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Most common cause is Chlorine, combines with Phenols to make Chlorophenols that are really offensive even in the low ppb range (parts per billion). Don’t use bleach to clean/sanitise brewing equipment. Can also be caused by some bacterial infections, this is much rarer but can happen, if it does...

Take the taps off, pull them down, clean, inspect the rubber seals very carefully, lube and reassemble. Usually does the trick. Mark

If it’s the "faucets" leaking it will be beer that is coming out, no way gas can get up to the tap on its own. If it’s the pressure on the gas side, that’s a very different question, it could be that your beer isn’t fully carbonated and the CO2 is going into solution, it could be a leak, a...

Lagering is a bit more complex, but one part of Lagering is called "Chill Proofing". At low temperatures chill haze forms, when polyphenols and large proteins join up producing haze, this starts happening at around 8oC and happens faster as you get cooler all the way down to the freezing point...

Diastaticus or another highly attenuateive wild yeast really does sound like the best possibility. People in fruit growing areas (especially wine, apples, pears...) often find there is a lot of wild yeast in the air around certain times of the year. Might be interesting to look at when the over...

TY and Yep, its out of rego too, waiting for a part to arrive. Mark

I have always wondered if it’s thinking in an irrational system that makes the US crazy. Bemuses me that they were so quick to throw out the old British money (non)system and replace it with a thoroughly rational modern system. Try to do the same with other measurements and you’re the...

I get a bit of mail from some beer packaging companies, over the last couple of years there has been a quiet revolution in bottle design. The difference between "Toughened" glass and window glass is the way its heat treated. You can send a piece of glass of to a factory and have it toughened...

All the research done on pressure fermentation was done on Lager beer, it was found that you could knock 7 days out of a 21 day Lager brewing cycle. The early tests on Ale made beer with so many faults it was dropped immediately, with Lager there were some faults (like increased Acetaldehyde...

You need to be very careful! Especially if the beer tastes a little sweet. What I would do is take a bottle or two and put them somewhere warm for a couple of days and see what happens. On top of a hot water storage tank was an old favourite, as was the top of a fridge at the back where the...

Coke in a can has around 6g/L of dissolved CO2. If you go to a good carbonation table (I like this one on Braukaiser) measure the temperature of your fridge, then set the pressure to get the amount of fizz you want. Say your fridge is at 4oC, follow accross from the temperature (4oC) untill you...

The final gravity of a beer is made up of water, alcohol and the bits of the malt/sugars that didn’t ferment. The more malt you used at the start the higher the FG will be, so how much frigging malt did you use? If you make it to a lower volume same thing, so was it made to 23L? I don’t know...

Can’t answer that one (I'm assuming you had a picture that didn’t get attached) without a lot more information. The FG can vary a lot from beer to beer, there is no hard and fast rule that says 1.014 is right! Or wrong for that matter. It depends a lot on what went into the beer, the type of...

I well remember the old silver bullet, back when it was one of the better commercial offerings. Then I discovered coopers, sort of lead me here. I had a talk with an old "Master Brewer" (the MB from IBD carries the equivalence with a PhD in brewing from Birmingham Uni) about Reschs. The brewery...

akx is pretty much right, I would go a little further and say temperature control and the right yeast are vital to Lager brewing! Starting with a good quality kit or fresh wort kit would be smart, as a lot of Lager brewing is about process. You will be able to make good Lager/Pilsner style beer...

Nice to be able to agree with WEAL, 60 minutes is a short boil! My default is still 90 minutes, the flavour and colour that develops during the boil is part of the beer. David Heath leavs a lot of why we boil beer longer out of his reasoning. Mark

Might give you some ideas Mark

First impression is that two things stand out as possible places to look. First - Oats I agree with WEAL and would probably use flaked barley. But its only 4.6% of your grist, so it really shouldn’t be a big problem. That said oats supplied through malt stockist are very different to the oats...

Add 400-500 ml of sterile water (boiled not boilinging) and bottle it. It isnt stuck, it's finished fermenting and the SG isnt1.020. After the ferment starts you cant use the simple conversion as Refractometers measure how far a sample bends light. when its just sugar(s) in water we can. Once it...

If you mean "Refractometer" they can’t be used after fermentation starts unless you apply some maths or use a calculator. Most refractometers have two scales often SG and Brix. You need to work in one or the other, let’s use Brix or as brewers call it Plato (oP) Roughly SG = (4*oP)/1000+1 so...