North Texas Homebrewers Association

Use this topic to post your Tips, Hints and Best Practices on Beersmith. Let's start with this one: I never remember the target water profile for a beer. Beersmith shows the target profile in the water builder tab on the desktop app. Put zero gallons of the real target water profile in your recipe. ...

I think I am seeing the calculations. Thanks Terry. Sugars have conversion and extraction efficiency that predict how much sugar you get out of the mash. Color is just the amount of grain and the color of that grain, it is not affected by your mash efficiency. It seems like your crush would affect t...

In creating a simplified example below I discovered there is not a step function on the color like I thought. For example the original recipe has: At 70% brewhouse efficiency (I just noticed it is Brewhouse not mash (which includes conversion and extraction)) 10# pale srm 3 1# color malt srm 10 Afte...

Beersmith has a recipe scaling function. In that dialog it has a check box for Match Original Gravity, Color and Bitterness. In playing with BS scaling with Match enabled, on a porter recipe I see two factors that trigger non linear scaling. If I change the efficiency and a grain SRM is over 30, BS ...

The Brewdays are a great way to meet club members and learn about brewing.

The Club Parties are more about sharing beer and general conversation. Just join any conversation.

Welcome Matt! You can find meeting information in the newsletters on the website. Go to the website then Club Documents then Newsletters. This month's newsletter is running a bit late. There is an officers meeting tonight at Yard House in Addison. We talk about the club. Next Tuesday, the 10th, the ...

Did you pitch the whole package? Dry yeast can have a bunch of cells in a small package. I try to pitch about 500,000 cells per ml per degree plato of hefe yeast. I have had good luck with the Munich Classic, not the plain Munich that they call a Wit yeast now. I have not found temperature plays muc...

The WPL830 is the Weihenstephaner Lager yeast. The Brulosophy guys routinely ferment this stain at Ale temperature and say it comes out just like the colder temp fermentations do. So let it go. Let's see what happens. The only worry I would have is lowering the temperature after pitching. This is us...

I am planning on enjoying London Pride. I just hope it is fresh.

There was a site called yeastcalc.com that let you select Braukaiser or Jamil. That site is gone.

There is another site that does the same calculations as yeastcalc at http://yeastcalculator.com/

The source for yeastcalculator is here: https://github.com/dboyd13/YeastCalculator

I am getting an error for that link. Says the host is down.

Does it work for you Randy?

We are discussing this on a BBO Slack channel. Some ideas from over there are: Change starting time and date either/or to a weekend or a weekday evening after work. Start userid registration a day or two before the entry registration. Judges from last year get a pre-sale code to register their entri...

We talked about this at the Officers Meeting last night. We had a couple of ideas. 1. I am going to start BCOEM on a big virtual server for the first day of registrations. A server that will not get congested. 2. Limit entrants to one entry per medal category. That might be a bit restrictive. 3. Onc...

Let us turn this topic into something positive. What could the "Bluebonnet" have done to make Bill have a positive experience? What can the Bluebonnet do in the future to make Bill happy next year. There was a server load issue. I was able to get an entry in in the middle of the storm and ...

And a couple of more thoughts. We changed the start time to noon from midnight. That made it easier for all the entrants to punish the BBO server. Perhaps it should move back to midnight or maybe 4:37am (some obscure time in the middle of the night). We did not know what the impact to the server wou...

Bill, I am sorry you did not get all your entries in. The good news you may still get your entries in as other entrants change their entries. So you need to keep watching the medal category counts: https://bcoem.bluebonnetbrewoff.org/index.php?section=entry The deleting of unpaid entries is now auto...

In the isomerized paragraphs in this article sounds like the isomerized hop products do not have the antiseptic properties.

https://byo.com/article/hop-extracts-advanced-brewing/

Wow, I lots of comments on this one. You can buy un-isomerized alpha acid as in this example at morebeer: https://www.morebeer.com/products/artisan-hops-hop-shot-cascadewillamette-extract-blend-10-ml.html Does it have to be isomerized? The isomerization is needed to create bitterness. I am guessing ...

I found this link in the past that gives SG to percentage by volume and weight: http://www.ppe.com/pdf/SpecificGravity.pdf I was unaware of Propylene Glycol deterioration until Wayne said his glycol was pink with something growing in it. I now set my chiller to 50F when not in use instead of turning...

Here is a link to the Braukaiser site that discusses mash related efficiencies:

https://braukaiser.com/wiki/index.php/U ... Efficiency

The braukaiser site is a great site that Kai Troester created. It seems that Kai has stopped updating his site.
http://braukaiser.com/

This topic started with my scaling a recipe with Beersmith. Beersmith has that option to match gravity, color and bitterness. I don't know what Beersmith does with that option. I did figure out that if the "efficiency" is different in the from and to equipment profiles, Beersmith adjusts t...

I did not get my Liquid CaCl article in the newsletter this month. The problem with CaCl is it is so hygroscopic that you will never know what you have. It could start out as anhydrous when you buy it. Every time you open the package it absorbs water from the air.

Smitty, My goal was to bread that was sour. My hope was that the Lactobacillus in the blend was still viable and the the hefe yeast in the blend would make an interesting yeast flavor. But sour was is goal. I think I want to get some SF starter from you and use the recipe you posted as a baseline. T...

An update on my sourdough experiment. I fed the starter a few times then grew up some extra to make some bread. I made a sticky dough with bread flour, about 3 cups of flour. I put the dough in the refrigerator for 3 days. Punched it down once a day. On the third day I form two loaves. I did not kne...

Exactly. You don't know. Also CaCl is so hygroscopic, meaning is absorbs water from air, you will never know what you have.

The water mixture solves that problem. That is why I moved to it.