Jim's Beer Kit

If the beer's OK, the yeast's OK.

I've left beer in a fermenter for so long there was blue mold growing around the rim. The beer was fine and the yeast was fine. In my experience, beer is a lot more resistant to infection than people will have you believe. And yeast is more resilient too.

I left it sitting another hour during which it dropped from 70C to 63C. The liquor is sweet to taste, that's probably a good sign. The pre-boil gravity is 1030, corrected for 63C that's 1045. It should be about 1048 after the boil; my target was 1052 :( I'll pitch and see what happens. Worst case sc...

I had a bit of a disaster with today's brew, an Oktoberfest using 4.25kg of Munich Light as base malt. I forgot about the pan heating with grain in it, and when I got back to it, the temperature on the sensor was 84C. After stirring/mixing it a bit, the temperature was 72C. After throwing in some ic...

My cheapest beer would be a mild ale that I frequently brew. 2kg of pale malt and 500g of crystal, 25g of whatever hops, S-04 for a 20L batch. So about £0.90 on crystal malt (scam price, need to find a new supplier again) the hops cost me £30 for 5kg so £0.15 for those, £20 for 25kg of cheap grain, ...

Yes, it's OK to turn it off at the cylinder if the beer is carbed.

Is the line properly chilled? This will happen when there's a temperature difference between the keg and the line.

Six and a gas cylinder.

It is a very old freezer, the walls are not very thick.

4kg of Maris Otter 250g of crystal. 200g of some hop around 4-8% AA Aim for 50-60 IBU, with the rest of hops as late additions/dry for flavour and aroma. Made 8 of these now, I think. It was originally intended as a SMASH experiment to try and tell the differences between the hop flavours but tbh, I...

I don't...

Assuming you didn't make a starter or use partial packets of yeast, it's probably more due to the fact that you pitched three packets of yeast instead of one.

I've found S-33 to be a particularly fast [also bad, and underattenuating strain] so maybe that has something to do with it.

Maris Otter as base malt.

I would be interested in trying any of these kits. All of the flavours sound good to me.

Personally, I'm getting very low attenutation < 70% using S-04 and US-05 yeast. My mash temperatures are spot-on 64C - I use an STC-1000 to monitor the temperature - so I'm not sure why the attenuation is always so low.

I'm inclined to think that as long as I don't try to bulk-age in pressure barrels, it's probably OK. After all, beer doesn't oxidise in the pressure barrels until long after six weeks... at least for me? The wine will only be in the pressure barrel for about six weeks before being bottled. For the f...

So, I have been recently looking at getting into kit winemaking. Since I'm now using corny kegs for the beer, I've got a couple of the budget white plastic pressure barrels sitting doing nothing. I was wondering if anyone has tried or considered using these things for secondary fermentation. Obvious...