"TIP OF THE DAY" a thread to educate by our mistakes

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

Good record keeping is essential especially change of malt/hop batch, yeast info plus any equipment changes including instrumentation, process times and temps etc. it makes fault finding so much easier later.

[beerfly]

If you can control your mash temp herms/rims/bruameister/grainfather. Mashing it at under 50℃ will prevent doughballs

[Leann ull]

If you underlet, (pump in your water from the bottom into your mash tun) you don't get doughballs at all

[Leann ull]

Expired dried yeast can be chucked in your boil as a nutrient

[Leann ull]

Expired liquid yeast will come back if you allow it an extra day for every month it's gone, use a 500ml 1st step to avoid stressing it

[Leann ull]

Let yeast vials settle before pitching and open cap slowly to avoid Mentos and coke experience.

[Leann ull]

Always sanitise you liquid and dry packets, incl scissors in some starsan or similar before pitching

[CARA]

+1 on soaking autosiphons. I use(d) mine in work and let it soak in weak paracetic acid and it warped to fuck

[Shane Phelan]

Always have a spare hydrometer.

[Archsnapper]

This definitely come under the heading "to educate by our mistakes":
When cooling the wort and it seems like a good idea to swirl the wort chiller about a bit - DON'T. This is a whiz way to loosen your hose connections, like I did today. My water supply is from the garden tap (with a long hose) because I have already deformed the tap in the kitchen. Bit of a fast run to turn off the water!

[Simon_]

Better to have the hoses positioned differently or tightened because moving the chiller (or the wort around the chiller) is way more efficient. You're getting poor heat exchange if everything is static. I like chilling overwith quickly.

[Garry]

Mill your specialty grains first. When you run the 3+ kg of base malt through the mill, the rollers are nice and clean for the next brew.

[Tom]

As discussed back on page three, Corny labelling can be done with chalk on the black rubber top.

[Paul B]

Learned from DCBrewing - when heating strike water pull off kettle fulls from the boiler tap, boil and re-add to speed things up.

[Paul B]

When entering recipes into beersmith, prefer percentages over weights. E.g. if a recipe says 5KG pale ale malt (80%), .2KG crystal 60 (5%), etc. use the grain pct button to enter it rather than the weights they give you. This way it automatically scales to your setup and chosen efficiency.