cdh

Well, how old are most of those reports... the first few results that Google presents are vintage 1993. Did your predecessor use the bricks, or the sachets? I could see the bricks presenting contamination issues if they weren't used all at once... But the sachets and the bricks are very different things. I'd always thought the Chloraseptic flavor was an artifact of chlorinated water, not bad yeast... and Band-Aid flavor comes from Brett., which would be quite a surprise in a dry yeast sachet... but one I've never heard a report of happening.

Scoop- Thanks for a pro's eye view. Mayhaw Man (aka Brooks), who used to brew for Abita, agreed with you up the thread about the liquid yeast. I am still not sold on the conventional wisdom that all liquid yeast is superior to all dry yeast. There are many reports of very happy brewers using Fermentis' products, Safale amongst them. US-56 is reported again and again to be just as good as Wyeast 1056 or its White Labs counterparts. What specific information can you use to convince me that you're right? I've got my own experience brewing my last 5 batches with T-58, S-33, Nottingham and Windsor, and they all turned out just fine. None of them infected, none of them off flavored. The T-58 did something weird when I split half the batch into a keg and left the other half on the lees for another couple of weeks, but that isn't a sign that the yeast was bad, since the kegged beer was great. I know that S-04 is the Whitbread yeast, and I've never, ever, enjoyed Whitbread beers, so I'm not the person to talk to about the relative merits of that yeast. The selling point for liquid yeast, in my opinion, is the variety available. There are a few dry yeasts, and a load of liquid ones. I am a regular user of 3944 for my witbiers, and I always have something fermented with 1214 around. But dry yeasts are just easier to handle than the liquid ones, you don't have to worry about a starter, you don't have to fiddle with smack packs, you just tear and pour.

Not too awful, so long as you cleaned it up before it caramelized and hardened onto your stovetop. Fingers crossed. If any funky flavors happen, you know where they came from. 60 would be just fine... low temperatures will slow the yeast down a little, but high temperatures will kill them. Always better to err on the cooler side. A lid loosely on top should be alright... it will let the CO2 out and keep airborne stuff from contaminating your beer. Glad that you enjoyed it. Now the hard part is ahead, waiting for the yeast to do their job.

I want to make a quick calendar announcement... a last minute business event is taking me away to Austin, Texas for Monday through Wednesday of next week, so those brewing then will be on your own until Thursday. Questions will get answered eventually, but not necessarily speedily.

That is sounding very good indeed. The slow cooling may have something to do with the glass... it transfers heat much less well than metal. Further considering such things, I'm just going to reiterate my personal dislike of glass in the brewing process. Glass is fickle and dangerous stuff that really doesn't like rapid temperature changes. Glass should be avoided if you can, especially in the context of hot liquids. If you're going to age beer for months, then a glass secondary fermentor might be a reasonable piece of equipment to use to transfer the room temperature beer from the primary into... but as a primary, I'm afraid of glass. It is just too likely to decide it didn't like something you did and crack. Then your beer drains away and you might cut yourself. As to the visual you're getting, yup, a foam on top is exactly what you want to see.

So, how did it go? Smoothly, I hope?

Yes, I mean 10 minutes remaining in the countdown. After 50 minutes of boiling.

Well, Philadelphia's own self image problems are at the very least useful for those of us who find ourselves away from home for a period of time. During my years in Texas, where football is a religion, when asked about the game (which I inevitably knew nothing about) my response was always "I'm a Philadelphia fan, I hate my own team, I just hate all the other teams more." Got me out of talking football more times than I can count.

That amuse sounds like an improvement upon Marc Vetri's Onion Crepe with White Truffle Fondue. Though yours sounds tastier than the surprisingly bland instance of the original I was served at the James Beard House a couple of years ago... http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=vetri...G=Google+Search Edited to remove grinding axe.

Do tell.. what goodies have you picked up? I see that you later discovered that 3 lbs for 2 gallons is not crazy brewing. This first recipe was designed for a little cognitive dissonance. It is designed to look light yellow like common beers, but was designed to have more flavor and more power than common beers. It is designed to look familiar but taste radically different... and hopefully better. I've played with coffee roasting too... but the air roasters just make too bright a coffee for my tastes. I've been meaning to try pan roasting the beans to see if a solid bed makes better homeroast than a fluid bed. Pop over to the homeroasting threads in the coffee forum to tell us about your successes.

If you're not planning on fermenting in your boiling pot, then have no compunctions about just pouring the boiled wort into your sanitized fermentation vessel... see below for the fuller plans for your situation. I realized I should note that you want to pour gently to avoid splashing, as oxidation is a long term problem for beer flavor stability, and splashy pouring leads to sticky floors and clothes and such. The latter is more likely to present a problem in a batch this small, but you should be aware of the former. Elie, for your situation, we'll engage in a little beer engineering for you. You want to boil your hops in wort at 1.068, as that is the density the recipe is calculated for. To achieve that with your pot, add half the extract at the beginning of the one gallon boil with the first hop bag. Then a little after the 10 minute mark, when you add the second hop bag, add the other half of the extract. That way your bittering hops boiled in wort of the right density so their effectiveness will be preserved... and you'll get the right concentration when you add the second gallon of water to the concentrated wort before you start cooling it. You'll get a head start on the cooling if you put the additional gallon into your fermentation vessel, and then just dump the concentrated wort in on top... and then put the fermentation vessel into the ice water in the sink to cool. This does run the risk of making a slightly sweeter beer than the unconcentrated method, since the caramelization affects flavor as well as color, and the flavor hops will not contribute much bitterness at all since they're boiling in a much denser wort. You might consider upping the bittering hops to .5 oz and splitting the flavor and aroma into .25 oz. Or you could follow the recipe and tell us what happened.

I agree that Ali is New York treasure. I'm surprised at one thing that did not catch your attention, however. On the Egyptian mixed plate, while the falafel and hummus are wonderful, it is the foul and baba ghanouj that are truly transcendent. Ali gets the eggplant smoked to a rich powerful flavor unlike the baba anywhere else. Absolutely delicious. The foul is an uncommon dish, a fava bean puree, that is more interesting than hummus, I think.

I just noticed that Matt and Pat and Rombot are all first time eG posters. Welcome! Explore the community here, jump into other discussions, start threads of your own, make yourselves at home. Looking forward to seeing more from all of you. Any other new folks are encouraged to introduce yourselves and say hi.

Boiling 6 quarts in an 8 quart pot is pushing it a little bit. You're likely to experience a bit of boil-over when the foam forms as you add the extract. As to the more general question of whether a concentrated boil will work, yes, it will. I generally brew batches of about 5 gallons, and boil about half of it. Boiling concentrated wort will result in a slightly darker beer, as the heat can cause some caramelization, and the concentration means that more sugar will be in the hot spots where it occurs, hence more darkening. So if you are looking for bright yellow beer, doing a full boil is important. The answer to that is mostly yes. The grain and extract will contribute proportionally. The hops are a bit more complicated. Hop utilization decreases as the density of your wort increases. So, if you're doing a concentrated boil, you need more hops to achieve the same IBUs as you would if you were doing a full boil. If you're doing a one gallon full boil, then halving the recipe would work fine. If you're doing a one gallon concentrated boil and planning on diluting out to two gallons, then you need to use more hops. There are hop utilization calculators online that will help you figure out how much you need to add, but it doesn't sound like you need one. If you do, let me know.

Absolutely Pat, you're right. If somebody here is absolutely certain that brewing is for them and is something worth dropping a couple hundred bucks on, then buying a rinky dink starter kit is a bad economic decision. I've designed this course for people who haven't come to that decision, but do read eGullet... hence folks likely to have a well stocked kitchen and a penchant for cooking. My thought was that the average eG reader would be able to brew a 2 gallon batch with stuff mostly already in the house. Who here doesn't make their own stock every once in a while? Looking at Elie's purchases, above, I'd guess he'd spent in the neighborhood of $30-35 for malt extract, bags, hops, yeast, tubing and specialized bits and pieces, and he chose the expensive reusable nylon hop bag. A case of beer could easily cost more. In keeping with the philosophy of the course, that makes the hobby a bit more approachable than asking somebody to put down $75 for a beginning brewer's kit, and another $100+ for a 7 gallon kettle and however much extra for a outdoor propane burner to get a 7 gallon kettle boiling. So, as Pat advises, if you're here because you know brewing is for you and you have no pots in your kitchen, then just a 12 qt pot is way too limiting. There is a world of gadgets out there if you're really serious... the hot item lately has been stainless steel conical fermentors with a dump valve at the bottom so that you can boil, ferment, age and bottle/keg, all the while never moving the beer from the vessel the wort drained off of your grain into until it finds its final home. And you don't even have to sanitize it because you boiled right inside it. But, if you just want to get a taste of brewing, this course if for you. If you want advice on all of the fine toys, we can certainly talk about it... but that is not the thrust of this course.

Walmart is your friend. They stock the beautiful Brazilian Tramontina stainless pots... cheap. I think I spent maybe $35 on my 16 Quart model pictured in the lesson. Btw, good news that the yeasty beasties are not rife in your kitchen. You can probably siphon and bottle safely in there if a week of ideal growth medium exposed to the air didn't pick up anything other than a little mold.

Hey Elie- Has your Malta grown anything yet? Any signs of sediment on the bottom or bubbles on the top?

Go back to the beginning of this thread. The photographs are clearly different enough not to be copyright violations. The angles are different in every picture... Not one of them looks like even at attempt to copy the original picture. And you can't copyright uncopyrightable subject matter by taking a picture of it.

The leaves haven't even come out on my walnut trees yet... nor any other trees here. I'll keep an eye on the walnut trees for the greens. I'm sure I'll have a ton of green black walnuts like every year. I'll gladly send some around if the recipients will cover the shipping and packing costs...

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...view=getnewpost

Where am I making any shrill moral judgments? I just believe that your radical copyright expansionist proposals (you get stuck with the vegan role in this discussion) will pile huge difficulties on ordinary people for the sake of giving a cookie to the chefs you happen to like. Not moral, just logical and logistical. I'm not even opposed to giving them a cookie... I'm just opposed to your preferred method of doing so.

Applying copyright to either food or clothing is just another step towards a society in which everybody is constantly violating the law. That is not a society in which I want to live. Think you've got privacy in your home? Not so much if anybody who didn't see the right label on your coat can swear out a complaint and get a search warrant issued against you for the contraband in your closet. Remember that infringement "for commercial advantage or private financial gain" is not just a civil action but also a criminal violation. Want to wreak havoc on a competing restaurant? You've got the law on your side now, whether the competitor actually did copy from you or not, so long as there is something arguably derivative of your work, you're not lying when you tell Da Man that somebody is infringing on your copyrights. The law coming in to find out is a sure way to wreck a kitchen's productivity. Frankly, I'm astonished that copyright litigation is not a more common method of legally demolishing ex-employees, competitors, etc. I've seen several cases litigated where copyright claims could easily have been inserted, but they weren't... mostly because lawyers just don't think to do so. While the statute may appear open ended, treating it that way is, I reiterate, absolutely insane. The courts have reigned it in before by inventing the First Sale Doctrine out of whole cloth... the sort of activist judging that is so unpopular today. I'd certainly not want to live in a world where used book shops were forbidden... Copyright in an out of control monster that needs to be reigned in before anything else gets anschlussed into its co-prosperity sphere.

AH... but trademark law goes so much further than just product names. If a product is truly unique to one particular chef, so much so that it serves a single source identifier, then the configuration of a dish itself may be protectable. If three tones (NBC's chimes) or a shade of the color green (Qualitex dry cleaning products), or the interior decor of a chain of taco stands (Two Pesos v. Taco Cabana) are trademarkable, then why not a particularly unusual dish. It might not be easy legally, since the attempt to trademark an odor has stumbled... but it seems within the ambit of this part of the law to preserve the source-identifying nature of a particular dish. This would be a fine way of accomplishing what people here seem to be clamoring for. Trademark rights are only violated when the mark is used in commerce... hence no spillover into private kitchens. Trademark rights are premised on the idea that the mark identifies the source... the dish would identify the chef.... It would be incumbent on the chef to police his mark, however... and licensing it would be tough too, since trademark law requires that a licensee be in some way supervised by the licensor... but all in all this seems better to me than a full copyright treatment, and wouldn't require much in the way of statutory meddling at all.

Good God, you're actually serious, aren't you? No. I've not plagiarized from you or anybody else, and this kind of prissy prima donna BS is exactly why this sort of legal reform is insane. You don't OWN that idea, you never did, and under the laws, you never will, nor will anybody else. Furthermore, I absolutely refuse to accept the ethical proposition that because YOU vaguely mentioned a meme already floating around in the environment first in this discussion that I owe something to you. Compulsory licensing is a common meme amongst copyright reform folks and has been for years. The fact that you mentioned it without citing to the relevant copyright statutes where it appears, and to the articles that have mentioned it in the past indicates to me that you either don't know that, or were violating your own oh-so-high ethical standards by asserting that you own or created that thought. If you want to get into the game of idea auditing, you'll soon find that we're all quite guilty and that there is nothing new under the sun. Get off your high horse and give it a rest. And have a happy Easter.