homebrewandbeer.com

Where do you guys FIND lactose? My HBS doesn't seem to stock it and no luck in Woolies.

Also, I have a sneaking suspicion I may be lactose intolerant. Is there a substitute, or am I resigned to the darkworld of artificial sweeteners?

glad wrap peoples - quick question.

how does the air escape without an airlock?

i was considering giving the filter-in-a-bucket a whirl, as i have a few unused brita filters lying around. however, i've heard they can take out some of the good water minerals (calcium, i think) which aid yeast development and help w/ pH and do nothing to counter the chloramines that are my chief ...

All,

I have found my biggest issue came from chlorophenols and only after I started all grain brewing. After looking into this I found that phenols were extracted during the mash of the grain and were combining with the chlorine in the tap water. So carbon block filter and drive on.

I didn't see ...

illywhacker... how old is the brew you're now having issues with (the 2 out of 3 failure rate).. i would be interested to see whether the 1 out of 3 bottles that tastes ok degrades with age or not.

you've got a point - its pretty fresh. only 2 weeks in the bottle now.
while i agree with you that ...

man. got the same problem as before, only worse. around 2 out of 3 bottles in the brew are infected; sour as hell, watery, over-carbonated etc. the remaining 3rd are just perfect, no hint of infection.

i thought the logical conclusion to be infection during bottling, but i don't see what ...

good-o.
i figured that it was really only the fermenting temps that were so sensitive to temperature, but wanted to be sure there wasn't some other factor i hadn't considered.

my ordinary bitter will today be turfed out of the brew fridge to make way for an esb.

ok, sure, i was meant to be ...

consider yourself lucky.

i thought the punchline was going to be that you had a fermenter full of your best brew in the boot that no insurer could reconstitute.

there are those who believe that any event that results in a greater sum of fine beer is a desired event...

(did a search doing spillsitall's google method with no luck, so forgive me if i have sinned)

how influential are temperatures during the conditioning phase?

reason being that i have a brew fridge w/ a capacity of 1 fermenter only.
currently i ferment and condition the brew in the one container ...

Ross wrote: If using dry yeasts, aeration is not needed

incidentally, is that also the case if you rehydrate the yeast?

ideally, i'd side with leathal too: in happy happy land i'd have a 40L kettle, dream mash tun and an investor eager for me to go micro brewing.

unfortunately, happy happy land is a long way away. i've gone back to studies and my budget ag set up is neccessarily a compromise. i suppsose i'll just ...

Can you give us a run down on your process?
Cheers

fair call.

i've only done one ag to date, so i'm still very green

i use 2 x cylindrical eskies. one max 15L with a stainless steel braid manifold, the other 7L w/ grain bag.
i had been using the latter for partials and added the former to go ...

i preheat the tun and don't get any sort of temp drop in the hour, but i'll try a stir every fifteen next brew, check it out.

hell, at 50% efficiency, i can't get much lower!

recirculating should help somewhat it seems.

anything else obvious i may be missing?

i'm just starting out ag and need a little help with the chiller question.

now, i know i'm opening a bag of very passionate worms with this question, if the chiller vs no chiller thread at AHB forum is anything to go by. my first and only ag brew used the no chiller method, and it took an age for ...

You will need to recirculate the first few litres of each batch otherwise you'll end up with grain husk and other material in your kettle.

i haven't been recirculating as the stainless steel braid i use hasn't permitted any grist to get into the kettle, but it seems that efficiency is also helped ...

What's your grain bed depth and it's relation to the tun width?

Cheers, Ed

i'm new to ag and getting even worse efficiency - about 50% - so i must be doing something pretty wrong.

i use 2 cylindrical esky's, so they are a fair bit taller than they are wide. i had thought that perhaps my gain ...

thanks all,

i've had some more bottles since first identifying the problem, and found many of them to be fine.

looks like the problem is my bottling sanitization. while i'm pretty healthily paranoid with the fermenter and cooled wort, etc, i always figured that bottling was not so crucial as the ...

hey guys.

i've got a propblem with 2 brews now, in that the taste appears to be deteriorating over time. both tasted really quite good 2 weeks after bottling, fresh with great hop aroma, but after another two, strong off flavours develop.

writing about beer flavour is a bit like dancing about ...

thanks ed.

the catalogue was a help in stopping me going out of my brain looking for the appropriate graden irrigation fitting to do the job. i was about to offer my kingdom for some sort of threaded pipe small enough to fit through the hole in my esky.

turns out a simple bung from hbs solved my ...

never really had uncrushed grain in the house, as have never had a mill, but i'll do a trial with already crushed grain. should get the idea.

i figure 'knurling' is the technical term for 'little knobbly bits'. do regular grain mills have knurls? as you say, i can imagine the pasta maker rollers ...