Recent content by MHB

At 2oC and ~170kPa (25 PSI for the Luddites) your carbonation should be just under 8 grams / Litre. Typically fizzy white wine is carbonated to 0.5-1.8 g/L so you are seriously over carbonated. This can cause some very strange effects. Here is a good read on the carbonation of Champagne; there...

Had a bit of a play, tasted like raw sugar mixed with molasses. Not surprising really. if you are making a dark Belgian beer, go with the original Belgian dark candi syrup. Mark

I would agree that in a pale Belgian normal white sugar will work well. It won’t be exactly the same but close. Yeast is very good at eating sugar in fact the scientific name for yeast, Saccharomyces literally means Sugar Eating. There is no benefit in inverting or otherwise modifying normal...

It's been done, can work reasonably well within certain constraints. If you take the alcohol over about 8% and certainly over 10% you will get quite a lot of flavours you don’t want. Ferment as cool as you can, again to minimise ester production. EC1118; the common Champagne yeast available in...

It needs a service kit, unlikely that you can clean it. Mark

Pretty pointless There is probably a small piece of grit in the needle or seat, or some other damage to the seat. If you Google up a diagram of how a reg works you will see how small and easy to damage the needle and seat are. Something probably got in there when you took the reg of the bottle...

Try ebay Mark

Had a couple of upside down fridges and have set up several. I like them and found they work well. To take your questions in order I would put the taps above the kegs, might be a bit higher than you planed but its way easier. Nothing to do with syphoning; any keg that is in there and connected...

There is an old saying among brewers. We make wort. Yeast makes beer! If you take abused yeast and use it to brew it stands to reason that you won't get the best beer you could. Yeast has to be happy and healthy to make good beer so we do all we can to keep it that way. Mark

If you play around with the ABV;equation; Change Gravity/7.5=ABV it looks to me like it would finish at 0.977 if it went to 18%. To get maximum attenuation you usually need to add the sugar in batches rather than all up front. I suspect if you have a good healthy ferment and lots of yeast it...

I think it’s a completely BS argument. Have a look at the excise tables for 01/02/2024. Scroll down to the Beer in a keg for pub serve, Excise has gone up by less than $1/L. That’s calculated on the L of alcohol in the keg. Say a 50L (48L of beer) at 5% ABV; we are talking about 2.5L of...

You can make water chemistry as simple or complex as you like! What you really need to as a learning brewer is make sure you have enough Calcium (Ca) in there. It is generally agreed that 50-100ppm (mg/L) is the minimum required to accomplish all the things Ca does. Personally I like to add...

Snip from the Complete Beer Fault Guide. Download it from the footer, well wort having a copy. Pressure fermentation can increase the Acetaldehyde production of some lagers; I haven’t used the strain in question but worth thinking about. Mostly comes down to Yeast management, but that’s always...

The tap out of most wine casks should fit. If it’s unique look for someone that installs or services bag in box (your local pub, fast food joint will have a service tech) they should be able to help you out. Mark

I would like to thank philrob for his efforts. AHB is very lightly moderated and we all have been well served by philrob. It shits me to tears that someone who isn’t paid for his role cops the amount of BS sent his way, In my experience philrob is an honest man who has been doing a thankless...