Shrike

Wow. There's appealing to a broad audience and then there's giving entirely unrealistic expectations of results. I tried my first Lock/Stock at five months. It was good. At nine months it was great. At 15 months+ it's fantastic.

He suddenly stopped posting here about two years ago. I always wondered what happened; he always had good info and posts to share.

I revised my schedule after receiving my latest order. - Day After Day IPA - Egocentric Jerk Ale - Best Haze of Our Lives Hazy IPA - Crafty Bitch TBD - Seawench Gose - Thunder Bay IPA - Crafty Bitch TBD - Black Beer'd Porter

Q: When you are cooling your wort to get it down to the temp to add the yeast, how long does it take you? A: If you are brewing a MRB recipe and adding fridge-temp water to the LBK before pouring in the wort you should be right around optimum pitching temperature. Q: What is an acceptable amount of time? A: The longest I've had to chill wort is about an hour. That was NOT for a MRB recipe, though. Q: How long is too long? A: Answers vary to that one, but if you follow good sanitation procedures you probably don't want to wait anymore than 12 hours or so to pitch the yeast. I always try to pitch at no warmer than 72F. Then the LBK goes into my fermentation fridge and sits at 65F (Wort temp, not air temp) until high krausen is over.

---looks up, re-reads--- Oops, not a question, just a response.

I was joking that he was asking a question to a four-and-a-half year old post.

@NwMaltHead hasn't been on the forum since March. He usually visits, posts for a few days, then is gone like the wind for a while.

Josh will reply to you in 4.5 years. 😜😆

Agreed 100%. Reinheitsgebot was implemented with only three ingredients in mind - water, barley, and hops. Yeast was yet to be discovered 500 years ago, yet we now know there are many varieties of them and how much they impact beer. So to be in compliance with the original law, you'd have to brew a lambic. But other than "because I want to make a 'pure' beer", what reason is there to comply with Reinheitsgebot? Why does the definition of "purity" as assigned to beer by some 16th Century minor Bavarian government bureaucrat matter? One of the three driving reasons behind the law was to ensure that grains more valuable for use in bread - mainly wheat and rye - weren't "wasted" brewing beer. So Reinheitsgebot can more accurately be viewed as a "Bread Preservation and Anti-Starvation Law" than as a "Beer Purity Law". Additionally, Reinheitsgebot was not just about "purity" of ingredients and protecting the grains used in bread. For some reason that seems to be the only part of the law ever discussed. But there were other parts of the law: the German government setting the price of beer... and far more importantly the taxation rate of beer. So Reinheitsgebot essentially was the government telling brewers "You can only use these particular ingredients because we want better grains to go to other uses, you can only charge this amount per beer, and this is the amount you'll be paying us to sell your beer." Plus, Reinheitsgebot is no guarantee of quality. I was fortunate enough to spend almost nine years living in Germany. There are many great beers that comply. There are many crap beers that also comply. There are many great beers that DON'T comply...and also crap beers that don't. Some German styles that don't comply with Reinheitsgebot, and the styles are world-renowned: Hefeweizen, Roggenbier, Gose, Dunkelweizen, and Berliner Weisse. IMNSHABHAO (In my not so humble and borderline haughtily arrogant opinion) and not trying to denigrate the OP's intent, complying with Reinheitsgebot is more about bragging than anything else. I look at it this way: Belgian brewers have been crafting absolutely amazing beers for centuries caring not a bit about "German purity laws".

Exactly!

Two things come to mind: 1) Contact MRB and ask them which HMEs conform. Brew it. Done. Or 2) Do an all-grain batch. You can probably find hundreds of recipes online. Most will be for a five-gallon batch so you'd need to scale it down to two. As a side note, barley is what's used to make most LME/DME.

The more craft beers I try the more I realize I usually prefer my homebrews.

Same here. Might as well eliminate it as a suspect, though.

When I've had beer that was flat it was almost always due to improperly capped bottles (I've learned which glass bottles not to re-use). Since you've had this with both plastic and glass bottles, that's probably not the cause. Are you sure of the ambient temperature where you're carbonating the beers? Below 70 the yeast take longer to carbonate. I'd try putting a few of the bottles in a warmer part of the house, maybe around 73-75F for a couple of weeks, then put them in the fridge for three days before trying.

According to the instructions for the three new "workout" beers from MRB, the Beano is added to the LBK at the same time as the gallon of cold water, before adding in the hot wort. See Step 10 here.