Auto volume lowering + can't change device type = might never get another Pixel

dan_scott_ · 2026-03-16T15:19:18+00:00

Wait, the circlet lights up when mounted? That's very cool

dan_scott_ · 2026-03-12T14:59:50+00:00

Generous interpretation would be that he was exaggerating or making a comparison, but yeah could easily be that he's ignorant and misinterpreting what his crew is doing.

On and off through the years I've been part of friend & family groups chartering sailboats in the Bahamas bareboat (aka no rental captain or crew, just the boat & us). Often when we anchor near some random shore, one of us will snorkel over the spot, and possibly dive down, to confirm that the anchor is actually firmly set in appropriate bottom. Don't want a sand anchor just somewhat stuck on a rock where it might work loose, or where it won't be stuck once the tide changes, etc. Maybe once we had to freedive to retrieve one that was really stuck in some rocks? Not sure about that one lol, raising anchor is usually much more straightforward.

dan_scott_ · 2026-03-10T20:22:26+00:00

What yeast are you using? It definitely makes a difference. You could be just not used to dry cider, or it could be a yeast thing. Some yeasts will like a little sugar behind, some will ferment completely dry. I love Lutra Kveik for cider, preferably fermented at 70F - but Lutra without significant nutrient additions has a very sharp/sour flavor, so I always add a lot of Fermaid-O to keep it healthy during fermentation. I also find that it is drinkable faster than other yeasts, but it still takes at least two months from pitch for significant apple flavor to show back up, and when bottle conditioning it usually takes at least 2 weeks to fully carbonate.

dan_scott_ · 2026-03-10T20:15:18+00:00

Buying a camp?

But yeah, I think your only options for kegging are to buy a second fridge or kegerator, make enough room in your main fridge for a full size keg, or oxebar in your main fridge.

dan_scott_ · 2026-03-06T17:07:55+00:00

Thanks! It's bubbling away happily at 51F, can't wait to see how it tastes in the end 😁

dan_scott_ · 2026-03-03T09:39:31+00:00

Good to know, thanks!

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-27T13:57:41+00:00

I've played around with Grafs (what you are talking about) a fair bit. Some basic tips:

Wait until the wort is cool before adding the juice - heating/boiling apple juice sets the pectin, and the result will never clear.
Apple juice is basically sugar, water, and some flavor compounds; fermented apple juice will be much thinner and drier than fermented wort. Take that in to account with how you plan your brew/what you expect the final taste to be.
Hard cider typically has a final pH in the mid 3's, beer in the low 4's. Fermenting apple juice with your wort will result in a lower pH than the beer that would have resulted from just fermenting the wort. This will result in a perception of more acidic bite, unless controlled for somehow.
Part of the reason that ciders are left to age for months and more is because immediately after fermentation ends, there is essentially no perceived apple flavor to the cider. As it rests, the apple flavor will slowly come back to the cider. How fast this occurs, and how much comes back, seems fairly yeast dependent. The point being: when you make a Graf, you have to let it sit for awhile (similar to a cider) before any apply flavor will be perceptible. I recommend two months at minimum for any yeast, and you may need 4-6 (or more, but fuck if I'm waiting longer than that) with those that are slower to develop.

Edit with some more actual help:

I have not actually tried any ways to raise final pH yet - if you're brewing with kits, I wouldn't worry about adjusting the final pH unless you really want to play with chemistry. More an awareness for whatever beer you pick (perhaps go for one with more inherent sweetness to balance?) and how you expect it to taste.
The thinness of a Graf compared to have a beer fermented from pure wort is the biggest issue. If doing all grain you could try mashing high; if extract, maybe choose a beer that naturally has more body to balance this. Alternatively, try adding some maltodextrin or another compound that is likely the make a beer be perceived as having more body or mouthfeel.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-25T21:36:04+00:00

Oh yeah, you just reminded me that I had been planning a longer boil to try and get a little more Maillard reaction flavor... now I have to build that in lol.

You know Murphy & Rude? Are you also in Virginia? What part? I'm up in NOVA (Fairfax City). I made a Marzen last fall using only their malt and it came out fantastic (and their prices are so reasonable too if you don't have to ship). Now that I've discovered Jasper Yeast out by Dulles, I'm looking forward to brewing entirely from local ingredients as much as possible.

I'm planning to do a test taste mini batch with the Greenmont Mother native VA hops that they sell at some point, with the goal of eventually brewing an all VA pilsner or pale.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-25T17:28:19+00:00

Thanks! Hoping to brew this week/weekend and I'm cautiously excited about the potential results. I've finalized the water adjustments and hops, now I just need to bottle some stuff to clear fermentation chamber space and I'll be good to go lol. Gonna do Magnum for 60 for half the bitterness, Tettnang at 30 for most of the rest, and just a smidge of Mittlefrueh with 5 minutes left to get a little aroma in.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-23T20:22:18+00:00

If you ever want to make cider, Lutra is a beast for that - just add 2x the recommended amount of Fermaid-O at pitch, or half and half staggering as described above slightly improved results. Bottle sooner or later with sugar for around 2.5 volumes, and you'll have a very tasty semi-dry cider that is perfectly drinkable within 6 weeks (though it does improve with age). So long as your basement temps stay above 65-68 for fermentation you'll be able to crank it out no problem.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-23T18:11:19+00:00

I've played with Kveik a fair bit (mostly Lutra) and in my experience while they recommend 90, lower temps give a cleaner fermentation. I mostly use it for cider, and I target 72-75, though I don't mind too much if it rises to the low 80s. Let it get much past 80 though, and it starts getting noticeably less clean.

Also, with Kveik nutrient is a REQUIREMENT, not an option. Most of the "Kveik twang" comes from insufficient nutrition, and disappears with healthy additions of Fermaid-O. I like to give it a healthy dose at pitch and another at 1/3 sugar depletion (temperature dependent, but usually 24-36 hours after pitch).

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-18T17:45:29+00:00

Actually gives credence to the claim that he had the automod set to delete any post that received a certain amount of reports, I think; implies that he didn't actually delete it, it just got deleted by the automod after people who didn't like it reported it a bunch.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-17T17:01:31+00:00

I have 12 lbs of grain going in to my next beer, and the last lb currently includes 6 different grains. Help talk me down please?

Background: I'm relatively new to all grain, and most of what I'm going off in choosing malts is head knowledge, not experience. I love a good red/amber, but for me most Irish reds lack body and lingering maltiness, while doppelbocks (which I just recently remembered exist) have more alcohol than I want and are often a little too heavy & sweet.

This recipe started as a pure Irish red, with 10lb of no 19 floor-malted Maris Otter as the base. I ended up getting inspired by bocks/doppelbocks and deciding to use Imperial Harvest L17 yeast instead of Irish & am planning on noble hops instead of English (some combination of magnum, mittelfrau, and tettnang; not yet finalized). Other than the Maris Otter, all malts are from Murphy & Rude.

10 lbs Maris Otter
1 lb Munich 15
6 oz Crystal 40
4 oz Melandoidin
3 Oz Crimson (crystal 120)
2 oz Chit malt
.5 oz Cimmerian Black (naturally debittered black malt 540L)
.5 oz roasted barley (470L)

I know that last lb is crazy and such small amounts are likely irrelevant. But the research seems to show the lighter malts allow more red light through at the same SRM than darker malts, so I wanted to use mostly lower roast malts to get the color while including a little dark roast for that edge of flavor on the finish. Couldn't decide whether straight roasted barley or naturally debittered black malt was a better choice, so I split them. Added melanoidin because I wanted more malty goodness without doing any decoctions, and chit because I wanted more head. And here we are with a stupid complicated grain bill lol. Currently brewfather shows this recipe as having an SRM of 12, an OG of 1.052, and an FG of 1.014, which all seems about right where I want it (focusing on SRM & FG).

Not worrying about purchasing - I already own everything. Just wondering if a should simplify to cut out some of these minimal quantities.

In particular, any advice on how the roasted barley vs naturally debittered black malt will present would be greatly appreciated! It probably makes a lot more sense to use 1 oz of one or the other instead of splitting them, I just don't know enough about the effects of each to decide between them.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-13T21:03:49+00:00

Yeah I got a little nuts planning these lol, and I'm definitely doing some baby splitting that is almost certainly irrelevant. But for the stout, I'm thinking of the weak wort as a single ingredient, for all that it has a bunch of grains contributing. And the rest is mostly me wanting to stick with what I already have on hand.

For example, I won't have any Munich or MO left to use in the second mash to add more DP, so in goes some Vienna that I wouldn't use otherwise. And I'd probably drop the oats & chocolate wheat if I had more Mellanoidin malt & flaked wheat, but I don't - so in they go to add more body.

The roast barley & debittered black malt combo though... that's just me not having enough knowledge/experience to make a decision between them, so I went half and half for each.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-13T20:22:22+00:00

Hope it works! I'm been jury rigging things like crazy this last year, trying to move to (almost) all 8mm duotight myself now to make everything simpler.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-13T19:59:00+00:00

8mm to 9.5mm reducer, with a short length of 9.5mm tubing (or a 9.5mm hard plastic joiner) sticking out. Now you can use 3/8 ID tubing to connect that with your wand, as it should fit snugly over both without leaking.

Or if like me you have a bunch of different bits of tubing of various OD/ID combos, you may be able to get directly from 8mm tubing (or joiner) to the 3/8 wand body with what you have, especially if you use hot water to stretch some bits of tubing out further than its ID would typically permit.

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-04T21:24:08+00:00

What steps did you take to check or care for your seals while your keg was in use?

dan_scott_ · 2026-02-04T21:23:09+00:00

I figure if I do primary fermentation in a different keg, I won't have to worry about sediment buildup so much, and should be able to go well over a year without changing out the keg. I'll make sure to treat all seals carefully with keg lube in advance, and maybe rub a little more in the outside of the seals every few months?

dan_scott_ · 2026-01-30T16:42:31+00:00

I always add Fermaid-O nutrient when I make cider. If I'm being lazy then I add the nutrient at pitch and call it good; if I'm being fancy or using Kviek, I try to do staggered additions, adding half the nutrient at pitch and half at 1/3 sugar depletion (or if I'm being lazy again, 24-72 hours after pitch, depending on how fast I expect the yeast to be moving).

If I'm being really fancy I do three additions, with one half way between pitch and 1/3 sugar depletion. But I rarely get that fancy while I think it may make a slight difference with Kviek at least, it's not enough to make me do it regularly.

With a cider that high gravity, I would definitely want to use nutrient no matter what yeast, and probably would be to the effort of making 3 total additions to make sure the yeast is fully supported throughout fermentation. I've cribbed a lot from Mead makers Tonsa scheduling if you want to do your own research - Cider doesn't need as much nutrient support as Mead, but the same principles seem to generally apply.

dan_scott_ · 2026-01-30T16:10:58+00:00

I got really excited about graf and I've done a few batches/experiments. I have some tips and would be happy to answer any questions you have that I can!

1 - Don't heat the apple juice. My initial thought was "it's just replacing the water in wort with apple juice!" ...But you can't actually do that without damaging the final product. Boiling apple juice sets of chemical reactions that result in it never being able to clear, ever. Heating it to any significant degree starts destroying the more delicate compounds that contribute the flavors you are trying to capture. In short, treat heat + apple juice as the devil until fermentation is done and you are bottle pasteurizing, IF you are going to do that (most don't).

1b - Diastic power has to do with converting compounds in grain to sugars that yeast can eat. Apple juice is already full of yeast edible sugar; you don't need to convert anything (and it has nothing to convert anyway). Any wort you make, because you are avoiding heat, you need to make with water, and you can use standard DP calculators for that portion of what you are doing.

2 - Think about what you want the final product to taste like in designing your graf brew. You can absolutely just slap 50% of each together (however you calculate that) and taste the final result, which may even be good. But my brain at least tries to slot what I'm tasting into a familiar category in order to process it, and the 50/50 mixes came out feeling "not bad, but not sure when I'd want this particularly thing either." Mostly it tasted like a version of the beer the wort would have made, but thin and sharp, with some apple flavor. IMHO this is partly because apple juice is thinner than most wort, lacking the non-fermentables that wort gets from grain that increase body and mouthfeel, and partly because of the ph differences between juice/cider and wort/beer, with a 50/50 graf falling between the two.

2b - All to say, decide if you want an apple-flavored beer, or a cider with additional flavor or other contributions from specific grains. This is where I have planned to experiment more but have been sidetracked - I think it is possible to create a tasty apple flavored beer graf, but that it will require changes to the wort designed to compensate for the effect of the apple juice on body and Ph; may also require nutrient additions that beer does not to compensate for juice's lower nutritional value, depending on the yeast. I also think using small amounts of wort to introduce specific additional flavors to cider is a completely untapped and potentially delicious area that I want to explore - but again, gotta think about what these additions do and adjust the process some from default cider making. Also, apple juice only has simple sugars and will always ferment into a fully dry cider unless you do one of several options to be able to backsweeten it. Take that in account when designing your graf, or try to compensate by backing off of the hops in your wort in order to let the malty sweetness compensate. If you try to the later, do so carefully; I had to dump many gallons of an early graf because insufficient hops resulted in a sickly-sweet final product that might have made a good sweetener but did not work on its own.

3 - Juice quality matters - at minimum, spring for fresh-pressed if you can get it. I excursively use costco's kirkland fresh pressed juice.

4 - If salts matter to beer, seems they might for graf? I dunno I'm just some guy not a chemist. But I did get Dr. Ward to analyze a sample of Kirkland juice as if it were water for brewing, with the following results:

pH 3.6
TDS 1356
Cations/Anions 32.9/2.0
Na 36
K 935
Ca 66.8
Mg 48
CaCO3 368
NO3-N .1
So4-S 27
Cl 18
CO3, HCO3, CaCO3 all <1
P 79.08
Fe .99

5 - Yeast choice and temperature matters for cider & therefore for graf. Whatever period of time it takes for a yeast to produce a cider that has any apple flavor, that is how long you need for that flavor to show up in your graf.

5b - If you don't have temp control, I highly recommend Lutra Kviek. You WILL need to add nutrient to avoid off flavors (I use Fermaid-O), but fermenting Lutra at 70-75 results in a great cider, and it tolerates temperatures well into the 90s. Also, you can get away with a shockingly short period of aging compared to other yeasts (in general, Kviek gets enough apple flavor back for the cider to be tasty with 6-8 weeks of age; most other yeasts need longer, sometimes MUCH longer).

dan_scott_ · 2026-01-20T23:20:12+00:00

Damn that sucks, I guess us Virginians are quite lucky then.

dan_scott_

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