Topics

1

Kegging and Bottling / Why do YOU keg?

« on: April 04, 2013, 06:32:20 am »

What are the reasons you keg? Personally, I've found that kegging doesn't save much time over bottling. Kegging involves a lot of cleaning: cleaning lines, kegs, dip tubes, posts/poppets, faucets, and more.  It takes me an hour and a half, roughly, to bottle a batch. It might take me half an hour to keg the same batch. BUT, that doesn't include all the cleaning and sanitizing after the keg kicks.  With bottling, I just have to triple rinse the bottle after I pour it and that's that. There's also more moving parts for contamination to hide with kegging.
I know and understand the benefits of kegging, as I've been kegging since the beginning of 2010.  I just want to know why you guys do it.

I like having the variety of bottles. I can have 5 or 6 kinds of beer in my beer fridge to choose from and I don't feel bad if I don't drink on a particular beer for a week. But with my kegerator, which is 2 taps, I feel like I have to drink those more regularly and I'm not always in the mood for the same beer night after night.

Anyway, I want to know what you guys think.

Cheers & beers.

2

Yeast and Fermentation / An alternative to starters

« on: December 19, 2012, 09:11:05 am »

Saw this over on Homebrew Talk: http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2012/12/no-more-wasteful-yeast-starters.html

Seems like a pretty good idea to me. Could put half of the wort into a sanitzed keg and seal it with CO2 for a day, then dump it into the fermenter.

Thoughts? Concerns?

3

General Homebrew Discussion / What are you tappin'?

« on: December 12, 2012, 06:51:06 am »

What have you got in the pipelines that you're excited about that will soon be tapped?

I tapped an extra pale ale last night with 91% 2-row, 9% special B, cascade and chinook to about 54 IBUs, and the beer came out to 6.66%! Metal! It's f*cking tasty if I do say so myself. Really surprise myself once in a while. I used the new BRY-97 for this one and it turned out nicely. Still might rather use US-05, but either way, it's a good yeast.

4

General Homebrew Discussion / That German lager flavor

« on: June 21, 2012, 08:19:51 am »

So I've realized that my palate really lies in German beer after all these years.  I've always liked it, but never really focused on it as my main beer of choice.  So I want to replicate some of those favorite styles of German beer that I love so much.
So, based on your experience (if any), what does one have to do to achieve that distinct German lager flavor found in beers like Spaten Dunkel, Weihenstephaner Festbier, Hacker Pschorr Oktoberfest, etc? Is it anything specific that gives the beer that flavor? Is it the yeast? Is in decoction mashing? Is it specific malts? Hops?  I'm thinking the answer is going to be a combination of all those.  But I've tasted a lot of Oktoberfest beers fermented with Wyeast munich lager yeast I'm sure, that don't taste anything like what I'm after. I want that flavor found in those beers listed above, not just a "clean" flavor. Get what I'm saying?

Anyway, thanks!

5

General Homebrew Discussion / Your own recipes, kits or other's recipes?

« on: July 15, 2010, 10:02:45 am »

What do you typically brew?  I started out doing kits, then started doing my own recipes.  But sometimes I feel like brewing kits just for the hell of it; for something different than I'd normally brew.  Lately I've been running out of ideas or desires to brew my own recipes because basically all I know how to create recipes for are IPAs, pale ales, amber ales and stouts...I get a little bored with stuff like that all the time.

Cheers,

Jesse