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After sanitizing everything, you could connect the CO2 line from the tank to the keg, only connect to the downspout side rather than the normal gas inlet side. With the lid removed, slowly fill the keg with CO2 - it will fill from the bottom, pushing the air out. You can use a lighter to test to see when it's full of CO2. (Lower a long fireplace lighter ...

Use half a tube of liquid yeast per 1 gallon of 1.050OG beer. You are probably thinking "but I get more uses out of one pack of dry"....well you were probably under pitching the amount of yeast for optimal performance. Check out this pitching rate calculator if you haven't done so before: Mr. Malty Pitching Rate When you are done you can just recap the ...

With any size fermentation, your fermentor is just something that keeps your beer off the floor. Likewise, there are countless practical options beyond what you've listed here. You're just trying to balance convenience, ease of cleaning, and availability. Any of those things will work fine, and there's nothing to really worry about as far as a reasonable ...

Yeah you can scale it down as much as you want . Stove top brews are very easy to manage. The only thing to keep in mind is your efficiency, on a stove top and with a smaller amount of water it can be difficult to perfectly manage your mash temp, because smaller volumes respond more quickly to heat. But with a good thermometer with an alarm (10$ digital meat ...

I would go with the 3.5 gallon buckets, and I don't think it's too much headspace, at least not for primary. I've been happily using 8 gallon buckets for years - so that's 4 gallons space for a half batch, so 3.5 gallons is not too much. You can also use the 3.5 gallon buckets for secondary (if you really need a secondary). Here, the headspace might be on ...

This sounds perfectly manageable to me. BIAB is especially easy with small batch sizes. However, keep in mind that there's nothing magical about 5 gallons. Sure, you get two cases of beer in return, but you can scale any 5 gallon recipe to a 1 gallon recipe by simply dividing all ingredients by 5. I would suggest you get your feet wet with a 1 gallon ...

Go to the grocery store and pick-up a 3 gallon Primo water bottle for about $8. Use the clean-tasting water in your brew, then put your normal carboy topper and airlock on it to ferment. Or you can buy a rubber stopper, drill it, and mod the blue cap that comes on the primo bottle to accept the stopper.

No. The purpose of Irish Moss is to remove particulate matter from your beer. I wouldn't bother trying to use a precise amount. Use half of what you would normally use and call it good. All Irish Moss does is gelatinize and the gelatin captures small particles to help clear the beer during the cooling phase. It doesn't and shouldn't taste or smell like ...

I do 2 gallon batches on occasion. The brew-in-a-bag method is great for this, but you get a lot of trub. In this 1-gallon jug the dark band under the krausen ring is beer, the rest is suspended stuff. After a few weeks it all settled and I got six bottles of nice looking (and tasting) beer.

When I started I did a bunch of 3 gallon batches for the same reasons you mention. Now I have transitioned into 5 gallon batches and 2 gallon batches. I tried 1 gallon batches but its far to little beer, and way too hard to control the final amount of liquid obtained, as well as measure everything in such small amounts. I also enjoy tasting the beer after ...

Unfortunately, you will be unlikely to get any conversion out of the Carafa as it has been kilned to the point that all of the enzymes have been destroyed. Weyermann shows that this malt has No Enzymatic Power http://www.weyermann.de/usa/bmprodukte_neu.asp?idkat=204&umenue=yes&idmenue=269&sprache=10 If you were to add some base malt (or DME and ...

That size will be fine, especially if you batch sparge. If you fly sparge, you may find the grain bed depth a bit shallow, which could negatively impact your efficiency. If you batch sparge, you don't have that problem. Holding temp shouldn't be too big a problem and if it is you can wrap your cooler in a blanket or sleeping bag to help hold the temp.

I do a single step mash, heating the water on a propane burner and adding it to the cooler then waiting the appropriate amount of time. I then do a two step batch sparge. In this case the size of the mash tun will simply make it more difficult to maintain the mash temperature, but it's still do-able. Coolers tend to hold their temp very well, but the ...

Around North Carolina you can go to the grocery store and pick-up "Primo" drinking water in 3 gallon plastic jugs that are, for all intents and purposes, the same as a Better Bottle. I imagine there's a drinking water supplier like that "everywhere". The five gallon ones are $11 at Wal-Mart, so the three gallon ones must be around $9. And the water in the ...

I have brewed a lot of half batches lately. Great for testing out recipes and perfecting them. What I do is brew a 2.5 gallon batch of wort. Put that into a 5 gallon carboy pitch my yeast and wait till the krausen subsides. Then rack that for secondary fermentation into a 3 gallon carboy. That way you will not have to worry about an overflow because the 5 ...

Brew in a bag is perfectly manageable for a first time brewer. It's pretty straightforward, and if you already have the equipment for a small batch that's perfect. I started with a 5 gallon kit and then wondered why, once I discovered brew in a bag. There are a couple of things to watch out for though, because in my experience if the batch is too small it ...

I've got a 3 gallon better bottle that has worked nicely for a sour beer experiment. I also bought a few 1-gallon glass jugs for a mead experiment. The mead was fermented in a bucket, and then the various fruit and spice additions were added in secondary in the 1-gallon jugs. I did find with the 3-gallon batch that it takes about as much effort to brew ...

If you want the finished batch size to be 1 gal. you'll need to start with a container larger than that. If that's not much of an issue, you could use a glass gal. jug from wine or apple juice. You can certainly make a 1 gal. batch in a 5 gal. fermenter, too, but due to the headspace you have to be more careful about air getting to it after fermentation is ...