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Actually it doesn't seem to be much. Mostly because I'm not stirring the total bejesus out of the secondary yeast cake, most of it is left. I just want to see the wort get cloudy if you catch my drift. (I do 4 weeks in the primary and 2 in the secondary so there's probably less than you have?)...

Wow, mucho great stuff here. A few had asked whether I boil up the dex before hand. Yes, but there's plenty of weak spots it seems based on the comments. Others had recommended putting the sugar into the vessel before siphoning the wort onto it. I haven't been doing that. One of the reasons...

It's not rocket science is it? Well apparently you can still cock it up royally because I have not one but two brews which have fire hydrant bottles and flat bottles in the same batch. Obviously there's not enough stirring involved. I foolishly thought that if I left it for 20 min or so the...

Crumbs that sounds fabulous. What's a good wheat recipe to go with it?

I'd love to give that a go but sadly I lack a brew fridge. I've been watching some on ebay...

I hit on the idea of weighing the other bag and peering at the grains in that one. After a good, ooh, 30 seconds worth of intense concentration I worked out that essentially the two bags were switched. Confound those pesky bag wranglers at Ye Olde Grain and Grape. Confound them for not realising...

I brewed this up and sure enough, it's a lot darker than the Summer Ale usually is. So it looks like 400gr of torrified wheat got switched out for some random very dark grain. I suppose I could whinge to G&G but I might have had more of a leg to stand on if did it before I brewed and chucked...

Cracking open a fresh glistening bag of grains from G&G for Nelson Sauvin Summer Ale *, I'm surprised by seeing black grains in my kettle. The recipe only has two grains, Marris Otter and Torrified Wheat. I've made this before but I can't recall seeing black grains in it. On the other hand it's...

Marvellous, so it seems there was something I was missing with the technique. Particularly useful to catch that bit about waiting until the convection settles down (you can see it moving trub around so that totally makes sense) before siphoning. Manticle, that's a excellent paper - very...

So we've got these things called hot breaks and cold breaks. These, apparently, are not seasonal holidays nor are they unusual ground-based dancing activities based in the 1980s. Well, I sort of no-chill (cube in a bath) so I don't know about cold break anyway - but you know, we have forums for...

When fermenting in the cube, do you just leave the cap on but loose or go for cling film + rubber band or similar? Mat.

Yeah, so I presume the 25s are probably also a bit conservative in capacity.

Interesting thread. What about using a 25L cube instead? That'll leave plenty of air in there and plenty of head space for fermenting. If you slosh hot wort around, it should still be safe. Particularly if it's going to be fermented as soon as it's cool anyway? This outfit in Melbourne has 25L...

And... while we're at it? BigW for 750ml PET bottles? I'm tooling up to make some brews for friends...

Marvellous, great leads - thanks gents!

I'm having trouble tracking them down. Two aussie disposals have been sold out and having phoned Ray's Outdoors they had none either. Course there's a lot of those stores... just wondering if anyone knew who had them for sure? Mat.

A quick thing I knocked up out of some spare parts and a Arduino, a digital temp probe using a cheap DS18B20 probe. Since this photo was taken I added some software features to graph the temperature, show me the rate of change, ping on alerts and added a boil timer. Simple project but worked well.

I was thinking of basically just using a large sterile syringe to suck up some yeast cake after I've bottled. If that's good for a few weeks until the next brew then I'd be pretty happy.

How long is a starter good for in the fridge? I like the idea of some strains of liquid yeast but I'm not paying that dough for each one... and I might not need the yeast for weeks. Mat.

This yeast temperature thing is pretty wide spread... Dr Cone, the bloke from Danstar Yeast, is on record as saying most yeast strain optimum rehydration temperature is closer to 40C. You can Google that easily enough. Course one might choose not to believe the lead scientist of a yeast lab...