Craft Forum / Winemaking / Brewing / Brewing / March 2007

I have a mild ale recipe I've been tinkering with for about 6 months
now, and I think I have it really well balanced and damned tasty at this
point.  I've started thinking about entering some homebrew competitions
lately, and I'm wondering if those of you with some experience in

I've been making sparkling apple cider with beer yeast and bottling it. I'm
having problems with the yeast not settling out but forming "flakes" so that
the bottle looks somewhat like those winter paperweights with "snow" inside.
It tases fine so I am not worried about contamination ...

Does it have to be crushed before mashing, or can you mash as is?

greetings to this august group. the last time i brewed (1998) i was a decent
extract HBer & was about to make the leap to all grain. Unfortunately I was
seduced by the dark side of the force (winemaking) and drifted away from
brewing. I've gotten a hankerin' to start up brewing ...

I have been struggling with the Sam Adams Longshot site trying to find where
to send entries...it says to see the list
what list?

Last week we showed how we collect the sap and this week we are boiling
it down to syrup.
The kettle on the right is the pre-heater and collector. The bags of sap
are poured into this kettle as they are collected. It is held in the

To celebrate the arrival of Spring I brewed ten gallons of a super-
light lawn-mowing swill.  After a week in a stainless primary
fermentor, and another week spent racked into two glass carboys, is it
ever clear!  I switched to all grain brewing last year and have brewed

I'd seen some people mention hooking up a small pond pump to their
immersion chiller to re-circulate ice water through it once cooling with
tap water slows down.
I was thinking of doing the same and was curious what the flow rate is

I have 10 gallons of a fairly light Pale Ale (1.045 OG) that has been
in two glass 6 gallon primary fermentors for almost 2 weeks.  I
haven't taken a FG reading, but I'm fairly certain that primary
fermentation is nearly complete.

I just got a new keg (used and old) and I've got a leak through the
threads of the gas in. I was thinking about using teflon tape, but
with that hold under pressure? Is there something else I should use to
seal that up with?

i am having difficulties with a couple aspects of pro mash. first, is
there a way to enter when the extract is added? i have been doing
partial mashes, where i add the DME before flame out. i know that late
addition of extracts increases hop utilization, but i can't seem to

I mash in a cooler with a false bottom and am interested in doing a
step mash.  Anybody know of a program that has a calculator that will
tell me the volume and the temperature of the amount of water i should
add to the mash given the mash water/lb of grain ration and current

I was wondering if anybody had trouble after sending a
bottle-conditioned ale to a competition (e.g., through UPS). The
shipping would rouse the yeast and temporarily destroy the clarity. What
if the folks at the competition didn't handle it properly, or give it

This little berg is trying to pass an ordinance to only allow 1 keg
(actually any container of 4 gallons or more of beer or wine) per
address/home/location etc.
http://www.oxfordms.net/recent/kegordinancedraft.htm

Ireks 100% wheat malt...where can I get it?
I've been searching online for several days for some place in the U
that
sells Ireks all wheat malt.  No luck.