Home Brew Gurus

[SportWagon]

In the early 1990's I brewed several batches in 5 gallon (what looked like) pickle buckets. Just used the time recommendations. Never had any problems like Tom described, and mostly if not always the yeast was dried. Various British kits, all cheating with sugar IIRC. One was a Barley Wine, and it ended up definitely well north of 8% by hydrometer and human judgement.

I used plastic bottles with screw lids which greatly helped.

Basically I believed everything a local home-brew store told me. "Use this pink stuff for sterilization". Didn't ever seem to see either contamination or fermentation problems (might happen with insufficiently rinsed equipment?).

Once I tried using two kits of malt instead of any sugar. That resulted in a very mild mild. (Oh yeah, at one point I ended up with more kits than I really wanted because my father gave me some of his malt inventory after his diabetes set in).

Lets see. The spare hydrometer does sound like a good idea. And I believe I did crack a carboy once (before putting beer in it), but I don't really recall how.

P.S. Many commercial craft-brew stouts call themselves "Imperial Stout", and this seems to mean almost no head.

[Rikadyn]

Last night when I got home from work, I had definite fermentation going on

Would love to be one of those guys who has a kegerator setup, but my first task is going to be to procure some kind of wort chiller, because by the time I brew the next batch, it's not going to be 16F outside...

Make one, they're fuck simple to make either a immersion or counterflow, though i'd say immersion is simpler (buy a coil of copper tubing, coil it around something that fits in your pot [my case was a keg] and and some hose connections viola chiller for at most 60 dollars)

[Rikadyn]

P.S. Many commercial craft-brew stouts call themselves "Imperial Stout", and this seems to mean almost no head.

low to low-normal carbonation is appropriate for the style

[KillerB]

I've not gotten to brew since I moved west, mostly because I don't have a location that I can temperature control like my old spare bathroom.

I also need a wort chiller because I can't just stick the wort in the snow anymore.

[speedpimp]

#YeastMode

[pl8ster]

Drew, are you going to rack yours to secondary fermentation? I was planning on it, but for various reasons am coming up on four (!!) weeks in primary and I've heard that some people don't bother with secondary at all, so...

Curious to hear others' thoughts on this as well.

[Rikadyn]

never bother with secondary, usually primary to keg, and keg to bottles if i'm bottling (have a Blichman Beergun for it as well). Only time i'd secondary is if it was going to be aged for a long period (3-8 months) of time to get off the yeast cake.

[pl8ster]

That's kind of what I've been reading. The Northern Brewer kit for my brown ale called for a two-week primary and a four-week secondary, so I'll just need to figure out exactly how long I'm going to keep it in primary.

[Rikadyn]

I'd bottle at 2 maybe 3, I secondaryed one beer, and when I tried to bottle carbonate it, it was flat because not enough yeast to create full pressure. basically unless it's a lager, where it needs the cold conditioning step, whenever you hit final gravity, it's good to bottle.

[Tom Servo]

I did a secondary for the pseudo bourbon-barrel aging (i.e., dropping some oak chips in bourbon overnight, then putting them in the secondary with the beer). Otherwise, yeah, I'm hearing it's not worth bothering with the secondary.

Now, here's my issue with my other, non-secondary'd beer: Carbonation just doesn't seem to be happening. It's coming up on four weeks now and it's still pretty flat. Just from poking around, it sounds like maybe the temps have been too low around here (in the 60s mostly) and that high gravity beer tends to take longer to carbonate anyway, but it's still a pain in the ass. At any rate, all the advice I'm getting is to just be patient, but is there a good way to tell if it's carbonated without opening the bottle?