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Hi chaps! I got myself a brewing/lagering fridge setup, and now that I can control things properly, I have a bit of a question about the diacetyl rest. I'm using Wyeast 2278, for which the recommended temp range is 10 - 14 C. It's currently in the fridge, where it's been dead on 13 C for the...

Hi chaps, Making my second lager. This time I have a fridge to lager it in, should be a lot less bother than the ice bath I used last time! So I was wondering if I should rack off into a secondary vessel before lagering, or just mature it on the yeast. What do you do?

I used Ground Ivy to flavour some ale I made many years ago. In the days before "beer" which was boiled with hops, various herbs were used as a strainer for the mash, to flavour the ale. The wort was not boiled. The results of my experiment were somewhat underwhelming, but don't let that deter...

It might make it taste better! Give it a chance... I had some kind of flora of this sort develop on a winter ale I made last year, I was worried at the time, but it didn't grow back after I bottled it (presumably too much CO2 in the bottles) and the ale was lovely!

My fermenter is in a giant bucket of water in the shed, into which I add blocks of ice made in the freezer every day. In a month or so I'll be able to tell you if it worked. I think the slowly lowering the temperature isn't strictly needed if you gave it a thorough diacetyl rest after...

Looks absurd to me, but then I could never understand the American take on traditional styles - they seem like parody to me, every characteristic taken to an incredible excess. That said, don't let me deter you, you're brewing for your own enjoyment, so design recipes to suit your palate!

I like to punch my bags of crystal malt before I use them, to really get the malt rage going... :twisted: But really, I've never made a really "angry" tasting brew, except perhaps the 11% barleywine which I insisted on trying after it had only been bottled for a week...

The recipes. A log of specific gravity and temperature throughout fermentation. Finally, don't forget to write some notes on what each brew turned out like. I find nothing more frustrating than digging through my old beer recipes with no idea whether they turned out any good.

Are you sure? I've never seen how they are made, but if I were designing a kit I'd work on the assumption that it would be made up with tap water...

I just float the sterilised hydrometer in the bucket. No more risk of contamination than if you use a baster to remove a sample.

Don't they belong to a brewery? That said if the plastic firkins are still as ***** as they were in 2004 when I worked for one, they'll be glad you take them off their hands... :roll:

Hi chaps, just wondered if anyone can suggest which is paler? I've made a few pale ales in my time all with LME, and find that the colour varies between brands a surprising amount - Muntons in particular seems very dark, while Brupaks is fairly pale. I've been using spraymalt as part of the...

I had never heard of degassing wines until my interest in winemaking was rekindled recently. I made unbelievable quantities of wine, many of which are still maturing in the cellar at my parents house. None of them are fizzy.

There definitely is a knack to pouring a pint from these kegs when they have a lot of carbonation - trick is to to it really slowly, then it won't foam up. I've never tried alternative taps, but maybe that's worth trying, it does get annoying pouring pints really slow when you have lots of...

Letting a bit of air into a barrel really isn't the end of the world, in fact that's how cask ales are served! However, a pub will go through a firkin of ale in a day or so, while you might want to keep your keg going for a few weeks, which is where CO2 comes in handy. The tiny amount of air...

I think if any of the methods you've read about were producing anything other than drinkable results, you would not have been reading about them in the first place. Don't sweat it!

Well, I'd certainly agree with the consistency thing - it was never a concern of mine making homebrew, it was a different batch every week. When I worked at a microbrewery we had customers who drank pint after pint of our bitter every evening, and would notice the tiniest variation, and be none...

I've been looking at various discussions about reusing yeast lately, and it seems to me that people are overcomplicating things a bit - all this talk about having to pitch to a brew of higher O.G, only reuse it 3 times, washing the yeast etc. To give a bit of background, whenI was a lad I...

Most of my "regular" beers are in the keg after a couple of weeks. I try to hold off for another week for conditioning before I start drinking them, and they are splendid! That's not to say that what's left a week or two later isn't better still, but there's no reason I can think of to keep...

That's interesting. Do you mean, blind tasting, and the beers tasted contaminated, or the beers were cultured in the lab to see if anything else was in there except the yeast? If the latter, I don't think it's terribly important, provided the beers tasted great. Even the yeasts we buy don't...