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That's an awesome book! I really want a bottling tree, might have to put one on the birthday list!

Aha! Have just discovered cold-steeping : ). I plan to steep the black malt for this recipe. Will read more about it shortly,

Santa very kindly brought me some books: Radical Brewing - Randy Mosher For The Love Of Hops - Stan Hieronymus Brewing Better Beer - Gordon Strong IPA - Mitch Steele Also got some speciality malts for a few of the next planned brews, including some Carafa, Crystal Rye Malt and Biscuit Malt...

Hi! This is great timing, as I have the Strong book coming, as well as Radical Brewing and Mitch Steele's IPA book :cheers: Just wanted to check something. I have posted a recipe recently: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=33342 ...the grain bill for which is finalised at the bottom of the thread...

I like smoke in mine too, but want a less complicated first AG porter. Next time I might straw-smoke some pale by shoving straw in the gas BBQ with the lid down!! Would that just be rough? The film was fairly bad, but I like bits of it. I hope my beer doesn't make people's eyes explode!

I've adjusted the malt bill - now final! 79%Maris Otter 8% Crystal (60L - it's all I have) 5% Munich I Malt 3.5% Chocolate Malt 1.5% Carafa Special III 3% Black Malt Looking forward to brewing it!

I may well up the chocolate to 4% and stick a bit of Carafa in anyway.

Me too! Nice one :cheers: I could drop the chocolate and black by 0.5% each and add 1% Carafa Special III instead, just to smooth the flavour out. I need to save the rest of the Carafa for the Brown Porter I am planning a month down the line from that! It's expensive stuff :shock:

I had planned to do something else for Number 3, but will now be going for a Robust Porter. Before I brew, just wanted to post the recipe below for comment to see if I am on the right sort of track: 81% Maris Otter 8% Crystal (60L - it's all I have) 5% Munich I Malt 3% Chocolate Malt 3%...

Meaty flavour is autolysis; your yeast are dying / have died. Either the yeast wasn't healthy to start with, or something shocked them to death during the brew. Were you reusing previous yeast, e.g. pitching onto a previous cake? This can cause enough spent yeast in trub to have hung around...

I didn't think there was any need to sanitise tinned fruit, as the contents are sterile anyway. You can add canned cherries, blackberries etc. straight to 2ry to make a fruit-modified stout or porter, for example.

Nice one! Thanks.

Has anyone tried brewing with the new Flyer hops yet? Supposed to be good for darker beers, but wondered if anyone could provide some idea of the bittering, flavour, aroma characteristics?

Why bother? I colour code with little coloured sticky labels on the caps. If you're giving it away. stick an adhesive label over the original label with the info on.

Cool. Will try. All the online information suggests this works best with more gently-flavoured styles, but I reckon it would brilliantly in an IPA using high-alpha hops. We'll see ; ) I have a Porter and a California Common to make before I do the IPA so I won't be posting anything on this...

Hi! Thanks for that. I will give it a go. I got all confused, as I thought it was the late ones that go in for FWH. I am perfectly happy to experiment with my hops ; ) This will be the first time for 3 things: Dry hopping; First wort hopping; Parking my brew in a secondary prior to bottling...

Hi! Thanks for all the tips everyone! I have been looking into First Wort Hopping a lot today, and it all seems to relate to using about 30% of the overall hop schedule, but made up of late addition hops. My question is, can that be flavour as well as aroma hops, or should it use aroma only...

I haven't ever left in 2ry prior to bottling, but plan on starting with the next batch. I have read (I think in Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels) that optimum time in 2ry is OG/2 = number of days, but it could be (OG - FG) / 2 = number of days. I can't remember!

That's interesting to know - I am probably going to be using WLP002 a lot, so will experiment with it too ; ) I'll let you know how I get on!

Kegging after 4 days won't have allowed the yeast to clean up compounds like diacetyl (okay in some styles) and acetaldehyde (taste and smell of freshly sliced green apples), which isn't good and gives big headaches! The caramel tones you pick up in batch A is likely to be diacetyl - is it a...