Jim's Beer Kit

A full mash brew takes me about 11 - 12 hours . That includes weighing grain and chemicals, setting up the polythene greenhouse in the back garden for the boiler, mashing, sparging, boiling, very slowly draining the boiler and finally cleaning everything up and putting the greenhouse away. I never p...

Had a quick squint through my books and found an entry that said not to use isinglass with bottom fermenting yeasts, apparently its not very effective. Most of the time my brews clear well enough in the secondary fermenter without the need for finings. The ones that I always have to fine are anythin...

I use one sachet of Dr Oetker gelatine for five gallons. Available from Tesco. Mix it into 3/4 pint of very warm water and let it stand until cooled. I use a secondary fermentation , and after all signs of activity have ceased , I wait about three days for the heavy to settle and then gently stir th...

Thanks Chaps. Found what I was looking for. I must get more organised. I only got into reading Palmer's book on the internet whilst I was looking for water treatment info that I had mislaid . No offence intended to him, but I shall be giving Palmer's book a wide berth for a while, he may have good r...

I have lost my scrappy notes on water treatment and had to resort to the internet to get some info. Looking at a post by Aleman on Water treatment - Alkalinity Adjustment Sat Nov 13 2010. The bit that I wanted was in paragraph 5 , multiplying milliequivelants per litre (meq/L) by 50 gives the alkali...

After bottling my Christmas Brew at a final gravity of 1.022 I sure was worried about possible exploding bottles. I have never bottled anything with such a high final gravity before. I even knocked up some plywood crates out of some panelling the neighbour had ripped out of his house, ply lids naile...

Hello Dave S

I think you forgot to mention, a bad case of the Arabian Nights next day.
Tee Hee....

Cheers

Slants, Stir plates, HEPA filtered air, flushing with bottled oxygen. Makes me wonder how on earth I used to get anything brewing in the early 1970 s ("The Good Old Days" ) with just a table spoon of Alinsons bread and baking yeast. Worked for wine and beer. Mind you I don't think the results from t...

I may be getting a wee bit picky here. Orlando mentioned a stir plate to get oxygen in for the yeast to thrive. If the yeast is generating carbon dioxide , then this heavy gas will be sitting on the liquid and contained in the bottle , forming a barrier between the liquid and fresh air, just like in...

Thanks for the swift and interesting responses gents. I know what fermentation looks like in a starter bottle, lots of gassing and a good crust forming but what does it look like when just replicating ? Is replication the time at the start , when nothing much is happening, no bubbles, no sediment fo...

Up to now I have quite happily managed to get my own yeast slants and shop bought, bottle dregs working in stepped starters. (100ml, 200ml, 400ml etc.) As is usually the case, I have been reading too much and confusing myself. I read a post on this site that says yeast from slants and bottle dregs n...

A bit late but I have only just found this article. I found yeast settling on the walls of some of my bottles and not others of the same brew. It was due to the shape of some of the recovered bottles that I was using. Some of the bottled beers on sale have a small inwards taper from the shoulder to ...

Hello boingy I think you have hit it on the head first try. I remember losing a lot of the fluid as steam when boiling. I only got half the amount of slants that I expected. I now think that I used the right amounts of DME and Agar but managed to lose half of the water in steam when I boiled it all ...

Just checked my slants in the salad drawer of the fridge. The bottom of one of the glass tubes that I use for slants has blown out and managed to burst through the polythene bag that it was kept in. Just looked like someone had cut the bottom disc out of the tube. Very neat. The slant smelt beery, n...

Hello Barley Water, nice to hear from you.
If I did my "safety checks" once a week I dont think there would be anything left for Christmas.
Cheers.