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Ohh colour me... uh... in! :)

The biggest problem I ever had was a barleywine with 11.5kg of grain in a 44 litre urn.... couldn't lift the bag at all! Had to ladle grain into a colander and juggle sparging vols while getting the bag weight down far enough. A massive pain in the arse, but got 35 litres at 1.080 into the boil...

Sorry for the hi-jack Chris! DBStu, I remember seeing a pic of your immersion bird's nest and the question I forgot to ask at the time was.... there's not really going to be a trub cone form due to the massive turbulence on whirlpooling, and if you pull the coil out it's going to stir everything...

The pond pumps don't like a lot of head loss, I run mine with the water sitting at the same level, so losses are limited to line only. Its still a bit though given about 10m of half inch pipe means there's only 5-7 or so litres/min. Put the bucket on the floor so the lift is 1m or so and that...

I was doing the same thing, but using a spare 30L fermenter to hold the cold water & pond pump. Through a 25ft (I think? pretty damn long!) coil the flow rate is not huge, less than a tap on full bore, maybe 5-7 litres/min? Found that with Tas water temps of about 12 degrees that it wasn't worth...

Yep that was the other thing, thanks for the reminder Mikeyr, mine was sold as a 48L but was actually 44. The kettle draws 2200W when its boiling, and while not super quick to ramp up, 8-10 degrees every 8 mins or so, it will keep that boil going. At $120 delivered, it's about $5 a brew if it...

I got one of the no-name concealed element versions and ran 20-odd brews through it in 12 months before it cacked itself (was not paying attention and a big rye wheaty burned a massive scorch & cooked the element). Won't do more than a simmer at 90-odd degrees now, even with bypassing cut off...

Yep, likewise with Tropical_Brews, I've used the same caps for nearly 2 years, reckon I've cycled through over half a dozen times for the lots that I have with no probs. I'll turf them if the little blue seal bit inside the cap is looking a bit manky. I've found it's the PET bottles that go...

Homebrewing doesn't fly as far under the radar as you might think. The BasicsCard income management system for welfare recipients (first rolled out as a way of dealing with the societal epidemic of unacceptable widespread and rife poor behaviour...wait, sarcasm or parody, I can never tell...) is...

I've just recently got into kegging as well, and have noted that although the beer can be ready in a week from fermenter to keg at 12psi, it realy does benefit from at least 2 weeks before getting stuck in. This could be a combination of sitting at 8 degrees and the types of beer to date - IPA...

A good chat, plenty of thought and useful links to boot, that's why I really like this forum! For my contribution I'd like to add this document for reader's perusal, it was something I found when I was stuck with an urn that pooped itself and would not do more than a mild simmer of about...

For getting into the groove in about 10mins time, putting 10kg of grain thru the mill takes a little bit of mindless doof-doof on rotation to pass the time :) https://youtu.be/IdU5qU8CDBE

I wanted to try AG when browsing the recipes in the forums and seeing so many AG recipes with big wraps, but as a K&K dabbling in extracts the biggest impediments seemed the complexity (missed the SMASH stuff, didn't even occur to me it was a possible approach) and the huge step up in gear. Then...

Nice work mattyg8, I found with only a couple of brews that efficiency was regularly mid-80% when measuring before transfer to the fermenter. It was the variability of the trub volume that threw out my efficiency measured into the fermenter, sometimes knocking it back from 85% to 65%. So I...

6 months ago around xmas 5 of us each did a big barley wine for a long secondary ferment in a Larks barrel. Bottling happens next weekend, hoping it's sitting around 11% or so. My portion was 11.25kg of grain as a single infusion BIAB effort in a 44 litre urn with ZERO headspace. Took about 8...

I used undiluted star san smeared onto my concealed element to get the scorch to just peel off. This worked even for some serious black gunk that was rock solid. Takes hardly any, like keg lube on an o-ring, then let it sit for an hour or so.

I needed some crystal & choc rye for a recipe a couple of weeks ago and found some good info on these forums & this site http://barleypopmaker.info/2009/12/08/home-roasting-your-malts/ about making your own. Did both and they did taste, look & smell pretty good, but I'm a week away from kegging...

Just popped into primary a rye & galaxy red (hopefully!) ale, using some home-roasted crystal & choc rye & fresh galaxy flowers. Pale ale 66% Rye 20% Crystal rye 5% Choc rye 1.5% Amber 4.5% Melanoidin 3% OG 1.055, hoping for FG 1.014 for about 5.2% Est about 35IBU 20g Magnum as it came up to...

I've just finished trying a couple of different approaches with cherries. One was a soak in sodium met, pitting then freezing, then on thawing putting in a steamer for 10mins. The other was just putting the thawed pitted cherries straight into secondary. The secondary now has a lovely pellicle...

Interesting & frankly pretty scary thread. I've only just had my first lot of bottle infections and picked up a wild yeast (text book pellicle, mucking around with cherries) and know how it happened, but nothing like your tale. I was wondering if there might be something external, like if you...