Jim's Beer Kit

Some oxidation and a bit of diacetyl will usually work....

So usually "caramel" (as opposed to toffee) tends to be associated with off-flavours, although a little bit can be good. You want to be looking at the lighter kinds of crystal in your grist otherwise.

It'll just be very dark, and taste a bit...caramelly - but there are better ways to add that flavour if that's what you are after.

But to give you an idea, adding 5ml of 35,000 EBC caramel to 23 litres will add about 7.5EBC of colour.

AIUI Ram Tam is just Landlord with some brewer's caramel in it to colour it up. It's an old British brewery technique, people always make the mistake of trying to add strongly-flavoured ingredients to hit a colour target when that just ruins an otherwise tasty beer.

Don't worry about it - BRY-97 is notorious for being one of the slowest-starting yeasts around.

Also I was told not to mix American and English hops by the staff who run the brew shop I use. Can anyone shed light as to why this may be Part of brewing mythology. No basis in fact. Hops are hops. In fact, if you check up on the heritage of American hops you'll find English and European hops were...

Roncoroni & Verstrepen put the colour at 11EBC and bitterness at 14 IBU which is a starting point. This is the kind of thing where liquid yeast are probably your best option, a fun one might be 3864 PC Canadian/Belgian Ale which is one of the Wyeast Q4 seasonals, allegedly from Unibroue in Quebec, w...

Paul's were bought by Axereal (Boortmalt) in 2010, who went on to buy Cargill's grain business last year, so I'd imagine the distribution of Paul's across the pond will be improving in coming years as the acquisition beds down and they start cross-selling.

A while back they tweeted the original recipe sheet for Daylight Robbery (the eclipse special which turned into Tribute), which I posted over on HBT , and someone has added some comments from Roger (RIP) - I like the detail that they weight their pounds in hops because their hop scales date from 193...

One assumes that it's ...ahem, "related"... to Bootleg's Oslo, in which case read this thread on HBT.

I'd imagine that they're pretty old-school, so will be doing a pretty traditional Burtonisation with lots of gypsum, and a decent slug of AMS/CRS to get the alkalinity down.

There's various pics kicking around the forums from visits to HN of tables of recipe ingredients like here.

Thank you NB, very informative and I am beginning to realise what a huge subject it is :shock: when you said This Murphy article is a good brief introduction to water chemistry, and suggests (calcium/sulphate/chloride) : Was there meant to be a link to an article? Bugger. Yes, I meant https://www.m...

I just checked my postcode and its the same, though I could not see CaC0 Calcium Carbonate on the list at all? Now I need to read up why I need to add gypsum and calcium chloride ;) Hardness is the one thing that "normal" consumers are interested in, so the water authorities often split it off (it'...

Thanks all, so probably tap water as good as anything then, I am lucky enough to have about a dozen breweries within a stones throw of where I live so I'm sure to get some information. I am reading Palmer's book but not got to the water section yet but will see how what he discusses compares with B...

Ask the guys at Buxton Brewery? I'd imagine they're using tapwater, which in much of the Peak District is great for brewing - it's just rainwater that's run off (relatively impervious) gritstone. They'd be mad to use Buxton mineral water, which is groundwater that's soaked through limestone for a f...

During lockdown I've been playing around with spent grains in bread as a way to "stretch" flour supplies. Certainly 20% is fine (in fact quite tasty), I'm trying to tweak things to increase the percentages. I dug out the bread machine to try and introduce some consistency and found that if you put s...