Recent content by fishops

It's not very good for the yeast to leave undissolved sugar in there. I never add it directly to the carboy, I just shake it up in the gallon containers of apple juice to dissolve it. A little bit won't hurt though. Don't add dextrose after it has started fermentation. 2 pounds per 5 gallons...

oh great now i have to make another batch just to cook with

Braise a pork roast in it. Braise anything in it. Deglaze with it and make pan reduction sauces. Make apfelwein gelatin and put it in a parfait with spring berries. Marinate stuff. Cook mussels in it. Put a splash in some seafood risotto. Make walnut apfelwein cake. Apfelwein donuts. Mulled...

nope. when we say don't fear the foam we really really mean DON'T FEAR THE FOAM

Yeah, "accidentally shipped without gas" is almost certainly fiction. I would bet good money it has a leak.

You can brew practically any ale with pacman. In my experience it's basically a feistier, more flocculant strain of Cal Ale WLP001.

Update: I did it. I ended up brewing a strong porter and aging over earl grey tea leaves in secondary for a month. It picked up a little bit of an infection, probably due to badly sanitized tea leaves, but thankfully not enough to mess with the flavor too badly. All things told, it's a roasty...

That sounds... interesting. The 3lb dark malt addition seems too vague, I can't imagine anyone using 50% aromatic in a recipe. Not a bad jumping off point though. Also I can't figure out why you'd need a full pound of rice hulls in an all barley recipe. They must have left out the wheat.

this is such a beautiful melange of ESL, weed consumption and complete, newborn ignorance. i think we should make it the mission of this forum to turn this poor soul into a master homebrewer.

Your LHBS is also in competition with every mail order place on the internet. If their crush is worse than B3 or Northern, they will lose customers guaranteed. I know for certain that my LHBS dude cares a lot about my efficiency, because I slip him a couple bottles out of every batch :D My...

Bunch of pseudoscience bullcrap. Brewer's droop is slang for alcohol-induced impotence aka whiskey dick. Who knows where they got this phytoestrogen emasculation concept from. There's more phytoestrogen in a soy latte from starbucks than there is in 10 gallons of beer.

so, the short answer is it's the beer kits. Your process looks fine, I would poke through the recipe section and start putting together your own kits.

Kahuna may be an abrasive ranting nutball but he's right. You can wait as long as you like, if your beer is finished fermenting it won't give you sufficient carbonation no matter how long you let it sit in the bottle. I speak from personal experience as well as every brewing resource I've ever...

Can't really tell you much unless you tell us your process. What recipe, what equipment, what temps are you shooting for? I will tell you that the times I've gone way under or over on my SG were due to a badly calibrated thermometer.

You need to use priming sugar to bottle condition your beer. It won't carbonate if you don't prime it. It will take about three weeks to carb and condition. Once it's in the bottle you can keep an ESB around for a year or two if you want. It'll probably be best at around two months.