Shrike

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.

Regardless of using MRB, -04, or -05, you're still brewing an ale that is in the style of a lager. There's nothing wrong with brewing it this way. Thousands of batches of Oktoberfest have been made and enjoyed this way over the years. For my tastes, adding the DME in addition to the LME would result in a final product that was too malty. I'd do a hop boil to help balance it out. As a newer brewer, this provides a good opportunity to see what different yeasts do. You could brew it as per the recipe now, then do it again later as a true lager just to see, smell, and taste the differences.

It's a lager-style beer, but brewed with an ale yeast. To truly brew it as a lager you'd want to use a lager yeast, like S-23 or W34/70 and ferment it at lager temperatures, 45-55F depending on the yeast and the style.

I'm not sure what you mean by that, can you elaborate?

Couldn't the peppers clog the keg lines? I don't keg, so...

Thirded.