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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Rob Gardner, Digest Coordinator


Contents:
  Stuck Fermentation? (Doug Roberts)
  Homebrew in Fort Lauderdale (a.e.mossberg)
  Wheat malt and dry hopping (Algis R Korzonas +1 708 979 8583)
  Wyeast (Pete Soper)
  Rootbeer recipes (Slabicky)


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Archives available from netlib at mthvax.cs.miami.edu


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Date: Thu, 24 May 90 10:02:52 MDT
From: roberts%studguppy at LANL.GOV (Doug Roberts)
Subject: Stuck Fermentation?


> 
> "Gak & Gerry's Batch #3" is in the fermenter now.  We brewed it on
> Sunday and pitched two packets of Red Star Ale Yeast.  It bubbled
> Like Mad on Monday, but it was almost stopped by Tuesday night!
> Is this your basic "Stuck Fermentation"?  What can be done about it?
> 

Unfortunately, you did the damage by using Red Star. It is generally
recognized to be one of the lower-quality dry yeasts around: it is not
attenuative, and it often generates an unpleasant variety of
off-flavors & aromas. 

If you wish to use a dry yeast, use one of the better ones. Whitbread,
IMHO, is the best of the dry yeasts.

- --Doug

================================================================
Douglas Roberts                |
Los Alamos National Laboratory |I can resist anything
Box 1663, MS F-609             |  except temptation.
Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545   |  ...
(505)667-4569                  |Oscar Wilde
dzzr at lanl.gov                  |
================================================================

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Date: Thu, 24 May 90 16:26:59 GMT
From: aem at mthvax.CS.Miami.EDU (a.e.mossberg)
Subject: Homebrew in Fort Lauderdale


Correction to my previous posting about homebrew shops in
South Florida -- The former tiny shop in Fort Lauderdale
is kaput, gone, dead, closed, finished. Out of business.

There is one and only one shop in South Florida again,
and that shop is Wine and Brew By You in South Miami,
5760 Bird Rd, (305) 666-5757.

Tell them I sent you and get a free pair of rubber flippers!

Disclaimers: subject to availability, I am customer and
occasional employee there, etc, etc.

aem

- -- 
a.e.mossberg / aem at mthvax.cs.miami.edu / aem at umiami.BITNET / Pahayokee Bioregion
I work for the union, cause she's so good to me. - J.R.Robertson "King Harvest"


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Date: Thu, 24 May 90 10:52:13 mdt
From: hplabs!hp-lsd.cos.hp.com!ihlpl!korz (Algis R Korzonas +1 708 979 8583)
Subject: Wheat malt and dry hopping

Cher--
No, you cannot use all wheat malt, because wheat malt has no
enzymes (or at least not the right ones) to convert the starch
to sugar.  What you need to do is use some wheat malt and some
barley malt in your mash.  Edme DMS malt extract has the proper
enzymes if you want to go that route.  Otherwise, when it comes
to mashing barley and wheat together, even very few wheat beers,
(or weiss (white), or weizten (wheat)), contain more than 40%
wheat malt, the rest being barley malt.  Note that if you wish
to try this without mashing, Ireks and a few other companies
make a wheat malt extract.  You can use that "straight up,"
but I don't know the difference in percentage of fermentables,
so I cannot actually answer your initial question.

Ken--
Dry hopping affects beer similarly to the hops added in the last
5 minutes of the boil (finishing hops), namely, to add aroma and
hop flavor.  As we know, flavors and aromas are fleeting things
and any amount of boil drives off some of the aromatics and 
subtle flavors.  Therefore, dry hopping (adding hops, ususally
leaves, to the wort in the fermenter, for those new to dry hopping)
provides more hop bouquet and flavor than just adding finishing
hops at the end of the boil.

Al.


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Date: Thu, 24 May 90 17:01:41 EDT
From: Pete Soper <soper at maxzilla.encore.com>
Subject: Wyeast

  Wyeast is not out of business. The story I got is that although they did 
have a fire in March the original culture stocks were rescued and taken 
to a lab in Portland. Their products were in short supply and although
they had to resort to an allocation scheme for a while things are pretty
much back to normal now.

  As for the packet problem, I described what has been written about
recent episodes with bursting to the owner of my local shop. He would
like more details before contacting Wyeast. If you've had a Wyeast
packet burst please email me a brief response to these questions: 

  0. How long did it take for the packet to inflate? 

  From the time the packet inflated to the time the packet burst:

  1. What was the temperature of its surroundings?
  2. Did the temperature of the surroundings change and if so, by how much? 
  3. Was the packet moved and if so, to an area at what temperature? 
  4. Was there a heat source near the packet like an appliance or was the
     packet ever exposed to direct sunlight such as near a window? 
  5. How long from "inflated" to "burst"?

  Also:

  6. What was the yeast type? By yeast type I mean the strain number or 
     enough description for me to derive the strain number (like "American 
     lager").
  7. Was this the old smaller packet or the new larger packet? Please skip
     this question rather than guessing at an answer.
  8. What month and year did you buy the yeast?
  9. When did you use it? 
  10. What was the date marked on the packet?

  Obviously a lot of you will have to punt on some of these questions since 
you probably don't memorize date codes and the like but the more information 
we get the more complete the picture will become.
  Please include your full name and postal address with your response. I
will shoot an email acknowledgement to you asap so you know I've gotten your 
response.  Everything I get by Friday June 1st I'll print and take to my shop 
to be forwarded to Wyeast. 
  Please take a few minutes to send me some facts if you've had a packet burst 
so we can get this problem understood and solved. I will of course inform the 
Digest of anything that I find out.

- ----------
Pete Soper (soper at encore.com)                          +1 919 481 3730
Encore Computer Corp, 901 Kildaire Farm Rd, bldg D, Cary, NC 27511 USA

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Date: Wed, 23 May 90 10:03:46 -0400
From: hplabs!gatech!sgfb.ssd.ray.com!iws (Slabicky)
Subject: Rootbeer recipes

	In HOMEBREW Digest #423	
	Date:     Tue May 22 09:13:07 1990
	From: "Robert J. Cordaro" <rjc7c at boole.acc.virginia.edu>
	Subject:  Root Beer Recipes
	
	With summer coming on I thought I'd like to try making some root beer,
	birch beer or sarsaparilla.  This would be specially good for those
	times there's alot of kids over, they can have their own homebrew while
	the adults have theirs.  I'm collecting recipes and would like to know
	if there's any favorites out there you'd like to share?  If this has
	already been covered, my apologies, in any case, thanks,
	
I have made root beer soda, using the recipe that is given
with the Hires Root Beer extract.  The first time, I used
the recipe as given, and I thought it came out too yeasty 
tasting.  The second time, I put in less yeast, and it
tasted fine - or at least less yeasty.  Both times, the soda
did seem a bit too gassy also.  I bottled in the Grolsch
ceramic top bottles, which I had boiled first, to sterilize
them.  A few of the rubber stoppers went soft after coming
out of the boil, but I had enough replacements.  I kept the
bottles at room temperature - about 66 F.  I kept them in a 12
quart kettle - in case they decided to explode or something.
One bottle (and these are the dark brown Grolsch bottles, now)
did break - more like crack - probably due to heat stress
coming out of the boiling water.  Another leaked, probably
due to the bad seal with the rubber washer around the ceramic
cap.  After all the discussion here about using a mild bleach
solution to sterilize bottles and equipment, next time it will
be a through cleaning and then running through a mild bleach
solution and a final rinse before bottling.

I assume that your really want to make root beer 'soda' for the
kids, and not root beer 'beer'?  As an added treat, you could
bottle the root beer soda in some of those painted label soda
bottles (like Coke ...) or in the long neck beer bottles...

It's amazing how many other 'professions' use this mild bleach
solution for cleaning/sterilizing - gardeners wash the plastic 
pots in it before reusing the pots, needles used by druggies
are soaked in bleach out of the bottle to kill the A*** virus,
dentists use bleach to kill/dissolve nerves in your teeth during
root canal work... and the homebrewers.

Ihor


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End of HOMEBREW Digest #425, 05/25/90
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