A word to the wise

Ozarks Mountain Brewery

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starting a thread stating what we should all ready know but failed to pay attention to our instincts, possibly because weeee had too many lol
 
Ill start, a word to be wise.. never get impatient with cooling your starter wart and pitch it too early, you might just have a dirty feet beer lol
 
Word to the wise....Don't toss that coiled immersion chiller in the trash just because you bought a plate chiller...You'll need the immersion chiller soon enough...#nevercloggedmychillernopenotever
 
Word to the wise: As you develop new skills, don't forget the old one: You never know when you might have to make another extract-and-steep batch....
 
If your Koslch tastes like a blonde ale, call it a blonde ale.
 
Word to the wise: It actually takes quite a lot of effort to brew a bad beer...it will be fine.
 
You can't disguise a tainted beer by calling it "Belgian."
 
always prepare a head of time, a day is best just to get things in order, last minute changes to a recipe or your set up can make your brew day last forever
 
Write things down, your memory is not as good as you think.......
 
Yeast have been their job for over 10,000 years, you have been doing yours considerably less. Trust the yeast to do their job unless you don't do yours, in which case, see sentence number 1.
 
To OMB's comment, running out of propane in the middle of a boil sucks.
 
Write things down, your memory is not as good as you think.......

always document changes and trust me there will be some, last minute grain or hop substitution and times because you thought you had it but just can't find it but brewed the best beer ever and don't remember what you subbed 6 months down the road
 
always check your valves. I left the valve on the mash tun open once and my strike water went everywhere.
 
always have your yeast starter the same temperature and the same gravity as the target fermenting temperature and wort or shock might set in :shock: , always assume that the temperature is going to climb upwards of 5 to 8 degrees inside the fermenter and never trust the outside air temperature, you could be as much as 10 degrees higher than you think the first 3 days
 
A while back I packaged, read bottled, a Koelsch. It was a delicious green beer, perfectly clear after gelatin fining, cold from the lagering refrigerator so I used the bottling calculators basing the calculations on a 32 degree beer. It came out under-carbonated.
The equations for bottle conditioning rely on two sources of carbon dioxide. The first is a contribution from the bit of residual yeast in the beer fermenting the priming sugar. The second source is the carbon dioxide dissolved in the beer. The assumption is that the beer is saturated with carbon dioxide at the temperature of packaging. A beer saturated with carbon dioxide at 32 degrees needs just a bit of sugar to prime where a beer at 68 degrees needs the full amount – very little carbon dioxide remains in solution at room temperature.
So I packaged the Koelsch using the priming equations at 32 degrees and got an under-carbonated beer. What happened? The beer was fermented completely quite a bit warmer than the 32 degrees I was “lagering” it so it wasn’t saturated with carbon dioxide. I can fix this, I take the caps off, drop a couple of priming tabs into each bottle and recap, little risk since the beer has already got a bit of carbonation, but work I didn’t need to do.
Lesson learned, let the beer warm up to room temp before bottling and use the full amount of priming sugar. There’s no question about priming that way.
 
A word to the wise: always relabel your grains and hops, once the label peals or wears off and you have 3 or 4 that do it you have no idea what it is
 
Word to the wise 2 on carbonation: Dropping priming tabs into a carbonated beer results in a gusher. If I want to up carbonation on these, I'll have to dissolve sugar in water and add the solution.
 

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