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I do think a pH meter is a very good investment. pH stabiliser on the other hand, well if you can measure your pH and have some acid (I prefer Lactic Acid) it’s redundant. It is also far less effective at keeping the pH stable than some would suggest. Make sure you have 100-150ppm of Calcium in...

Most new brewers ask unanswerable questions or supply way too little information to get anything other than a guess as an answer. Brewing is a science and an art but the art doesn’t make the science go away. We can work out your OG (Original Gravity) pretty accurately, from an equation that...

Yeast choices are important to. S-04 and Nottingham are both much better as sedimenting than is US-05, they stick to the bottom more too. Racking to a secondary fermenter is another good way to reduce yeast sediment, sadly gone out of fashion around here but it still works. Mark

Dave I had a look at the yeast table you put together. Just one point Fermentis 34/70 is the same as W 2124. It’s the best selling Lager yeast in the world and accounts for something like 45% of all the Lager made in Germany. Worth noting that W in SW-34/70 stands for Weinstephner, but it is...

Adding a little to what akx said:- Nottingham is more attenuateive than US-05, it should finish lower As a general rule Lager yeasts will go lower than Ale yeast. Yeasts that are slow to fallout (flock) tend to be more attenuateive. There is a way to quickly determine the "attenuation limit" of...

Yes, I did the tour and asked the same question - same yeast. Mark

That tour would have been a very long time ago. They had multi strain house yeast which also had a bunch of other bug in it. Eventually it went out of balance and became unpredictable. It was replaced with a pure strain selected from the mix they had. The blend might not have been too safe for a...

Apparently they use the same yeast in the whole Coopers range. If you are looking for healthy yeast best to go for a young (see Best After date) and a low/er alcohol beer. The Pale Ale is often a good choice, in theory the Mild would be better but its often got a bit of age on it. Mark

The one on Keg-Land isn’t too bad. When you get one read up on storage and calibration. Get some storage solution and extra standards 4pH and 7pH are good for brewers. No doubt there are lots of other good value pH meters on the market but this one will do the job. Big proviso is that you look...

If your system is pumped (it could help if you said what you are using) it isn’t "dead space" as the liquor in that space will be involved in the mash. Odds on all the water you add will count as mash liquor. Mark

There are two things you need to know before you can even start asking the question. The pressure and the temperature. Without knowing both any answer is just noise. You don’t need a temperature controller for most fridges. But measuring the temperature is vital. As fridges go up and down a bit...

You need to understand how yeast works; it’s different to what you appear to think. Yeast doesn’t want to make alcohol at all, that’s it responding to an environment where it can’t reproduce which is what it really wants to do. In a wort yeast will make yeast until it runs out of any one of a...

Its been a while since Victoria had the option of printing money (01/01/1901). Point taken about how governments sometimes behave. Before this turns into a political slanging match... Choice had a look at how heat pump HWS preformed, might be worth a read. Mark

Hops and bittering can get very complicated. Most of the readily available calculators won’t get you very close. The conversion of Alpha Acid to IsoAlpha Acid then to Trans Iso degradation products. There are also lots of variables, most important is the temperature usually assumed to be...

Welcome to AHB, hope you get a lot out of this place. If you want Windsor to do its thing properly you need to pitch about 1g/L of wort, otherwise it can get a bit fussy. Sometimes "Rousing" it helps, I would prefer to put the fermenter on a table and slide it around in a circle until you get...

Actually they are something like 3.5 times more efficient than direct heating with an element. Heat pumps move heat around rather than creating it, so the comparison isn’t a direct one more of an apples and oranges. Mark

Er.... I think more like 14 years, what happened, run out of fingers? Mark

Yes yeast will try to ferment at the best temperature for its purposes. Sadly yeast has no interest in making beer. Its aim is to make more yeast and will do all it can to that end. We manipulate the yeasts environment, population, nutrients... to persuade it to make the beer we want...

I would be very reluctant to mash or boil for less than 60 minutes. You won’t get the beer you want if you don’t mash and boil properly. A 60 minute boil is a short boil; my default is 90 minutes; until very recently brewing textbooks would be recommending 2 hour boils as standard. For some...

Fair cop...