Hot answers tagged primary
2
Use a hydrometer and take a reading at the same time every day for the next three days. If the reading is the same each time, then fermentation should be done.
Airlocks aren't really a great indicator as far as determining when fermentation is finished, so don't rely entirely on that. Also, Sometimes you may not see much krausen during fermentation, other ...
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Try starting in the mash or specialty grain to add your coffee flavor. Add some roasted barley to impart that coffee flavor right away. This has given me a good coffee base on many of my brews.
Next, cold extract your coffee using the following technique from Radical Brewing:
This is a way of getting very smooth coffee flavor to add to your
beer. Add ...
1
Unless your recipe calls for lots of dry hopping or the addition of fruit, you probably don't really need to do a secondary at all. Pitch yeast, let it rip, wait 3 weeks, then bottle. If the fermention kicks off within the first 24 hours and looks strong, then don't even bother checking gravity for the first 2 weeks (unless you have a strong drop in temp ...
1
How worried should I be about contamination that may have occurred
during two days of air cooling this wort?
Honestly, I'd be very worried. However, not much can be done now anyway, so don't sweat it, but don't do this again for future reference.
As that wort cooled, it contracted in volume slightly, which created a very slight vacuum that might ...
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The canned puree will be sterile, so the concern about having to wait until secondary to have the alcohol to help sanitize is a moot point.
To my mind, the tradeoff with adding late in primary or as part of secondary is really if there is enough yeast in secondary to consume the sugars in the fruit and clean up by-products from the primary ferment. When ...
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I use something called a "china cap strainer" to strain my wort before it goes into the fermentor. These things work greater, as it fits into the funnel I use on top of the fermentor and they have a good handle to jostle the strainer to encourage the wort to work it's way past the captured hops and trub.
An example of a "china cap strainer" can be seen ...
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I chill my wort in place on the stovetop and transfer to my primary with an autosiphon. But I transfer to a larger metal screen strainer on top of my primary fermentor that has a paint strainer bag arranged inside it. This strains out the debris (hops, whirlyfloc, and hot break) and helps with aeration. I have also used a nylon stocking and the paint ...
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