Brewing Master

Question:

I have had luck using the natural Blueberry extract from St. Patricks of Texas.  For a few dollars.  All you do is add at bottling. The flavor comes through but the color is not so strong.  I think there are a few fermentables in it because carbonation was a little stronger than usual and happened within a week.  Maybe next time I will cut back on the priming.  Given the price of fresh blueberries and the lack of hassle, this route seems a good one. Standard disclaimers

Response:

HOMEBREW Digest #1212                        Thu 26 August 1993         FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES                 Rob Gardner, Digest Coordinator Contents:   Tun size and cheepness (David Hyde)   WORT AERATION & Sierra Nevada ( Neil Mager )   Liberty Ale Clone  (Lee=A.=Menegoni)   PU, Honey, AERATION (Jack Schmidling)   Blueberry Beer (Michael L. Hall)   Victoria Microbrewers Festival (Philip Atkinson 356-0269)   press rel ("Philip Atkinson")   Bottle labels? (Gretchen Brannaman 250-8384)   Please add me to mailing list! (Frame)   pico-Brewery (MRS1)   aeration (Bob Devine)   Free software (Domenick Venezia)   Warm Temp Aging? (ROB WILSON)   Blueberries/Calcium chloride (Kinney Baughman)   Chlorine, Yeast and My Septic Tank (CCAMDEN)   RE: Irvine Brewpubs (Brad Roach)   carboy handles (Dick Dunn)   yeast (Todd Gierman)   (Articles are published in the order they are received.) Send UNSUBSCRIBE and all other requests, ie, address change, etc.,   then you MUST unsubscribe the same way! If your account is being deleted, please be courteous and unsubscribe first. Archives are available via anonymous ftp from sierra.stanford.edu.   (Those without ftp access may retrieve files via mail from   message to that address to receive listserver instructions.) Please don’t send me requests for back issues – you will be silently ignored. HBD was a great source of help for keggin info a year or so ago, so I’m back with more questions.  With the time I save by kegging  instead of bottling, I figure I can go all-grain and still not  spend much more time than I used to. I’m acquiring stuff bit by bit  to start and have run into problems finding a suitable mash tun. I’d planned on using a cylindrical "picnic cooler", but haven’t been able to find the larger ones.  Not true…I did find a large  (10 gal?) one at an "exclusive" outdoor shop, but I didn’t have the kind of money they wanted. I’ve found 5 gal ones at plenty of places, but that’s the largest around here. So…three questions: 1.  Would a 5 gal cooler make an adequate mash/lauter tun for 5 gal batches with an average amount of grain? 2.  If not, is there a relatively cheap source for large coolers? 3.  Can a rectangular cooler make a suitable tun?  I like the idea of a smaller grain surface area, but could sacrifice that for economy. Understand, I’m deep in Southern Maryland, far from civilization , but close to DC and Baltimore for supplies. By the way, I’m currenty using a propane hot water heater element as a burner.  They’re pretty poular around here as crab cookers, and will boil something like 100 gal of water in 15 sec.  At least that’s  how hot they feel leaning over one on a summer day  (That’s a joke, but they do work well.) They’re cheap and easy to find around here, and I expect they would  be elsewhere. Thanks in advance. Dave Hyde DD853.cleveland.freenet.edu America Online has an online, live Brewing discussion the 2nd Thursday of every month. Participants include knowledgeable folks from Sierra Nevada. I believe in July, the discussion turned to Wort aeration. One of the participants from SN said they like to achieve as high an oxygen saturation as they can – 100% if possible. They use something called a fishtail which is basically a pipe with a flattened end which they use to spray the wort into the fermenters. – — Neil Neil M. Mager MIT Lincoln Laboratory       Lexington, MA   Weather Radar – Group 43 Voice                       (617) 981-4803 (W) I just got some fresh homegrown Cascade hops.  Does any one have an all grain recipe for a Libery Ale clone? If yes please post or send to:  my address gets mangled in a post  In my report on the Pilsner Urquell brewery, I noted that they  were using three yeasts identified as D, H, and W… I have speculated on  this before;  I believe that there is only one strain in use, but it has a  tendency to mutate.  In order to avoid problems, the PU brewery grows up a  pitching slurry and labels it with a letter (for example, ‘A’).  They brew  beer from this yeast and attempt to maintain it as if it were a separate  strain in the brewery during successive repitchings.  I guess I missed this but if it was in the article, I probably mentally  voided the information because it sort of cancels out in a practical sense.  It would be futile for us to compare notes on "strains" considering that the  brewery is pretty much throwing darts.  Thank you for clearing this up.  I’m not sure if all cream stouts or all sweet stouts have lactose in them,  but since I’ve recently done a semi-sweet (demi-sec?) stout that turned out  quite nicely, I can offer a bit of advice.  Having tasted this and several other sweet stouts at a CBS sponsored Stout  Seminar, I rather liked the beer and made one up for a party.  However, not wanting to add another odd ingredient to my collection of never  to use again stuff, I sweetened mine with honey and the result was just what  I expected.  My thinking was that honey ferments very slowly in the first place and with  ale yeast and in a cold fridge, it probably never will ferment out.  Prior to kegging the stout, I poured two cups of honey (boiled to sterilize)  into the keg and filled and carbonated as usual.  If I were to do it again, I would only use one cup of honey as it is a bit  too sweet for general consumption.  The first few sips are a taste explosion  but a little goes a long way.  It was made in May and I still have a couple  gallons left and it is as sweet as the day I keggged it.    The dialogue concerning Jack Schmidling’s wort aeration  experiment continues on the digest.  I have E-mailed Jack directly  concerning his experiment.  However I feel that misconceptions  continue regarding the experiment so I feel compelled to bring my  concerns up on the digest.  My only concern is the misconception of the objective of the experiment but I  did learn a great deal from the objective discussions both private and public  and thank those who contributed.  I apologize for whatever share I may have had in the unpleasantness that  developed but simply offer it as a warning of what happens when personal  garbage is brought to a public forum.  It is all too easy to attack the  messenger and never get around to the message or so fog it that little else  is accomplished.  There are two ways to alter this experiment The first and  most obvious is to make four full-scale batches (5-10 gallons?).  The valid assumption can then be made that the experiment mimics  the situation in the (home) brewery.  Considering the objective, viz., the wonders of the airstone, I guess I will  fall back on anecdotal evidence.  There are only two variables, airstone and  whatever else one normally does to make good beer.  Anyone who has been  making good beer and tries the airstone, soon comes to a very practical  resolution.  If it improves things, he keeps doing it, if not he quits.  The  mail and posted comments indicate that most people quit.  So much for  science.  js Since I made a blueberry beer recently, I thought I would respond. It had no blueberry color and very little blueberry flavor. My recommendations:    Make a *very light* base beer. Mine was way too dark/heavy. A light    wheat beer might be nice. Even then the color will probably not come    through (but the flavor might). Blueberries tend to have a reddish    color in solution, and I think that will be the best you can hope    for.    Use lots of blueberries. I only used 5 lbs. of frozen blueberries in    5 gallons and it wasn’t nearly enough. I would use about 2-3 lbs. per    gallon.    Add fruit only to the secondary, so that flavors and aromas don’t get    scrubbed out by the vigorous fermentation. I did this, and it started    a pretty good second fermentation due to the sugars in the    blueberries.    Using hand-picked blueberries, I would pasteurize them first, by    heating to 165 F for 20 minutes.    You may hate to do this, since you have nice fresh-picked blueberries    and you would like the beer to have natural flavor, but you will    probably be able to get a better blueberry flavor by using an    extract. There are various ones on the market; some are probably    better than others.    Actually, my final recommendation would be to use a different fruit.    I don’t think that

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