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I've read through many sections of palmers online version, i thought it was finally time to send some royalties his way. I'll be happy if the other two books are half as good.

Can't see i being a problem. Is it standard bottle thickness glass? Maybe test it, put it in the sink, plastic bag and a towel over the top. Work out the amount of pressure a bottle needs to take and add an appropriate ammount of backing soda and vinigar. See if it holds. I had a 5l brown...

Just got these 3 from amazon for $56 all up delivered, didn't seem too bad. I did get suckered in by the 'if you like this look at this and this' feature of Amazon. "Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles" Ray Daniels; Paperback; $13.56 Sold by: Amazon.com...

I wrote some emails to James Spencer from basic brewing radio about my experiment with wild yeast. I went back and found what I'd written. Here's my conclusions. "The wild yeast started, the starter bottle swelled up there were signs of fermentation in the bottle. I opened it to take a smell...

If you can get hold of some agar, do it this way. There is a lot of shite around in the air and i'd consider it a bit of a safety concern to try it uncontrolled in Australia. The way I attempted to do it was to expose the plate and then allow it to incubate. There was a couple of yeast...

A few years a go I caught some wild yeast on an agar dish and turned it into a 2l starter. That's as far as I was willing to go with it, it tasted aweful. Have a read about Lambic beers though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambic They are blessed with naturally occuring pallatable yeasts which...

Awesome, can't complain too much about free cocaine laced beer! But he can keep the transvestites.

I usually get a bit of sludge in the bottom of my secondary, not much but still some. When kegging without a secondary I'm guessing this sludge would still cloud the beer. My guess would be it would be worse then in bottles because it will end up covering the pickup pipe, while in a bottle you...

Is there really much risk of infection in a secondary? You have an environment with high alcohol content and very little sugar remaining. What beasties can really survive in there besides yeast that have been artificially selected over a long time to have the alcohol tolerance to survive in...

His still making up his mind and told me to find someone else if I could.

I haven't been able to order mine with someone yet. If anyone is keen I want to get 2 shipped to Sydney. If I get 4 it will cost about $70 a pop (as opposed to $80 for 2) with the aussie dollar doing quite well against the euro. Anyone interested? I'll even throw in the toy truck. PM me. Be...

Also I don't usually touch the mash except the big stir at the start. Wil a 30 min mash stir help to expose more starch? I got 75% on sat which is a big improvement, but i was letting a friend use my equipment for their own brew so I wasn't in complete control of the variables. He crushed the...

Alright so I think I understand the mashing process a bit better now. The starch in the grain is converted to sugars which sits in the liquid held by the grain during mashing. No extra sugar is absorbed into solution through the sparging process. Sparging is a process of dilution of the liquid...

The tiny amount of fermentation that occurs during carbonation will make a bees dick of difference to the flavour if temp is high. If your concerened do a contrast and see if you can note any differences.

My tun is 20L so just fits 5kg grain for a 20L batch with optimal water grain ratio. I've got a hand crank type mill, I will definately mill finer next time, see how this goes. Have never had probs with stuck mash so won't be a problem to have it ultra fine.

The problem with this is my mash tun is a very limited space. So there's no room to add water to heat the mash up without taking out wort. Rather then take wort out and add hot water, i may as well take wort out to heat up the mash, and absorb a little more sugar. Your right though if I had the...

Heat plays a big part, if my understandings correct. Try to mix sugar into a cup of cold water compared to boiling water, see which you can get more sugar into. As the heat of the water rises, the sugar saturation of the water increases. Raising the heat for the sparge is not really necesarry to...

No it wont, because I'll run the decoction through the false bottom so there's no grain parts in it :P. If tannins wern't a problem I may as well sparge at 95C

Last time I calculated my efficientcy it was 67% so not terribly bad but a lot of room for improvement. Anyway brewing today, so I'll see how well this method works, i don't think it's going to be that difficult. I guess the one thing to be careful is mix the boiling wort through the mash as I...

I do things a bit ass end about. I haven't read nearly enough about brewing and often think of an idea through first prinicples to only discover that it's a well established practice I don't do. Anyway I just had an idea which I believe is going to fall into this catagory. Right now I brew...