www.nthba.org

Oh yeah, get thee to a homebrew store and buy a refractometer, it's so much easier. What I do is take a reading at the start of the boil (right after the hot break settles down). I know from experience where I will end up if I boil 1 1/2 hours (and I always do). I take a reading and compare that to ...

Thanks to Pam and Walter for another great holiday party; had a blast. There were many great beers to sample as well as some very interesting meads. Also the food was great, thanks for all the hard work guys. I am somewhat concerned however that we didn't fill up the keggorator this year as has been...

Well at least I did something construtive with all this unfortunate ice. I got two entries bottled this weekend, an olde ale and an oud bruin. That brings my entry count up to six ready to go. If things go as planned I should have 5 more to go between now and the entry deadline (and two of them are ...

Competitions are essentially just a trial by fire and they are extremely subjective. As long as you don't take this crap too seriously it can be really fun and also help you brew better beer. In my opinion, just pick out a few of your better efforts and give it a go. As you can tell, we are all tryi...

Generally speaking, I like to enter stuff that is no more than 6 months old (with certain exceptions of course). I also force carbonate, again with exceptions. Some beers are better when really young like heffe for instance (and I guess American hop bombs). I will force carbonate everything I enter ...

Just starting? Your kidding right? I start brewing for the Bluebonnet immediately after the Limbo Challenge was completed. I already have half of my entries bottled and four more are already brewed just waiting to be kegged or bottled. Since I have relatively little in the way of cool storage ('caus...

I'll tell you what; although I hope you haven't had issues, in my opinion that value on the bottom of the fermentor could cause some real problems. By it's very nature, that fitting affords bugs a place to hide which could lead to infected batches. Take it from someone who over the years has had tha...

I frankly doubt you'll get any honey taste with the the roasted malts in the grist. Likely what will happen when you add the honey is that it will jack up the alcohol content of the beer and dry the whole thing out a little bit (none of that necessarily being a bad thing by the way). I don't use hon...

Well as somebody who enjoys a nice Porter occasionally that looks like it might be tasty. That black patent malt is going to give you the burnt roasty flavors which should make the beer fall into the Robust category. If I were making it, I would probably use English crystal malt rather than the Germ...

Hell, I think if I were gonna try that I would go for something even bigger. I can get a 1.080 beer out of my current set up doing single mashing (just barely) I would probably try to get maybe 30 or 40 points higher; but then of course I'm greedy.

Well if you really want to do something crazy try double mashing. Split your grain bill in half and mash the first half normally. Sparge normally and collect a little bit more than your normal volume. Heat the wort you have collected up to about 165F or so then use it to infuse the second half of yo...

Myself and Mr. James (he of the award winning mild) will likely be brewing an IPA in a collaborative effort. We are currently in tense negotiations about exactly what we might attempt although I have a couple of ideas. By the way Mr. Barrett, although the competitions are essentially done with for t...

Great party, thanks for having us. It was also good that enough homebrew showed up to fill the club kegorator, nice job everyone. By the way, who said only Melinda knows how to brew in the Beyer household? I rather enjoyed old Grumpy's traditional Octoberfest bitter.

Well, my plan was to bring a mini keg (3 gallon) of my Vienna Lager.

Oh hell Orlando, you engineers are all the same; stuck on the facts. Here's the thing; I wrote that post mostly from hersay and inuendo, I never bothered checking the numbers (actually I don't think they were out when I wrote it but whatever). When writing propiganda, facts are nothing but an annoya...