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Hi Pumpy, I've been wondering similar things myself with a view to retiring the old immersion chiller to save a bit of time on brew day. I don't really have an answer or any observations of my own to offer, but my summary of the points peopled make (and they are all conflicting) is: Late hop...

Frag_Dog, absolutly correct. Although if you're prepared to wait for 2+ months, I'd consider adding all the sugar you would have put in bottles into the keg and naturally carbonating the keg (the first glass may have sediment, but you will use less CO2 this way. As for water. My wife was into...

No one seems to want to answer your question directly (which might mean the answer is not really straight forward) so I'll try. Normally turning priming sugar into bubbles is quite quick (1 week at 20C should see it done) but i f you have a cold spell it will take longer. Normally this won't...

Hey Komodo, with a 45A circuit, why don't you consider an electric kettle as well? Also why 2 march pumps rather than 1 and lots of stainless disconnects? General feeling on the forums seems to be that soft plumbing with disconnects is easier to clean than hard plumbing. I dont' think most...

Hi Elli, There are two scenarios where you transfer beer to a second fermenter. The first scenario is the "bottling bucket". I used this for quite a while. Basically instead of putting carbonation drops in each bottle, you disolve some sugar in water and put it in the bottom of a second...

You might have a problem with getting high enough flow rate through the immersion chiller. If the flow rate is too low, the water will reach the same temperature as the wort when its only halfway though the chiller and you end up wasting half of your expensive copper. I find with my chilling its...

I use qbrew on my linux system, but its a little limited (had to write some python scripts to do things like strike volume and temperature calculations and there are no water chemistry calculations) I get a lot of beer blogs and can't really find the software your referring to. Sorry to be...

Inflatable mattress pump. I connect tubing to the tap on the fermenter and suck air out of the airlock hole. I use it to start a siphon but it should work just as well between the fermenter and kettle on the same level (but my pump is a tad loud) Also a march pump is definitely going to be less...

Thanks guys, Tipping the whole lot in the bin sounds the way (I guess I've just been wary because I've had the manifold fall apart once :-P) I am batch sparging ATM (I build the manifold after reading "How to Brew", before discovering AHB and the joys of batch). Based on both gravity of the...

So my mash tun is a 55L willow with a slotted copper manifold. To clean it I use a jug to scoop jugfull after jugfull of hot spent grains into a garbage bag which goes into the bin (not enough room to compost all that grain at my place). This is both a PitA and makes for a low efficiency system...

Hi James, I'm pretty sure they are HDPE. From what I remember HDPE is "rated" (i.e. completly stable) to less than 100C. Having said that I think plenty of people have boiled in them with just some softening. Wikipedia suggests the melting point for HDPE will be in the range 120-130 (and that it...

Just from a physics perspective, if you flask has a radius of about 5cm, you'll get about 21m/s^2 (i.e. a little over 2G) at the edges of the flask (less towards the centre). And if its off centre. you may get complex waves sloshing around. If you put it about 20cm away from the centre (and use...

Unfortunately I think the answer is no. Certainly some yeast by products can be cleaned up with time because they have only been partly digested, but I think, given that alcohol in high concentration is just as poisonous to yeast as humans, trying to metabolise fusel alcohol will not go so well...

You might be interested in some sour mashing techniques described at at BYO. Basically I would count on there being bugs present after the steep. Depending on temperature I would expect them to modify the flavour of the liquor from a little to a lot. Depending on the variety of bug and your...

I'm with Hutch, I'd expect the power factor to vary too much depending on the load to make it meaningful. Are you doing something funky like generating your own sine wave to control the speed of the pump or something? If your that serious about it though I'd probably hook up a shunt resistor as...

Just though I should mention since we are all focusing on the hot side heat sink, having a decent cold side heat sink helps as well. Having a large area contacting the wort that is only slightly cool will be much more efficient than having a small area thats really cool. Might even be worth...

Hi Dazzla, If you haven't purchased the pot you you might want to consider ally rather than SS to give better heat conduction, but it shouldn't really matter. A couple of things come to mind. You'll want to bolt the peltier on pretty tight to the pot (i.e. clamp it between the pot and the...

Back in the day, the nerds with noisy nerd boxes used to modify the fan connectors, so that instead of connecting to 0 and 12V they connected to 5 and 12V (i.e. some people ran 12V fans off 7V) It definitely makes the fan go slower and reduces the noise (not that that matters for a fan in a...

Personally I would use the boiling water. Dry hopping (adding hops once the wort is cold) is not entirely interchangable with adding it to hot water. With a 10 minute steep you will still be getting some bitterness from the hops and I wouldn't want to loose that if the kit designers intended it...

Seems to be the general feeling is "It depends how hard you boil". Just as a matter of interest, I remember reading that some commercial breweries (in the interest of energy savings etc) only have about a 4% evapouration rate. I guess at that point they have to worry about kettle shape and hop...