Search results

Haha, excellent. :-) What you drinking?

Grist and hops look good, never used Belle Saison but I believe it ferments well and tastes decent. I prefer to pitch my saisons and belgians low and let them rise slowly, 20c is probably fine but I wouldn't let it ramp too soon. I keep mine 18 - 20c for 3 days then rise to about 22 - 24c at...

It's fairly straightforward for brewing, most yeasts produce esters which give a characteristic fruity flavour to the beer they produce. Some yeasts are much more neutral so don't create much of their own flavour which lets malt and hops shine clearer; e.g. US-05 (and liquid versions), most...

Saaz/EKG is the blend I use in my "British" pale ale, really nice combo, actually need to brew that again sometime.

That looks normal as far as yeast goes, I'm pretty sure "bottom fermenting" is a misnomer (can't remember where I've read it discussed) and they're just not as crazy at making krausen as other yeasts. They would still make krausen as the CO2 generated rises and will create foam.

I've used PiA and Beoir each once I think. Pia made a very good pale ale with NZ hops, Beoir made a clone of Orkney Corncrake which has just as much hops as the pale ale but they're all Styrian Goldings instead of Nelson and Galaxy, both great beers. Didn't really pick up much esters from...

Brewing big batches shouldn't really be much different from smaller ones, just takes a bit longer to do things. I've split 23L batches and pitched different yeasts and my recent batch was a full-on blended parti-gyle giving a Maibock and a Best Bitter so you should be great as is. Without a...

I've been reading Guile Brews by Peter Symons and you're right, most of the beers have between 5 - 20% sugar added as various shades of invert. I'm going to try making a brown ale or something similar using a homemade dark invert. Also amusing to see the common practice was quite a good dose of...

Hope the IPA is good, I feel you pain of "slightly disappointing wine" fortunately I found out that I make pretty good beer to console myself. I sit my FV on the kitchen table then sit on a chair next to it to bottle, I don't think someone with good knees could crouch for that long...

How were you planning to seal the spirit bottles? Are they screw caps like Gordon's gin etc? They probably wouldn't hold pressure and if they did they could shatters. Reusing commercials beer bottles is the cheapest way forward, just need to buy caps and a capper.

Whichever you want really. Yeast was very interesting, hops was decent, water is essentially a textbook that you'd reference rather than read, took me back to my uni days. Not read Malt as I believe most of it is about malting rather than brewing/mashing.

I was just going to say this, spirit bottles are not going to be safe with carbonated beer inside them. My routine is to boil my sugar in some water then gently stir it into the FV (I've a conical so I dump the yeast before this). I leave this to mix and settle while I sanitise my bottles then...

You are correct, 15, 10 and 5 mins before turning the heat off. I use a grainfather so after the heat goes off I whirlpool to get everything spinning then let the hops and break settle for 15 mins so the pump doesn't get clogged. Then it's a counterflow chiller so the hops are still in the hot...

Citra is an excellent flavour and aroma hop and it's also more expensive than cascade so it's a bit "wasted" as a bittering addition. Quality of bitterness varies with cohumulone content of the hop I believe, not sure how that applies to these two but I know from experience that using galaxy as...

You've essentially got a pale ale / IPA there. My grain bill for 23L would be 350g of either the oats or wheat (I use flaked barley) and 250g of the Caramalt then base malt until you hit an OG your happy with. I generally range from 1.040 to 1.050. This is a ratio I used in a bitter, and I've...

Yeah, I also see it occasionally and think it's (harmless) burnt DME.

Thank Steve that's all really helpful. Jamil is one author that I've never had much exposure to, listened to some of his podcasts a couple of years ago. BCS is also one of the go-to books which I don't have. That sounds like good advice on the bitterness and is kinda what I was looking for, so...

Toasted coconut could be good, vanilla was a bit pointless in the VBS, I used extract and it faded really quickly and could barely be detected over the bourbon anyway.

My wife has requested a cherry imperial stout, I've been wanting to brew a big stout for a while anyway. Most of these have a big bitterness to balance out the alcohol but I think that might clash with the fruit. I'm not really wanting to go all in on the "pastry stout" idea so don't want...

Hope it's a good one, you've got me wanting to brew a dark strong again now as my last attempt got sabotaged by a blocked pump then thermometers reading way out so I pitched the yeast far to high and got a fusel bomb that didn't even make it to bottling. Gravity reading are handy when you need...