advanced homebrewing

Yea, I have just started my Octoberfest Ale in my little brew kit last Thursday. My first batched last year turned out great. My wife was surprised it really tasted like beer.

You may want to try out this link, im sure you have already checked it out but they have all kinds of meep to buy.

Mr. Beer

your unawareness of my experience with homebrewing, and your negligence in reading the entirety of my journal belittle both of us, but you more than me.

dude, relax..I could tell you have alot of experience in home brewing. I wasnt trying to belittle anyone. Like I said in my post, you probably already knew about that site...I just knew they had all kinds of ingredients like you were talking about. They have lots of recipes too.As for myself I just started with my little noobie kit. Sorry I didnt mean to dirty up your journal with such childish comments.

Hope someone else can help you out on your big journey to master home brewing.

I got a Mr. Beer for my birthday, and yesterday had my first taste of the first batch.

I was pleasantly suprised at how well it turned out.

One day, I hope to graduate up to advanced brewing, but I need a lot more experience.

I think I may buy my dad the Mr. Beer kit for Christmas. He needs a hobby (and a job)

your unawareness of my experience with homebrewing, and your negligence in reading the entirety of my journal belittle both of us, but you more than me.

haha, I think you just looked up homebrewing on wikipedia and learned a few technical terms to drop into conversation, you dirty fraud (^_^)

12% is plenty for beer--particularly an IPA. The sterno drinking bums on the street may argue otherwise, but there is such a thing as beer being too boozey.

But if you are dedicated to that low ending SG, do a sencondary ferment pitched with your more robust yeasties. You'll want to rack the batch off the old yeast so your batch doesn't suffer from auto-lysing and your fresh innoculation cannibalizing their ded cousins.

The new innoculation will certainly out compete whats left of the old one, and you'll get your home made ripple.

when you say pitch the yeast for the secondary ferment, should I aerate the wort, or should I just sprinkle the yeast on top? Also, this is the high level advice I'm looking for.

Once you've racked the batch off the old dead yeast pile, you'll have done as much aerating as you'll want.

Though no serious mico-biologist, I'm pretty sure that O2 is not a serious concern for top fermenting beers; i suspect it will have an impact on bottom fermenters, and in my experience that kind of "impact" is always unpredictable and usually bad.

And not that this means anything, but I met a professional brewer whose beer was usually meep--and he was a great big fuking fan of getting O2 to his little beer bugs. My explaination to myself regarding why his beer was so usually bad is that yeast do all right in anaerobic environments, but LOTS of other bugs do better than brewers yeast in aerobic environments. The metbolic product of those other bugs is what made his beer all wrong.

Clearly you have not aged it long enough which is demonstrated by this delicious 137 year old brew

I saw the article on the old beer, which I'm really curious about, re: how much has beer changed in the last 137 years? does that stuff taste like it's supposed to taste? Also, aging doesn't significantly affect the alcohol concentration of the beer.

I just noticed you said "sprinkle" when referring to the yeast.

I hope you're not using dry yeast.

no, I use white labs, but most of my interaction with yeast is outside of brewing, so I was thinking about it as a dry powder

Hey Dinoza, it pained me that this post came up while I was away on vacation and I didn't get to chime in. We have been finding that it isn't really necessary to pitch more yeast when you go to secondary fermentations. If the young beer is still too sweet there are usually enough live yeast still active to continue fermentation in secondary and sometimes even end up with a remarkable amount of sediment after secondary. After much more than two weeks in primary you are really just racking the beer off the old dead yeast sediment at the bottom of your carboy to avoid that stale yeast taste, the fermentation may still have a while to go. If your beer tastes a little sweet when you start to transfer from primary then let a little sediment get sucked up just to make sure there are enough active yeast cultures and then give it another couple weeks. I've only had one batch where we couldn't beat the sweet out of it.

Now, as per your original question. I've been lusting after an all grain setup for a while now and have been trying to think of ways I could give it a shot without buying or fabrication the more specialized mash turn. It seems the real key is the consistent steeping temperature of the water and even coverage on the crushed grains for the starch to sugar conversion to work correctly to make a good wert. I was wondering if there was a simple sort of thermostat valve that could feed something like a brass lawn sprinkler suspended over a makeshift steeping pot. Let the gravity feed the hot water released by the thermo-valve and the resistance in the sprinkler head to time process out. How about doing kind of a half and half, maybe like a baby step beyond the kit style we do now? Use about 10-15 lbs of Grains but still a small amount of malt extract rather than all grain. If you do give it a shot please take pics of your setup and let us know how it goes. Oh and hey, 12% still kicks the meep out of off the shelf 4.5% beer. ~ good luck

I was thinking something like this

A picnic cooler to insulate the grains while they are mashing, with copper tubing dry fitted into a spigot coming out the bottom/side. The copper tubing will have holes cut into the top, so that when I want to drain the wort, it will come out through the spigot and also get filtered from the holes. Is this kind fo what you're talking about?