be immersed in the wort. Not to mention god knows what they are made of. Lead solder? Maybe, maybe not. The thing was never made for a food-contact application, so it was not engineered that way.
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Nov 8, 2011 16:03
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Yeah, I kinda figured it was a way out there idea. It popped into my head while I was checking Craigslist for cheap refrigerators for kegging with. Seeing people just try to get rid of old A/C units, practically giving them away. My thought was to get one of these cheap or free units and expose the guts. I wasn't planning to actually insert the cooling coils of the A/C unit directly into the wort. I was thinking to buy enough copper hose to run from the A/C unit into the wort. Then, solder the purchased copper onto the A/C unit's coils. When finished, the A/C's coils would never get near the wort. I guess this would end up looking like an immersion chiller that is basically attached to a giant pump + constant source of cooling instead of trying to run cool water through the immersion chiller coils. Although I wonder how cost effective it is the more I research. Plus as CaptBubba mentioned, it isn't going to be any more efficient than other, existing solutions. I've heard of people using an immersion chiller + ice water + aquarium pump combo with lots of success. The pumps don't look too pricy either.
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Nov 8, 2011 16:15
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Toebone posted:I made the jaggery IPA from the book, I think I crushed the seeds and added them at the end of boil, no roasting. It added a nice maple flavor, though it faded away after a month or two. Awesome, less work then! Do you happen to remember how much fenugreek you added? Since it's gonna be in a barleywine I know I should scale the amount up a bit - just don't want to end up with curry beer accidentally.
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Nov 8, 2011 17:40
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Moved my cider to a new container today for clarification. It's been a bit over two months since I opened this lid, this is what it looked like: Using a hose to move it to a new container:  Looking better already.  The taste and smell is like that of wine, which is not surprising I suppose since I used wine yeast. It was not sweet at all so I guess the sugar's been digested pretty thoroughly. The air lock didn't really bubble much the second month so I guess thats around when it ran low. I dunno what strength it is at now, I added 12 grams of sugar per liter though, that + any natural sugars in the juice. When, where and how much sugar should I add when bottling them if I want to get carbonation? Should I put a little pinch in each bottle or should I mix it all in the big container first?
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Nov 8, 2011 20:21
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I have a porter that has finished fermenting using the Wyeast 1968 (london esb). Since my basement has been slightly too warm to lager, and slightly too cold for ales (hovering around 60-62) I've had the ferment sitting out of the way in our living room. The question I have is about the whole diacetyl rest, it seems like 68 is the ballpark temperature for ales when you do the rest, and my house generally goes from 64-68 throughout the day, should I figure out a way to keep my beer slightly warmer just to make sure it gets done? or do you think I can just leave it for a week and it should clean up? Also, generally, what is the coldest you want to go to when your ready to clarify before bottling? It's starting to get pretty cold out, but I don't want to leave it out on the porch if it's gonna get too cold. We are currently not getting down to freezing, but definitely the low 40s. My main worry is too much yeast precipitating out and the bottles not carbing.
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Nov 8, 2011 21:38
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His Divine Shadow posted:Moved my cider to a new container today for clarification. It's been a bit over two months since I opened this lid, this is what it looked like: When I brew I make a syrup with all the sugar needed to carb whatever bottles I need, typically 5oz by weight of table sugar dissolved in 2 cups of water. I put that syrup in a sanitized bottling bucket, transfer the brew to the bottling bucket, and let the swirling generated by the transfer mix in the priming sugar, then just to make sure, I give it a stir with a big sanitized spoon for a minute or so. All of the priming sugar should be mixed in evenly by that point. In two batches I've done so far, I haven't had problems with uneven carbonation.
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Nov 8, 2011 21:59
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Speaking of cider... I almost had a serious cider disaster today. I was following the apfelwein recipe that Hypnoblaster posted only cut down. I cut it in half like I usually do for beer recipes. Only problem is I'm only making a gallon. WAAAAAAYYYY too much dextrose. Luckily I didn't go all out and put a full pound in for super strength. 12 ounces. So I had to run to the store and get another gallon of cider. Now the 2 gallons is sitting in my 3 gallon carboy. I'm gonna need the carboy in the next 4 months, though. So would it be ok to get another gallon jug and move the cider yet again into two containers? Shake it up some to make sure the yeast is evenly distributed or something?
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Nov 9, 2011 05:19
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It will be fine either way. You probably only need 4-6 weeks, rather than months, before it's ready to package, even with 12 ounces of dextrose in a gallon of juice. I've gone as high as 16 ounces of table sugar per gallon of juice and had it come out OK. It will continue to improve in the bottle for some time, but there's little need to keep it forever in the fermenter.
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Nov 9, 2011 05:27
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Ok cool. I should have been more specific about my carboy needs. I'm going to need it in about a week to start that crazy steep and sparge lager.  So it's really done fermenting in a matter of weeks. The 4-6 months is really conditioning that can be done in bottles? Additional sugar to carb?
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Nov 9, 2011 05:34
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Hey whoa, the container with the cider I put in for clarification, it's started bubbling? Should it do that?
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Nov 9, 2011 07:43
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I tasted the ~1.080 tripel I brewed just over 2 weeks ago with Wyeast 3787, kind of shocked how good it was already. Pitched at 64, let it get as high as 70, and it's down around my expected FG at 1.013. It's still green but I didn't pick up any hot fusel alcohols which I got from the last high ABV beer I brewed. That beer was the stereotypical headache homebrew, was too ashamed to pour it for any friends. But it was also an accident; had some math errors and boiled off way too much and then vastly underpitched my yeast. This one got a beastly starter and I'm hoping it turns into a real winner  Assuming it turns out delicious I may reuse the yeast cake to start off my first sour before pitching bugs/dregs, advice begging to follow. Already have Wild Brews on hold at the library. Docjowles fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Nov 9, 2011 |
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Nov 9, 2011 07:46
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His Divine Shadow posted:Hey whoa, the container with the cider I put in for clarification, it's started bubbling? Should it do that? Probably just CO2 coming out of solution.
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Nov 9, 2011 11:14
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Toebone posted:Probably just CO2 coming out of solution. Just to make sure we're on the same page, the airlock is what's bubbling. I didn't taste any CO2 when I tasted it. But I suppose it makes more sense than it starting to ferment again.
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Nov 9, 2011 13:38
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^^Sometimes racking can kick up the yeast and start fermenting anything they left behind.
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Nov 9, 2011 16:12
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Of course, Grolsch stops coming in swing-tops the same time I start brewing. Any good sources for swingtops? Or is an early investment in a capper a good idea?
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Nov 9, 2011 22:12
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A simple capper is probably cheaper than buying all the special bottles you'd want. Most brewing starter kits include a capper.
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Nov 9, 2011 22:20
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Bad Munki posted:A simple capper is probably cheaper than buying all the special bottles you'd want. Most brewing starter kits include a capper. Ok. My kit recommends drinking a lot of Grolsch. Looking at the prices, you're right, the capper is much cheaper than swing-tops.
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Nov 9, 2011 22:29
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