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StarSan in a spraybottle is easy and effective. If you use distilled water as the base the starsan will not be affected by minerals and will stay clear and acidic longer.

This might be a good excuse to build a poor man's stirplate out of an old PC fan and harddrive magnet. Makes a huge difference in my ability to build up cell counts in a (relative) hurry. Recently I used about 4 days of stirplate magic to revive a White Labs tube that had been expired...

It is fairly common for brewers in cold climes to brew inside the garage near the door (with the garage door open). This keeps the wind off the brewer (and kettle) while allowing ventilation. Exercise common sense, but it can be done. I've never done it because my back patio has a...

+1 on the wheat beers. They are able to be consumed relatively young (after a couple of weeks in the primary and a couple of weeks in the bottle), are minimally hopped, and are forgiving. They will require blowoff, as has already been stated. I find the 3068 yeast does a fantastic job bring...

An American-style light lager is a difficult style to make correctly; it is definitely not one I would recommend for a beginner. The big red flag is that "lager" means "to store a long time at low temperature". The light flavor shows every little flaw and it will require you to have...

It's one I found on a webpage somewhere, and wedged into beersmith. Just brewed it up today and it's sitting behind me just now starting to put some positive pressure on the airlock. Also made 2 plates and 7 slants from the yeast pack while making the starter from the smackpack. BeerSmith...

My batch this weekend will be an Irish ale. Trying to clone Smithwick's.

I'd let it sit in primary until you are ready to bottle. Many HBers are starting to forgo secondary altogether and just let the beer sit in primary. My normal time in primary is 2wks. Shorter for some low-grav styles, and longer at lower temps (and about 2mos for ApfelWein).

As Dean notes, Iodophor at 12.5ppm is no-rinse. Higher concentrations should be rinsed. If you want more info on it google for the Basic Brewing podcast with one of the people who makes iodophor.

Screw-tops can be capped nicely with a bench capper (and sometimes with a wing capper if the shape of the bottom flange on the bottle is right).

Are the clumps before, during, or after addition to the wort? If before, I'd say a cheap mortar/pestle should break that up. I have used that on some (literally) rockhard yeast nutrient. Sounds like the bag isn't a moisture barrier. Maybe use a freezer ziplock to store the entire DME bag until...

I think I read elsewhere the red is spring-loaded and the black is not. If so the the red would be somewhat easier to use, but no big deal. I am running a bench capper now (super agata) and use the wing capper as a backup.

It was a little over 100F outside in the shade (my digital thermo was nearby) so I chickened out and bought a coupla bags of ice. about 2/3rds of it was left by time I finished. I will do the icemaker route next time as the ice consumption was not as bad as I thought. This was largely an...

I don't think it was 20mins but maybe it was. I didn't have a timer put on that part. I was timing the whole AG batch because of a thread on news:alt.beer.homebrewing (?) so I was watching that rather than the prechill component. I think it took the same amount of time to go IC + prechill to...

Reporting back after the first run. I dropped the temps to 95F with the groundwater then started the icewater recirc. Wort temp dropped to 68F before I stopped the process as I was using a yeast that likes heat (a belgian farmhouse strain). Looks like the prechill is a winner.

Yeah, my groundwater-powered IC drops temps rapidly down to about 90F where it becomes diminishing returns. So I was thinking switch to the pump at 90F and then start the recirc. I'm going to dump the contents of my icemaker on the pump first to see what kind of drop I get. I'd like to get into...

Got the pump in the mail from amazon last night and set it up for a test run. Seems to be fine for the purpose. I'm hosting a how-to-brew party at my house for coworkers on the 3rd and will test-drive it then.

There are a minority of folks who do not find bottling to be a nuisance; I rather like it. I like the shapes of the bottles, the caps, the capping motion, the neatness of having individually-sealed little containers of beer... Interestingly, on some forums male brewers indicate that their Dear...

Smurfe, thanks for the report; that's exactly what I had planned. Here near Dallas, so it's pretty warm here too. I also thought about the rocksalt approach but was concerned by the corrosion aspect and the possibility that the superchilled copper might freeze beer around it, decreasing...

I find that in the summer it's difficult to get below 80F with groundwater through an Immersion Chiller. I just bought a pond pump from amazon, and will try using the IC down to about 90F, then swap over to recirculating icewater with the pump down to 65F. I'll let you know how it goes.