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Bleh, being retarded, I put the wrong zip code in the order(I just moved) and now my stuff won't get here til Tuesday. Guess I will be doing this then.
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May 28, 2012 00:32
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crazyfish posted:Not to mention that you can bottle from a keg, too, if you want longer-term storage. I think Blichmann makes something designed expressly for this purpose.
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May 28, 2012 00:51
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Had some guests over the weekend, so Friday night I got off my rear end and racked 2 beers to kegs and force carbed them. They were actually tasty and well carbonated the next day, after having been shaken at 32* with 30psi and left at 30psi all night. Bad news is I hadn't set up the system in several months, and a leak has developed somewhere. I lost the whole tank  . The obvious source should be the connection of regulator to tank, as that is the only thing that was adjusted. The kegs seemed to seal well and are holding pressure still.Kinda bummed about that. Anyways the beers were a 10 gallon simco heavy pale ale I made, where half was pitched with 1275 and the other half with 3711. The healthy amount of whirpool hops actually seem to dominate over the saison yeast, it hardly tastes like a saison at all! I dry hopped the pale half with 2 oz of simcoe, and it's just fabulous. I actually get a tiny bit of cat funk in the saison, but none in the pale which has 2x as much simcoe. zedprime posted:You can fashion your own out of a couple of bottling wands and picnic taps for 1/10th of the price if you're feeling cheap. Bottling wands jam perfectly into a picnic tap so you have one on the liquid out and one connected up to your gas as the purge. Or you can be lazy and just chill the growler, turn your reg down to 1-2psi and pour very slowly. As long as it doesn't foam up a ton when you fill it, it should hold the carbonation for a long time. I've gone up to 6 months.
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May 28, 2012 22:03
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I jumped on the 3711 saison bandwagon, pitched it out of the smackpack, and I had bubbles within an hour. Evolution is cool.
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May 28, 2012 22:07
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tesilential posted:Or you can be lazy and just chill the growler, turn your reg down to 1-2psi and pour very slowly. As long as it doesn't foam up a ton when you fill it, it should hold the carbonation for a long time. I've gone up to 6 months. The bottling wand in picnic tap trick is just something cool you can pull out when you're sending bottles into a competition and someone thinks you need a $70 piece of swag or they will never get to the judges without tasting like cardboard.
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May 28, 2012 22:11
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I'm pretty pleased so far at how my Imperial Stout and "Amber ale" came out. The Stout went from 1.082 to 1.022 (which seems like a decent ending gravity for am IS, right) in about 8 days and the Amber went from 1.062 to 1.012. Both of these are way too huge to keep around my house as "house beer." Gonna have to bottle them up or I'll be wasted every day. I just pitched a packet of US05 for the Amber and double-pitched packets for the stout. I was planning to give the Amber to my dad who loves ambers but hates IPAs, but whoops, the thing came out tasting pretty much just like an IPA, but super dark. I guess that happens when you use 17% AA hops as bittering hops.
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May 29, 2012 05:21
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A screw in my Barley Crusher broke, the head snapped off and it's in a position where I don't really have the means to get it out. The rollers aren't properly spaced for BIAB milling at the moment (it snapped off when tight against the piece that holds the roller at its current gap), so it's currently kinda useless to me. So, I call Midwest Supplies, and the automated message tells me I'm second in line on hold. After 15 minutes I move up to first in the queue. Another 5 more minutes, and it starts ringing, yay. Except, I just get another automated message, this time telling me "please leave us a message and we'll get back to you when we're in the office again." I could have left a goddamn voicemail 20 minutes earlier. Couple this with Amazon sending me two pre-shattered carboys last week, and it's clear the BMC gods don't want me brewing ever again.
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May 29, 2012 05:59
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wattershed posted:A screw in my Barley Crusher broke, the head snapped off and it's in a position where I don't really have the means to get it out. The rollers aren't properly spaced for BIAB milling at the moment (it snapped off when tight against the piece that holds the roller at its current gap), so it's currently kinda useless to me. I'm not surprised nobody is there given the holiday; give it a couple days and I'm sure it will work out. But that's not boding well for my plans to buy a grain mill though. I wanted a Barley Crusher since the other option (Monster mills) are like twice as expensive and more heavy duty than I'll ever need.
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May 29, 2012 06:20
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Angry Grimace posted:Plastic buckets. I still kinda wish Better Bottle would make a 12-gallon size, ideally in a shape I could fit two of in my ferment fridge, but until then, buckets all the way for me.
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May 29, 2012 06:35
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Jo3sh posted:I still kinda wish Better Bottle would make a 12-gallon size, ideally in a shape I could fit two of in my ferment fridge, but until then, buckets all the way for me. You could always use one of those enormous food quality HDPE 15 gallon drums they use to transport liquid food products. http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/default.aspx?catid=459&clickid=popcorn
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May 29, 2012 06:48
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This might interest some of you stout guys: Irish researchers (naturally) think they've figured out why the bubbles in drinks like Guinness, etc., rise and fall simultaneously: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18247680 Direct link to the study: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5233 quote:Stout beers show the counter-intuitive phenomena of sinking bubbles while the beer is settling. Previous research suggests that this phenomena is due the small size of the bubbles in these beers and the presence of a circulatory current, directed downwards near the side of the wall and upwards in the interior of the glass. The mechanism by which such a circulation is established and the conditions under which it will occur has not been clarified. In this paper, we demonstrate using simulations and experiment that the flow in a glass of stout depends on the shape of the glass. If it narrows downwards (as the traditional stout glass, the pint, does), the flow is directed downwards near the wall and upwards in the interior and sinking bubbles will be observed. If the container widens downwards, the flow is opposite to that described above and only rising bubbles will be seen.
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May 29, 2012 15:14
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krushgroove posted:This might interest some of you stout guys: Irish researchers (naturally) think they've figured out why the bubbles in drinks like Guinness, etc., rise and fall simultaneously: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18247680 Irish researchers are really slow I guess. I read a story on why this happens in 2004. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/why-guinness-bubbles-fall-6172528.html
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May 29, 2012 17:30
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Today, I have donned the Official Brewing Shirt and I am heading out to get the mill rolling:
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May 29, 2012 17:31
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Jo3sh posted:Today, I have donned the Official Brewing Shirt and I am heading out to get the mill rolling: Should really say: No officer, these aren't molotov cocktails. We're brewing beer. story But I likely. 
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May 29, 2012 17:36
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zedprime posted:I make poison to drink for fun. Speaking of Official Brewing Shirts, zed, you should print up some of these. EDIT ^^^ true, but the shirt came before that incident. The guy that had it made for me thought it was a joke until some brewers were actually arrested because their neighbors thought they were cooking meth.
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May 29, 2012 17:37
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I'd wear a silly shirt like that. But then again I'm silly as well. And think brewing is cool. I'm getting a bit impatient with my porter. If it's still sitting at 1.020 I'm going to bottle I think... if only because I need a fermenter to bash out a wheat beer into. It had a WHOLE bunch of unfermentables, so I'm not massively surprised if it ends up with a relatively high FG. It tasted malty and nice with a slight earthy bitterness from the hydro sample I tested when I last posted in this thread, so I'm assuming it's not going to be completely duff - just lower in ABV than hopville predicted. Now's your chance to talk me down from being impatient. :P
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May 29, 2012 17:57
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Angry Grimace posted:more heavy duty than I'll ever need. This seems like a silly assumption.  Jo3sh, where can I get a couple of those?
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May 29, 2012 20:15
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So I've got 2 kegs, picking them up tomorrow. One of them will have the top cut off to be a big boiling pot, what should I do with the other one?
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May 29, 2012 20:24
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krushgroove posted:So I've got 2 kegs, picking them up tomorrow. One of them will have the top cut off to be a big boiling pot, what should I do with the other one? Cut the top off, put in a false bottom and ball valve and make a mash tun?
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May 29, 2012 20:25
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Splizwarf posted:Jo3sh, where can I get a couple of those? To the best of my knowledge, it's a one-off. A workmate had it made for me one year for Christmas after he saw pics of my rig. I can ask him where he had it made.
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May 29, 2012 20:51
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Angry Grimace posted:Plastic buckets. I'm thinking of permanently switching away from glass carboys due to the difficulty in lifting the drat things in and out of my freezer. I don't know why, but I feel like the handle on the bucket will snap off at the point of attachment every time I lift a full bucket up. I trust myself, or at least have more confidence in, a glass carboy. I also like to watch my beer. I did an online chat customer service thing with Midwest and was told they have a few Barley Crusher mills still left in the building (despite showing as OOS on their website right now) and they would 3-day ship me one of them so it could arrive on Friday. I told the guy I needed a two-day buffer between it arriving and when I'd brew, as I'd want to get my yeast starter on a stir plate 48 hours ahead of time and wouldn't want to do that if I didn't have a functioning mill in hand. He understood that. Also is going to include an RMA in the shipment for the borked BC. Apparently the Barley Crusher manufacturers are running behind demand so pretty much every site, once they sell their current stock, is going to be OOS for a bit.
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May 29, 2012 21:12
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wattershed posted:I don't know why, but I feel like the handle on the bucket will snap off at the point of attachment every time I lift a full bucket up. Having had this happen multiple times (not with beer, but paint, plaster, and water ), yeah, wire handles on plastic buckets are only safe when they're empty or mostly empty. Glass carboys are rad, but they're, well, glass and I need to get them up and down a flight of stairs (into a concrete basement) for fermentation.You guys convinced me a while back that the happy medium is Better Bottles with carboy handles.
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May 29, 2012 21:19
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Just get one of these and use it on the bucket instead? http://www.amazon.com/The-Brew-Hauler-Carboy-Carrier/dp/B000OF8V5W/ref=pd_sbs_indust_1 I don't see why it wouldn't work....
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May 29, 2012 22:17
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Plus buckets have those ribs/fins/reinforcements around the upper portion that make them easy to lift.
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May 29, 2012 22:20
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Pick up some milk crates for a quarter at the hippy produce coop.
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May 29, 2012 22:37
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Anyone use Blood Orange zest in a beer? Honestly, making a Blood Orange American Wheat as a summer beer sounds amazing, but I am not sure if the zest from a Blood Orange is any different than the zest from a regular orange.
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May 29, 2012 23:23
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ScaerCroe posted:Anyone use Blood Orange zest in a beer? Honestly, making a Blood Orange American Wheat as a summer beer sounds amazing, but I am not sure if the zest from a Blood Orange is any different than the zest from a regular orange. Easy, cheater way to find out? Make a tea out of each of them and see if they taste/smell differently. Also, know that zest goes a long fuckin way if added fresh. Another good reason to test it on a tea, you'll get an idea of potency.
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May 29, 2012 23:29
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Newbie question: are the links in the OP for the starter kit and extracts a good buy still for someone looking for a legitimate/expandable way to start making beer? I'm talking about these recipe kits and this starter kit. Just wanted to know if these are still considered a good buy 100 pages later, thanks for any help or suggestions.
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May 30, 2012 00:06
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YASD posted:Newbie question: are the links in the OP for the starter kit and extracts a good buy still for someone looking for a legitimate/expandable way to start making beer? I'm talking about these recipe kits and this starter kit. Just wanted to know if these are still considered a good buy 100 pages later, thanks for any help or suggestions. They're still good. Brewing is a hobby where you'll always want another piece of equipment to improve your process though. MoreBeer's ingredient kits are a little cheaper than NorthernBrewer, but NB links to the instruction sheet which says exactly what the ingredients in the the kit are, whereas MoreBeer only includes the ingredient list in the kit itself. Oxygenation kit and dual-stage thermostat arriving this week, should be ready for my first outdoor brewing session next week.
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May 30, 2012 00:26
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Just my opinion (and I was the guy who posted those links in the OP), but yes, those are still perfectly valid ways to start (and continue) brewing. As always, there are other good vendors and other good ways to start, but Northern Brewer is a respected vendor and has a good selection of ingredients and equipment. I don't mean to diminish any other vendor or suite of equipment, but there's nothing wrong with those two links. If you let us know the general area where you are located, it's possible we can make a suggestion of a local shop that is as good as NB. I just had (yesterday!) the experience of suggesting NB to a coworker, when Beer, Beer & More Beer [morebeer.com] has a retail location in their city. If you play Groupon, there's a recurring deal you can look for from Midwest: http://www.homebrewfinds.com/2012/02/ending-midwest-groupon.html
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May 30, 2012 00:27
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YASD posted:Newbie question: are the links in the OP for the starter kit and extracts a good buy still for someone looking for a legitimate/expandable way to start making beer? I'm talking about these recipe kits and this starter kit. Just wanted to know if these are still considered a good buy 100 pages later, thanks for any help or suggestions. However, on the site page where you order the kit and add it to your cart, Northern Brewer has a lot of upsale options that you definetely don't need: First, you don't need a secondary at all to start, so don't add that. The other option that they try to upsell you on is an extract-beer kit. You probably DO want one, but there's no particular benefit in picking one of the three that are pre-filled in the boxes - they aren't easier to make and they aren't cheaper. Just add the starter equipment kit to your cart and then go to the Extract Kit page and add whatever one you actually want. Extract kits for the most part don't get very complicated unless you pick something weird that has multiple fruit additions or something - although you likely can't do lagers when starting out. // Edit: I've found that most of the suppliers sell pretty much the same stuff at similar prices, but that Local places tend to have a lot less inventory at much higher prices. I'd love to support the local guys but it's pretty hard when stuff like carboys cost more buying locally even with full price shipping. I tend to use MoreBeer in general since they ship in two days to where I live (although I ordered some hops the other day and managed to be dumb enough to order them last Thursday so I didn't get them over the long holiday weekend, not that it really matters that much  )
Angry Grimace fucked around with this message at 00:43 on May 30, 2012 |
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May 30, 2012 00:36
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If you're ready to buy like right now, Northern Brewer has a email deal for the next 2 days where you get that starter kit free if you buy a kettle and an ingredient kit from them http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/...tm_medium=email The cheap kettle and ingredient kit are like the same price as the basic kit.
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May 30, 2012 00:48
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zedprime posted:If you're ready to buy like right now, Northern Brewer has a email deal for the next 2 days where you get that starter kit free if you buy a kettle and an ingredient kit from them http://www.northernbrewer.com/shop/...tm_medium=email If you're going to order from NB, I would jump on this one. Most people don't have a pot big enough and the asker wanted an ingredient kit anyways. Same stuff applies about the kits, you don't have to pick one from the drop down menu, you just look at the whole selection of ale kits as long as you use the code. Random musing from browsing NB: You know, I wonder what White Labs thinks about the fact that on some kits, i.e. the Surly Bender kit, that despite the fact that NB sells White Labs products, NB says, "Surly uses WLP007 in the actual beer, but you should use Wyeast instead (because they pay us advertising money) "
Angry Grimace fucked around with this message at 01:01 on May 30, 2012 |
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May 30, 2012 00:53
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I believe I have said it before, but the NB kit includes both an autosiphon and some Star-San, both of which are nearly must-haves. The deal Angry linked above is pretty freaking cool; if you are going to start brewing this is a very good deal.
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May 30, 2012 00:59
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Including StarSan (and to a lesser extent PBW but you can get Barkeeps Friend from the grocery store) is like giving someone a free crack rock, I'm not sure why more stores don't include the good stuff in their kits.
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May 30, 2012 01:07
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zedprime posted:Including StarSan (and to a lesser extent PBW but you can get Barkeeps Friend from the grocery store) is like giving someone a free crack rock, I'm not sure why more stores don't include the good stuff in their kits. I stopped using PBW the moment I figured out that Oxyclean Free is like the same thing.
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May 30, 2012 01:16
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Jo3sh posted:I believe I have said it before, but the NB kit includes both an autosiphon and some Star-San, both of which are nearly must-haves. The deal Angry linked above is pretty freaking cool; if you are going to start brewing this is a very good deal. Thanks for all the advice guys, I went ahead and jumped on that deal. Looking forward to joining the ranks of the brewmeisters in a week or so when it gets here!
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May 30, 2012 02:29
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Has anybody brewed the "Cherries in the Snow" or "Cherry Fever Stout" recipes from the Complete Joy of Homebrewing book? How did they turn out? There aren't nearly enough non-Kriek beers that have cherry in it, although it can be difficult to make anything cherry related not have the cherry cough syrup taste.
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May 30, 2012 03:04
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Angry Grimace posted:I stopped using PBW the moment I figured out that Oxyclean Free is like the same thing. Well, it's only sort of halfway to the same thing, but it'll sure as poo poo accomplish 90% of the same thing. I've dropped my PBW usage to the occasional extremely intense, critical cleaning of things that I cannot see inside of (chillers, pumps, things like that). Everything else is oxyclean free and sometimes with phosphate free TSP.
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May 30, 2012 03:19
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Hypnolobster posted:Well, it's only sort of halfway to the same thing, but it'll sure as poo poo accomplish 90% of the same thing. People always claim there's some problem with hard water if you use Oxyclean Free, but I've never noticed a single difference in the practical use of Oxyclean vs. PBW.
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May 30, 2012 03:28
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