Jim's Beer Kit

First I pour an inch layer of hot sparge water on top of the mash and then recycle a goodly volume of wort before letting the runoff into the boiler. Fly sparging in a cold garage, wort runoff is in the low seventies centigrade towards the end of the sparge although the upper part of the grain will ...

Hi Mark, Good point. I can see now the part about beta-amylase denaturing, quoting one study in the J.Palmer book by Stenholm states " ... beta-amylase was reduced to 75% of it's initial activity after 30 minutes at 65c and just 10% after 60 minutes" Cheers, Wayne Worthy point as you say, especiall...

While temperature will influence extraction, it is more a function of your sparging control and method. If efficiency much less than 70%, consider your method, not just the temperature of your sparge water as 75 to 80C is fine. Should, on the contrary, your mash efficiency be much more than 80%, res...

Ratio used by me is between 2:1 and 2.5:1. I view the mash as a two stage process:- 1. Alpha amalyse converts starch to complex sugars, optimal conditions for enzyme performance circa, pH 5.5 and temperature 70C. 2. Beta amalyse converts complex sugars to simple more fermentable types, optimal condi...

daveyk wrote:Cheers Eric.... nice suggestion..... secret option 4 I'd not thought of.
I love this forum.....
Dave.

Most of my brewing took place before I joined this Forum. Most of my learning has been since.
Yes Dave, a wonderful asset.

Take your pick, nothing out of the way in any of your thoughts. In your situation I'd pitch the yeast, it's waited long enough. Then I'd boil some water and add the hops, remove the heat and keep the lid on the pan. Then I'd combine the two through a sterile sieve before going to bed tonight. Good l...

As said, don't worry at this stage. There is much that you can and will do in future to get improved clarity, but these are not important at this stage, many other things are and as a consequence, you are rightly feeling knackered. Congratulations.

Similar to the limits here. Wondered, having often read comments about metallic tastes in beers but couldn't remember any that conclusively traced the source to be metal in the water. We might just have dug out most of our metal deposits many years since. My bet is the taste will in time subside.

Is there any rusty or black colored staining on any plumbing fixtures in the house? Rusty staining suggests iron and black staining suggests manganese. It only takes 0.3 ppm iron and 0.1 ppm manganese to be able to taste it. Those figures for iron and manganese are above the upper limits of standar...

I thought it may be of interest to post up information about a RIMS I'm making. It might help someone, or give them some ideas... Yes, it is and thank you. Been thinking about variations on this sort of system for years and got no further, even hardware obtained about six years ago for the project ...

You will certainly have taken out most of the yeast, but unlikely to taken out all. Therefore it will take much longer to carbonate than is usual. Keep those bottles warm to help them carbonate and maybe next time you bottle you could also fill one small screwtop plastic (PET) bottle that you might ...

High mineral content water can create fine beer…excessive mineral content water cannot. I don't think we are far apart on the technical aspect of this matter, more the history. We can certainly agree on the above, in 1736 The London and Country Brewer covered that in chapter 5, however, we may just...

Sounds like you are making beer. Leave it alone, would you ever judge a sausage or fish pie by taste before it was cooked? Like beer, you wouldn't predict what it might be like when properly cooked. If your fermentation vessel is reasonably well sanitised and you avoid letting anything spurious get ...

What makes you fear infection?

Yes, I would think so too, with a bit of thought, even the chance of making two dissimilar beers. Try avoiding too long a duration of the mash or consider denaturing the enzymes.