Jim's Beer Kit

If I can remember to check when I'm at home... Although mine may well be too fine - they're very prone to clogging.

No love for Dave Line's Big Book of Brewing?

Belter wrote:I see above a nail was recommended to make a loop of nichrome... Just curious as to what a standard apperture should be for an innoculation loop.

For our purposes, it doesn't really matter.

louiscowdroy wrote:Could I ask what actually defines a Pilsner??

German, Czech / Bohemian, or American?

http://www.bjcp.org/2008styles/style02.php

Haven't used that one, but I've used WY2278, which I assume is similar. No particular gotchas... A degree of diacetyl is typical of the style, but I would still give it a reasonable diacetyl rest as I'm quite sensitive to it and like to keep it at a low level.

I usually stick with a 90 minute mash (gives me time to have a cuppa!), but if I'm looking for more body (e.g. in an 80/-, which should have a lot of body) I'll up the temperature to 68 or even 69 degrees. There's also the question of yeast - some strains are happier chomping though those long sugar...

How big a stir plate would you need for a 25L starter :O More importantly where the hell would you get the glass wear from! The proper bit of kit for yeast propagation on that sort of scale is a Carlsberg Flask , which is a stainless pressure vessel (so the medium can be be sterilised under pressur...

There's the matter of potentially increased hop isomerisation, and the conversion of any remaining SMM to DMS will also continue post-boil - and that DMS will not get evaporated off. Jamil Zainasheff has long argued that even CFCs or plate chillers can introduce problems because you're not getting t...

Yeah, most micros I've asked just used dried Notty in industrial quantities. Some do continuous repitching (usually acid-washed, but not always) of a single strain (probably now a house strain, however it started out originally). You can get any of the commercial yeast labs to provide you with pitch...

Following Duncs method you turn the oxygen on. Chuck it in sanitiser. Then after a period of time chuck it in the wort. Therefore no gunk should ever enter the stone. Not sure how this works in practise. I'd still replace the stone with a stainless one. Actually, I sterilise my airstone (and its as...

Yeah, it seems fine to me.

Well, the first thing is to get a decent break... The pressure cooker seems to do a better job than just boiling. Then you want to chill it as quickly as possible. Then I filter it using proper Whatman filter papers, although I forget exactly which... They're not expensive. Only downside is that it ...

I've never added any additional nutrient to my wort agar...

Don't get hung-up on the "stop enzyme activity" part of the argument. The enzymes get killed in the boil anyway. Aye... But for a large batch size and a slow sparge, you could be looking at a significant length of time between starting sparging and getting the wort near boiling. And then there's th...

Hold up a minute! The final temperature which the wort reaches when using a plate chiller depends on 4 things: the temperature of the wort, the rate of wort flow, the temperature of the coolant, and the rate of coolant flow. If you drop the wort flowrate low enough, then the flowrates cease to matte...