Sometimes things don't go so well. Sometimes relaxing and having a homebrew doesn't quite do the trick. Sometimes it's not just going to fix itself. It would be helpful to have some images to compare against as things go wrong. For this community wiki, each "answer" should be a type of issue, like contamination, with an image (or multiple images) that are good examples of the issue. Note: This is a community wiki. No one will gain reputation for up …
Fortunately the ginger is pretty finely ground. Should I just leave it in there indefinitely as I cycle through new batches and hope it disintegrates? It doesn't seem like filtering will work very well without losing the majority of the ginger beer plant grains.
First time extract brewer here - I brewed today using a kit with 6.75 lbs of extract and 1 lb of corn sugar. I mistakenly added the corn sugar after adding the extract to 3 gallons of water at the start of the boil. I followed the rest of the receipt: first hops for 60 minutes, then aroma hops at the end of the boil. I cooled the wort and transferred it to a 6.5 gal carboy, added tap water …
So, I was brewing my Brewer's Best Kolsch LME kit, and I made four errors. First, I skipped rehydrating, yielding to the boxed instructions instead of the packet. Second, I overestimated how cold my bottled water jugs were (i left them in the freezer to cool) and after cooling the wort, I ended up cooling it down to 57F when I pitched it. Didn't realize my mistake until I affixed the thermometer strip to the fermenter. To top it all …
I have a high-gravity belgian ale, which after 3 weeks of fermentation is holding at 1.058--very, very sweet to the taste. Its first few days of fermentation were very active, and I fear I may not have topped it off quite enough. I'll be digging through my notes to determine if that's the case. If it is true that I started with too little water (and I took a shortcut and skipped taking an OG reading--stupid) then is it possible …
I made a silly mistake using a wine degasser to aerate my wort. After cooling the wort I aerated in the brew-kettle, with trub/hot-break still present, rather than racking to a carboy before aerating. When racking there was still a fair amount of trub, but I'm sure some of the finer particles were still suspended. I'm now 72 hours into fermentation, and just realized my mistake. My question is whether there are any actions I can take which will help …
My brewing buddy asked me this the other night. I've accumulated a lot of stuff over just an 18 month brew career. Not all of it useful. I know it's subjective, but I'd be very interested to hear other people's answers. My answer: the Northern Brewer aeration system. Not a bad solution for, say, someone who can't rock their conical fermenter. But I've found rocking the carboy and pitching correct amounts of yeast to be just as efficacious and less …