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No gravel/cobbles for me, just hard clay and random rocks. In fact I found an old beer bottle about a foot down in one of the post locations!

Very cool. Do I understand it correctly that I want to run the catch wires in pairs with one wire of each pair on either side of the posts? If that's correct, what's the purpose for that?

Ha, too cool! I wonder how one sanitizes a pumpkin for use as a fermentor?

Ok so I now have most of my posts set up. I would have them all set up but digging two ft deep holes in this soil and heat is really hard! Anyhoo, with all the rain we've had this year so far (~23 in. vs an average of ~17in.) the vines are growing way too big for the stakes so I've ordered...

Thanks Appleman, that's good to know about the gripples. I suppose I could pull them tight enough by hand for my short rows huh? Thanks for the advice on the posts too. I was hoping that I wouldn't need the anchors and all that for these guys! I shot a quick picture of the vineyard today...

Wow, it's been a while since I last posted here. I've been pretty heavy into the malt side of the fermenting arts lately! However, I'm not giving up on my vines! All the vines survived winter, though one of them must have been hit pretty hard cause the only new growth I got was from the base of...

Nevermind, I just put the numbers into ProMash. That's supposed to be 1.015 isn't it?

Wow, does your husband really get it down to 1.005?? That's like 93% attenuation! Looks like a very interesting stout recipe with the turbinado addition and lack of roasted barley. I bet that makes a very nice stout! How strongly does the coffee come through?

Yup I believe Dingeman's aromatic malt is belgian aromatic malt. Whirlfloc and irish moss are interchangeable in that they do the same thing and are essentially made up of the same material, however youare supposed torehydrate irish moss. Whirlfloc, you can just throw in the kettle "as is."

I made last year's hopnog kit. I remember liking it, though I forget which hops were included in that one. I recently won a couple golds in a homebrew comp and one of the prizes was the same kit. It's the 2008 version though, which makes me a bit skeptical as to how it will taste with that kind...

Wow, isn't that kind of a PITA? Wouldn't it be easier to just have longer beer lines so you can serve at your carbonation pressures rather than venting and dropping the psi, serving, then raising the psi back up?

If it tastes good to you, that's all that counts right now!

If it's only been a couple days at 40 psi then you should be fine. Does it taste overcarbonated? If it is overcarbed, you can vent the pressure relief valve a couple times a day to lower the carbonation level.

Don't candy thermometers have a pretty large range? I don't know that I would trust them to be accurate enough to measure such a temperature sensitive procedure such as mashing. For extract brewing they would be perfectly fine though. Right now I use a dial thermometer I picked up at the...

Me too. It doesn't matter if you're pressurizing one keg or two, 10 psi is 10 psi. I just ran into the issue of too short of beer line myself. I told the local LHBS owner that I wanted 20' of standard homebrew size beverage line. He gave me 1/4" ID line. I thought nothing of it and put 6'...

I just made the jump to kegging myself. Quite nice I must say! :)

True! So many ways to skin this cat. I still maintain that my beers without a secondary end up crystal clear after some time in the bottle cold. Bottle conditioning always leaves sediment in the bottle regardless so what's a couple more mg?

I get what you're saying tepe, butyeast doesn't care whether it's in a primary or secondary to flocculate. I'm just saying that racking to a secondary just adds more chance for contamination and oxidation. As you know, beer is more open to contamination than wine due to the higher pH, lower...

There's not really a need for secondaries for most beers. In fact it can be advantageous to leave it on the yeast cake for some time (a few days or so) after the fermentation is done. The yeast will clean up after itself when it's done eating up the sugars. Once that's all done you can go ahead...

I'm not sure what you mean, but I think what you're referring tois a wort chiller? They don't usually go around the pot, rather they go inside the pot. What you're looking for iscalled an immersion style chiller. Basically a coil of copper tubing that you put in the boiling wort about 15 minutes...