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I'm starting to sound like a broken record.. If you roast your grains into chocolate malt territory then you should be fine, otherwise you're just gonna extract a bunch of starch/ haze into your wort and risk infection (that's my experience.) On that note, I have personally found highly...

if you just toss flour into the boil you're going to end up with a bunch of unconverted starch in your beer, aren't you? If all you want is flavour and aren't concerned by a starchy beer, then I would just toast some buckwheat, crush it a bit and steep it in a grain bag for a while. Ideally...

Go for it! Assuming you're willing to put in a *lot* of extra work... I've malted millet, buckwheat and quinoa and while not all that difficult to do, it is pretty time consuming. Your base malts will still be bland because you can't kiln them at high temperatures or you will denature the...

When I took a course at Brewlab in the UK a few years ago I got to work at their micro brewery (Darwin Brewery) for a couple of days.. I basically did everything the head brewer did over the course of a brewday. I recall that about 90% of that involved cleaning things (tuns, fermentors, casks...

Yeah, you're right - the EU standard is 20ppm, which is a pretty damn small amount of gluten. I guess it's just the fact that there may be *some* gluten that sort of concerns me. I've got a real hankering for a GF bitter made with the Fullers strain, so I may give White Labs a try...

All dry yeasts *should* be fine - Fermentis and Lallemand/Danstar are anyway (as far as I know.) Wyeast put out a couple of seasonal GF strains a while ago but I don't know whether they're still available. White Labs claims that their yeast is "low in gluten" and within the European...

Doing gluten-free beers this way will get you drinkable brews but not great ones. You really need to make your own GF base + specialty malts to get that "real" (malty) beer flavour, although it still won't be quite like a barley or wheat-based beer. It's an awful lot of work and the brewing...

I have one of those (Hannah Checker1) and it's "OK".. It gets the job done but the probes need to be replaced every few months (I guess that's true of all meters.) Readings tend to "drift" a bit even when probes are new and it needs to be calibrated before every use. There is no temp...

Thanks for the replies all.. I'll keep an eye out for deals on better quality units.

Hi - Does anyone know whether a cheap pressure cooker (ie. $20-40) is suitable for yeast culturing? Any cheap ones I've seen don't have pressure guages and don't seem to indicate what pressure they get up to, etc. I'd prefer not to get botulism poisoning... I'm asking because I'm only...

I'm in a similar situation so my next brew will be using Northdown for bittering/ flavour and EKG for aroma. It sucks that the price of EKG has gone up so much (and availability gone down) but as someone else said, it's a good time to experiment with other hops. Anyone have any comments re...

I'm pretty sure there IS mention of an orc beer or "orc draught" (something like that) in LOTR, no? Otherwise, I think Tolkien was likely imagining the hobbits drinking the types of beers he enjoyed drinking (ie. porter, brown ale, bitter, etc.) I guess that theory makes things less...

Well, I'm pretty sure there's specific mention of porter in The Hobbit (one of the dwarves asks for it) but other than the fact that the beer was made with locally grown barley I'm not aware of other details. I remember coming across a webpage a few years ago devoted to this topic, where some...

I used S04 for a bunch of batches in a row and eventually decided I didn't really like it. To me, it has a sort of tart/ "twang" thing going on that I don't really care for. Other people love it though so give it a try. Windsor is excellent I think but you need to keep the fermentation...