Jim's Beer Kit

Read some books? Brewing classic styles is a good source. Can you cook well? Can you formulate original culinary recipes or amend them? It's all the same really. Certain flavours go well together. You need to develop a palate or understanding if what beer ingredients do when you mash, boil and ferme...

Yeast can get lazy when you feed it table sugar, and then it gets stressed when it tries to metabolise the malt sugar.

No chill requires that wort goes into the storage container hot to pasteurise it. This means no cold break, and any late hop additions will isomerise for a lot longer. In practice, factor all late hops as if they went in 20 mins earlier. This can limit your brewing styles - us pale ales are a challe...

First Gold is such an awesome uk hop, you can put it in anything.

Strong saison all the way for me, if you can get some nice late hopping into it, even the girls are going to swipe it too.

super_simian wrote:
I did a run of Saisons and BSA's 18 months ago alternating Belle Saison and MJ Belgian. Much preferred the Belle Saison beers; found the MJ to be very...coarse? The MJ is too attenuative to do a non-Saison Belgian IMHO. Like 90%+ AA.

I think that's the exact experience I got too.

I thought you were aiming for Broadside alright. Well worth getting into that recipe ball park. I would look for clone recipes that allegedly got close in taste tests. That might get you the right balance of crystal and mash regime. Though there is merit in playing with the recipe, going for both ca...

Belle Saison is a great yeast, and it's very easy to get good results with it. It's vicious attenuation make it very useful in other styles too. Mangrove Jack make a Belgian ale yeast that I have used once, but on an odd recipe that doesn't showcase it. Would like to heat others opinions on it. Brew...

Do you have a commercial beer that you want to be close to? Your recipe looks ok, but I would be more tempted to go for a darker crystal malt and less Chocolate malt.

Single hop first gold is fine, it's a great hop and stands on its own well

You don't need to dump the hop debris, but it may be better to dump the yeast before dry hopping.

Until you get used to it though, I would keep it simple, as long as your racking arm is sucking out clear beer, you are good to bottle/keg

Bring a camping cool box, cool bag. Fully loaded with ice packs. That will provide a lot of transport protection, and should allow you to relax some.

A guy in the club has the dispense tap, which has a hook up to an external gas supply, and he says it's a bit crap, really fiddle gas in. The tap itself, and the growler are great though

Thanks for the heads up on wilco guys. Never even thought about it, and worth a shot.

Has anyone had any experience with powdered superkleer (silica based) from Murphy and sons?

All grain. I am not mashing low either, they just dry out completely for me.

Are there any downsides to having a under filled conical ? When you drop the temperature to cold condition, the extra headspace will contract to a greater degree than the beer. This can result in blow off tubes sucking up their solution into the beer. The SS chronical I have has a rotatable racking...