If i can share my experience, i have certainly felt a change in the hobby. I started brewing around 2000 and back then there were some small clubs but most normal people had no idea about homebrew. I brewed for 20 years on a turkey fryer in my michigan basement. I was extremely clean and...

I'm glad you reminded me of that.

Room is not a problem. My tun and kettle are kegs. Like i said it's actually easier to run with more water because with K-Rims I'm always recirculating the mash and keeping the heating element covered can be tricky. I just need to figure out how to work my water levels in a way where I'm not...

Curious what a good mash thickness number to shoot for is with wee heavies. I just read it's advantageous to perform a long boil which will boil off some water which is actually great news for my setup which works better with more water in the mash. Any kind of ideas or experiences of what I...

Definitely have some things to work on. I ended up at 1.039 with a target of 1.045 so it shows in my efficiency. I used only 8 Gallons this time and ended up with just enough to fill a new bucket. Last time i had way too much wort left over. So i did better there. I think i was recirculating to...

Just realized my ph strips have gone bad. :( It's always something.

Yes. The one thing i struggle with is having enough water in the boiler during the mash to cover the element on 5gal batches. Another is controlling the levels all through the mash. I can never find a sweet spot using the valves and i also need to cut one pump for a few seconds tolet the level...

I used to have well water. Not that it was bad, i just got into the habit because i didn't want any of flavors and it would change depending on how much rain we'd had. But I'd use distilled or spring which is just filtered water. My present house has city water which just happened to have a lot...

Half way thru the mash!

Thanks for the suggestions. I spent a couple hours playing with the calc and it became really obvious that I could waste a lot of time trying to dial it in perfectly. That tells me I should establish a baseline and run from there 'in the future'. I heard 1/2tsp of both gypsum and calcium...

First post. Thought I'd see how my posts look here. I've been brewing for about 23 years now. Started with a turkey fryer setup in the basement of my old house and now I'm breaking in an electric k-rims setup I recently built. Ive come here to try to up my game a little. I always used an old...