New member of the club, as a 32 year old Dutch guy living in Franconia, and just started drinking my first beer. Which was a brew kit from brewmonkey, a belgian blonde style ale.

Messed pretty much every step up, especially the temp control. But still ended up with a very satisfying first beer!

I already have a 10 KG bag of Munich Helles malt coming, and a kellerbier bottle conditioning as we speak. So I'm hooked.

Here is a picture of me enjoying it:

https://planetaryexpedition.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/biertje-scaled.jpg

Hi all,
First time brewing and I did my best to completely sanitize everything and do things "the right way" but I'm a little paranoid something could have gone wrong with that crucial step. How would I know if the brew got contaminated? Would it be "dangerous" if it did?

I’ll be brewing a West Coast IPA, and plan on doing a late dry hop. I’ll be using US-05, and have been told to let that ride out a good 14 days. The last time I made this, I dry hopped about 10 days into fermentation by opening the bucket top slightly, and pouring them in. I didn’t notice immediate oxidation, but after over a month the flavor/aroma did start to die out. Now I’ll be using a stainless steel fermenter bucket, and am thinking of doing the magnets in a bag technique. My question is, how long can pellet hops stay out of the original packaging? Im thinking of setting up the bags of hops with magnets on day 3 so the yeast uses any introduced oxygen, then dropping them on day 10. This leaves the hops just hanging for a good 7 days, and wonder if this will stale out the hops? Cheers everyone!

This is my first carboantion machine and it was a bad experience. I was unable to screw the CO2 canister into the head properly even after following instructions and watching their videos.

I've been in contact with kegland suppport and will be sending it back for their evaluation.

Imo this is really poor design.

You have to awkwardly screw it into the head assemble in mid air. Looking at sodastream and drinkmate machines, they have a plastic guide so the bottle cannot be screwed in at the wrong angle.

In my case, it goes in straight/level about half way, then starts going in at an angle. The machine never works because the CO2 canister is not properly engaged/sealed.

The u-fizz has no independent reviews or videos so I was taking a gamble. The product listing does have several reviews, none with the same issue i'm having.

I was looking at the drinkmate omnifizz but the total cost to buy in is $280 AUD ($140 machine and $140 for 4 canisters). The cost of the u-fizz was $112 ($90 + $22). The sodastream mix is $180.

Has anyone used the u-fizz? Or have anything to say about the other models?

I brewed a bock by accident starting gravity was 1.066 using pilsner and Munich malt and tettang hops… any way after brewing I put my plastic fermentor into my keezer at 52 pitched two packs of saf34/70 thoroughly sanitized every thing after about 7 days of active fermentation I brought temp up in keezer to 65 for 4 days… from there I closed transferred to purged sanitized corny keg hit it with 30psi co2 for 24 hours then burst it set regulator to 11 psi and cold crashed for about a week…mind you I pulled gravity before closed transferred and it was at about 1.017 but had a really bad apple taste which I figured was all the suspended yeast…but after 8days of cold crashing still had that bad taste so I pulled corny keg and put in a dark room at 72 to referment for 4 days now I pulled another sample with picknick tap …color was a lot darker but still had an apple bite to it… and gravity hit 1.014 so my question is should I let it sit at 72 for a few more days or just put back in the keezer at 33 to recold crash and carbonate…. Or am I screwed any advice would be appreciated

An ale aged in oak bourbon barrels, coming in at 11% abv. I’m in love with this beer. I pay $16 a 4banger, and frequently.

I’m not a brewer but have long been envious of the skills of this craft.

This beer could be the one to urge me into learning the ways of the fermentation.

Can I get into this process and produce something of this caliber, even eventually, or am I doomed to shell out $4 a beer grocery store pricing?

Hello i want to start in the hobby and i got a recipe book and i want to scale this recipe to 5 gallons because my fermenter is that size, so i wanted to ask you guys how can i take measurements out of this recipes and scale them so they can make sense, also i wanted to ask if it would be better to do just the gallon or go ahead with 5 to start.

• 6 lb watermelon

• 1-1/2 lb fresh table red or green grapes

• water to 1 gallon • juice and zest of 2 lemons

• 1-2/3 lbs granulated sugar

• 1 tsp pectic enzyme

• 1 crushed Campden tablet

• 1 tsp yeast nutrient

• wine yeast

Cut the rind off of melon, cut melon into one-inch cubes, remove loose seeds, and put melon and any free juice in primary (crock, plastic pail, etc.). Thinly grate the yellow off two lemons, juice the lemons, and add the juice and zest (gratings) to primary. Separately, wash, destem, and crush the grapes well in a bowl. Add grapes and grape juice and crushed Campden tablet to primary. Add water to make up 1 gallon. Add sugar and stir well to dissolve. Cover primary with cloth, wait 12 hours and pectic enzyme and yeast nutrient. After additional 12 hours add wine yeast. Cover and ferment 5 days, stirring daily. Strain juice into secondary (demijohn) and fit airlock. Ferment 30 days and rack, top up, refit airlock, and repeat 30 days later. After additional 60 days, rack, top up, and stabilize (add 1/4 tsp potassium sorbate and another crushed Campden tablet). Wait 10 days, sweeten to taste and bottle. Allow to age in bottles one year.

ok, short and simple here.

New to homebrewing and kegged a few coopers kits succesfully. made a few hard ciders very successfully.

moved to all grain and got a nice little kit. was told everything was in the bag... except, oops... no hops.

So, now I have a brewed lager with no hops in it and it is 8 days fermented now.

THE QUESTION FINALLY: Can I make a "hops tea", put that in my keg like I would when I backsweeten my cider, pressurize with co2 to purge out any oxygen from the mix, then close loop the lager in with a light swishing to mix?

The google box says I can and we all know that google would never lie or make a mistake!

I'm sure the finished product won't quite be as good as it could be, but that is where I am at with it now. I'd rather not waste it, but I could always just do it all again I suppose.

Thanks for all you're seasoned advice on my new journey!

I had an idea for an American/English Pale Ale mash up with grain and hops (Fuggle, Cascade) from both sides or the Atlantic. I pitched Cellarscience Nectar yeast, but it didn't seem to get busy even after 48 hours, so I pitched 34/70 to try to start the process. I dropped the temp to the upper limits of lager yeast and the fermentation began.

Fast forward a few weeks and I'm drinking a very tasty, yet maybe undefinable style. I do love a hoppy lager, and I guess this fits that bill, but it also has English ale character.

Anyway, thats part of the fun, I think. Pivot when necessary. Enjoy what the beer gods give you!

Mine is betweeen 4 kegs in center of keezer approximately half of the height of a keg in a bottle filled with glycol water mix. Is this effective enough?

Hi guys so I did an impromptu brew. I’m decently new to brewing. I have only made makgeolli before but I have made it close to 6 times. Love the unique flavor. Anyways I’ve always loved oranges and I wanted to see if I could make a quick orange mead. So I boiled some orange peels with 2 tea bags in water and bought a whole bag of clementines that I peeled and blended, then I strained out the orange peels out from the water and mixed it with the orange juice from The peeled oranges. I then poured in 3 pounds of honey a cinnamon stick and a little bit of sodium bicarbonate as well as alkaline water to raise ph and get temp down to room temp. Next I took some of that concoction, tasted pretty good so I put in in a clean bowl poured in wine yeast and let it sit for a half an hour to see if the yeast survived the ph. They did and started releasing co2 pretty quickly so I poured it back into the fermenter. This is day 2 and it’s fermenting pretty well. Smells of ethanol and is bubbling away.

My question is this. Beyond regular contamination that comes with fermenting (I do a good job with keeping everything sterile) what should I worry about to make sure this is drinkable. Anything potentially bad from the oranges besides weird flavor. Also what kind of flavor should I expect if anyone has done anything similar.

Thanks for reading this long things

Hello, fellow brewers!

Currently i am fermenting a NEIPA:

20% Oats

15% Wheat Malt

65% Pilsner Malt

1.048 OG

Pitched a second generation of Verdant IPA

Whirlpool hops: 100grams Mosaic and 100grams Citra at 82 celsius. As for the dry hops - 100 grams Citra and 100 grams Galaxy.

Fermentation is halfway through and i am thinking about adding the rest of the hops for that batch. I've been reading Scott Janish book and some of his articles. He suggests to dry hop at 14 celsius after the fermentation is complete.

But i have some issues with that:

1) I want to add Citra during fermentation, so some greener compounds could be vented off with the CO2. Also, i want to get some biotransformation (i know that whirlpool addition provides some thiols, but i want more 😄 ), but i worry about the polyphenols

2) I have problem with hop creep, if i don't let it sit and referment newly available sugars. Thus i have to ramp the temp again to let it happen. What to do?

3) I want to add hops in 2 batches. Should i do them both at 14 celsius sequentially or one of them during cold crash?

Sorry for a lot of dumb questions, but what are your best dryhopping practices? My main goal is to extract as much aromatic compounds as possible, still limiting the amount of polyphenols being extracted.

Thanks in advance!

I'm probably overthinking this (I've been homebrewing for 14 years), but wanted to see what others thought.

I'm brewing an old ale next week with the plan of kegging it this winter. I'm going to ferment with a mix of a british yeast and a brett. Is it worth it to rack this into a secondary glass carboy or just leave in a fermentation bucket? I know historically these were aged a year in cask and some oxygenation is appropriate for style, but would I be risking too much by not transferring? It's also been a while since I've made a brett beer, wasn't there a thought at one point that it does better with some yeast cake present or am I remembering wrong?

Sometime soon I'm going to start fermenting in kegs to simplify my life, this is the setup I'm considering. I think it is pretty standard but I have a few questions.

Fermentation setup. Fermentation in the first keg purges a second keg of Starsan and fills it with CO2, which in turn fills a third keg with starsan.

• Keg 1: Fermentation keg. Gas post connected to Keg 2's gas post.
• Keg 2: Starsan filled keg. Liquid post connected to liquid post of Keg 3.
• Keg 3: Storage for Starsan pushed out of Keg 2. Spunding valve on gas post set to some PSI value.

Cold crash setup. Keg 3 is disconnected, temperature is lowered, residual pressure in Keg 2 compensates for pressure drop due to lower temperature during cold crash.

Transfer setup. Standard pressure transfer from beer Keg 1 to CO2 filled Keg 2.

Will this setup work? What sort of PSI should I set on the spunding valve during fermentation? This setup will carbonate the Starsan solution, is that a problem if I plan to reuse the Starsan keg later?

Hey all. I completed the brewing part of my first ever homebrew yesterday, doing a BIAB partial mash. I took some notes on issues I ran into that I'd like feedback/clarity on. Feel free to respond to all or just one of these.

1. Star San protocol: I have very hard water - I haven't tested pH yet but there's a lot of evidence for hardness, like how it leaves mineral deposits in all of our sink and bathroom fixtures. I read somewhere that this could make the Star San break down very quickly, so I ended up making several very small batches (1/2 - 1 qt.) of Star San to repeatedly sanitize things as I went. Overkill?
2. Also, do you worry about keeping your hands sanitized when coming in close proximity to the wort, or is just washing with soap and water enough since presumably you're not dunking your hands in the wort? You still have to handle things that might touch the wort, thermometer, siphon, etc. I ended up spraying and respraying everything including my hands, which I know is inadvisable since it's caustic but I was paranoid lol!
3. Gunk in the siphon: When I went to transfer the wort from the kettle to the fermenter, I had issues gunking up the siphon with sediment. This was all gunk that either made it through the bag, or it could have been dissolved hop pellets I guess. Either way I feel like I was doing something wrong, maybe I need a lesson on how to siphon properly.
4. Sediment on inner walls of fermenter: Because the siphon was getting gunked up, toward the end I just poured the rest of the wort into the fermenter. I got sediment on the inner walls of the fermenter and left it there because I didn't want to touch anything inside the fermenter. Is this a problem at all? From the outside, as of today, it appears that most of the sediment on the walls has already sunk down to the liquid level.
5. Cooling. I don't have an immersion cooler yet. The cooling took way too long, I'm embarrassed to even say how long. I did an ice bath and quickly used up all my ice (I probably should have used room temp water first to bring down the wort temp then added the ice at the end) and it was a lot of time stirring with the kettle open, which has me worried about airborne contamination and what not. Should I be worried about this?

Someone just suggested to me that I freeze several one gallon jugs then sanitize and submerge them in the wort to cool it, I might try that next time if I still don't have an immersion cooler.

Thanks all!

Link to my beer in fermenter + in glass 2 weeks later

https://imgur.com/a/QsTG3eY

So I tried a neipa with wheat and pale ale malt and oat

Hops: mosaic, azacca, cascade

Yeast: lallemand neipa

It tasted fantastic! I don't know exactly what happened to my beer but I haven't seen it look like that before but I tried and it tastes and smells great 👍. It did gush and ooze out of the flask for a long time but good overall.

Edit: needless to say my stomach is ok!

I'm fermenting a Belgian wit at 65F in my fermentation chamber (converted chest freezer with an Inkbird controller). We're getting into storm season and I've already had two outages this month.

The yeast is really sensitive to temp swings and a 10-15 degree jump would throw off all the flavors. A generator seems like overkill for a chest freezer that draws 80W.

What are other homebrewers doing?

I have finally had a good setup where I can cold crash my beer (with a kegerator). What worries me though is finishing with not enough of yeast in suspension and my priming sugar not doing enough of CO2.

My plan was to cold crash 48 hours. I am using escarpement labs Bitengarten lager.

Let me know if you have any tips or tricks. Thank you

Hi, I’m looking for an online shop with a decent selection of UK hop varieties. Here in Switzerland, it’s hard to find anything beyond Fuggles and a few of the classic English hops.
I’m particularly interested in newer varieties developed by Charles Faram, such as Harlequin, Olicana, Jester, Godiva, and Opus.
Does anyone know of a good homebrew shop in the EU or the UK with a wide selection of UK hops?

Hi, everyone!

Super beginning home brewer here. We made this small IPA batch 2 days ago, and saw this: the brew was bubbling up to the fermentation lock, and a bit of liquid seeped out.

The container had enough room between brew and lid. We brewed this in a whole different setad usual, so maybe the quantities were not 100 % exact. Is the brew spoiled?

Between the malt bill, the mash temp, the hop choice, the yeast... What bits would you throw to the wind, and which cannot be changed?

Have the next best recipe since Pliny the Elder, but want reddit to check everything over one last time? Maybe your house beer recipe needs that final tweak, and you want to discuss. Well, this thread is just for that! All discussion for style and recipe formulation is welcome, along with, but not limited to:

• Ingredient incorporation effects
  
• Hops flavor / aroma / bittering profiles
  
• Odd additive effects
  
• Fermentation / Yeast discussion
  

If it's about your recipe, and what you've got planned in your head - let's hear it!