Jim's Beer Kit

Thanks, MashBag. That's a good idea. I was getting a bit daunted by the mill idea. Ebay & Amazon have them ranging from £60ish to over £1000 - all looking much the same; and with hardly any reviews to go on. Hey-ho.

I have reviewed my brewing log and I've found that out of the brews which I get from a 25kg sack the first gets me a higher OG than the last fairly consistently. There's not a lot of difference. From the last bag I got 1046 1048 1045 1046 1044 (I still have one more brew's worth in the bag) and, as ...

I put it in the compost bin. Every time I brew the level in the compost bin is the same as it was before the last time I brewed. I think I have a rat living in the compost bin! ...living in the lap of luxury.

Actually, I've been thinking; The amount of CO 2 dissolved in the beer is dependant on the pressure as well as the temperature. So, you would expect the pressure to rise as the secondary fermentation proceeds then, when the pressure is high enough, some of the gas will just dissolve so the pressure ...

I also use KKs (top tap) and I bought pressure gauges for them. I got them from Amazon for around £1.50 each. They have ¼ inch tapered BSP connectors which means that I could drill a hole (11.8mm is the tapping drill to use apparently; I used 10mm) in the KK's lid, and just used the connector to cut...

I was thinking why do you need a rotating arm. Wouldn't a spiralled coil of copper with holes around it in the lid of the mash tun to drizzle down do equally as good with no moving parts? I agree. I normally get reasonable efficiency but it seems to me that the rotating arm approach is not really w...

I know I'm coming late to the party but: I have a ball valve on the output to my hlt which I adjust to limit the flow so it takes around 45 minutes to empty the hlt. This is far too slow to make the rotating sparge arm do anything at all so I sit there for ¾ of an hour tapping the arm around with th...

Yes, when I tasted it to see if it was sweet I noticed that it was, obviously raw, but surprisingly nice.

I did wonder if the two transfers got the yeast more mixed up than usual and, therefore, more in contact with sugar. Hey-ho!

I hope this is the correct place for a "dry hopping" topic, well it does take place during fermentation doesn't it? I've noticed that the received wisdom around dry hoping is to wait for the fermentation to nearly stop before adding the hops. I've been adding hops to the FV at the same time as I pit...

I had a brew day on Friday the 9th of August and finished by pitching the yeast at just before 3pm. I use Safale S-04 and I pitched it at 23ºC. (the water in the chiller was over 21ºC so that 23ºC was when I got too bored to go on) At about midnight Friday/Saturday I found that the FV tap was leakin...

I use a magnifying glass

You know you can buy them right for £22.44 from say the home brew shop stainless steel too if ur into shiny things but don't give up be worth it in long run and u have sense of achievement. Well, I bought one of those last October from the Home Brew Shop and was very pleased with it. I'm just getti...

Another shortcoming in all these scales, in my humble opinion, is the inability to account for redness. Well said seymore ...and how do they make beers red? I'm thinking of the Shepherd Neame "Autumn Late Red" lovely beer and lovely colour. ... and thanks DeGarre for the excellent post. I was think...

I used to sparge with a spiral of plastic tube with pin holes melted in it. This would spray the grain fairly evenly and slowly. This went mouldy so I bought a shiny new s/s sparge arm . However in order to make it rotate the flow has to be such that all the sparge water is used up in about 2 minute...

I fancied a bark beer for christmas so I played around with Beer Engine and plugged in 4kg of Marris Otter and 400g of Roasted Barley (9.1% - Worcester Hop Shop recommend a max of 10%) and BE predicted an EBC of 165. Wikipedia (yeah, yeah I know you can't trust anything there) has a diagram for EBC'...