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I just made about 2.5L of spicy tomato chutney from the 4.3kg of San Marsano tomatoes I picked from my veggie garden yesterday afternoon. Methinks they'll be delicious - will find out in a couple weeks once they all mature a bit.

And now we're all talking about Budweiser. Obviously it's not making an impact to us here because of availability, but imagine every extra dry drinker here hearing people get up in arms about a silly ad. They'd just be getting all confirmation biased and loving watching everyone get into a...

Lard is great. Potatoes fried in lard are amazing, works really well rubbed into the flour when making tortillas also. Plus when you make your own you get cracklins! It's hard to get good back fat these days - we usually get ours from the pigs we butcher ourselves and our local butchers pigs...

Could you just fill the top with silicone if you weren't going to use it for BBQ? I've used various thermometers over the years and wish I'd just bought a Thermapen from the start. I have one now and it's the best.

Try beersmith for free for 21 days and it'll do all of the calculations for you. The full version is $20 or so and is one of the best brewing related investments you can make.

When you say weaker do you only mean alcohol percentage or are you also talking about body. Adding sugar will increase alcohol but decrease the body - drying out the beer.

That would be totally unlike me....

I got given a shitload - literally about 8kg of cherries - I'm doing a lambic.

Also might be an idea to let it settle so you're not pouring chunks of yeast trub into your bottles.

The cherry lambic seems to have gone pretty well. Haven't actually checked my gravity but my volumes were pretty much spot on. Wort smelled amazing with about 1.5kg of cherries boiling away in it. Now only about 3 months of fermenting and ageing on fresh fruit before I actually get to try it...

Well... it's OG is up around 1.10 so it'll dry out a fair bit but still be reasonably light bodied. The lacto will dry it out even more so yeah it's a very dry, sour cherry beer. I'm also using mahlab in it which is a middle eastern spice made from cherry pips so it should be interesting.

So far seems to be doing well. Doing a 38L batch. 9kg of Pilsner and 1.8kg of pale wheat crushed and now mashing. Overshot the temp a bit in the tun but added 1L of cool water to it and it brought it straight down to the 64C I was after.

Ah - if it's the only mistake you make today at least it's not a huge one!

Nice - I'm just about to start carting water down to the shed. Making a cherry lambic today - got a bunch of cherries from the family that lives in Young. Should be good with the Turkey at Christmas in July.

My ghetto system involves a silicon bung and a carbonation cap/counter pressure filling cap. Total cost was about $20.

I'm thinking of doing it just like this but I wasn't going to boil after the lacto ferm. Do you think I'll get those garbagey flavours if i cool to 20 odd, oxygenate and pitch? My thoughts are that it could sour even further during & after the fermentation.

I am doing one right now actually. My process was taken from Michael Tonsmiere's American Sour Beer's and thus far has been: Get a 2L bottle of preservative free apple juice, open it and dump in a cup of malt (i used acidulated). Leave that at warm (~40C) temps for 3 days. After three days...

So I've been making a lacto starter in apple juice for my Berliner Weiss. Going to sour the wort with it according to the method in American Sour Beers. Hope it turns out well!

My concern is how are you providing oxygen for your yeasties?

I smoked with some plum wood for the first time the night before last. Have previously smoked with hickory or cherry... the plum was much... frutier.