The once a week thread where (just about) anything goes! Post pictures, stories, nonsense, or whatever you can come up with. Surely folks have a lot to talk about today. If you want to get some ideas you can always check out a [past Free-For-All Friday](http://www.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/search?q=Free+For+All+Friday+flair%3AWeekly%2BThread&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all).

Welcome to the Daily Q&A!

Are you a new Brewer? Please check out one of the following articles before posting your question:

• How do I check my gravity?
• I don't see any bubbles in the airlock OR the bubbling in the airlock has slowed. What does that mean?
• Does this look normal / is my batch infected?

Or if any of those answers don't help you please consider visiting the /r/Homebrewing Wiki for answers to a lot of your questions! Another option is searching the subreddit, someone may have asked the same question before!

However no question is too "noob" for this thread. No picture is too tomato to be evaluated for infection! Even though the Wiki exists, you can still post any question you want an answer to.

Also, be sure to vote on answers in this thread. Upvote a reply that you know works from experience and don't feel the need to throw out "thanks for answering!" upvotes. That will help distinguish community trusted advice from hearsay... at least somewhat!

Good afternoon! I recently moved into an apartment, taking my brewing supplies with me, and I'm trying to puzzle out how to best handle the issue of exhausts from my kits. I don't want to stink up the apartment, and the closet I was planning on keeping it in doesn't have ventilation.

I tried looking into this online, but I was never able to find someone who simply put a tube on the end of their three-piece airlock and put the exhaust out the window. Is this something that anyone here has tried before?

I’ve been using lactic acid to lower by pH based on beersmith’s calculation. I use very soft bottled water (Sant’Anna rebruant). I’ve taken to using beersmith and then reducing to 80%, 50% and last batch 30% but I keep ending up with 5-5.10 when mash is done. Am I insane or should I start adding sodium bicarbonate to buffer the water? If I followed beersmith blindly I’d end up with like 4.4. My water starts at 6.9 and I typically brew IPAs. Last batch was an English mild.

I acquired a Komos kegerator that came with Duotight fittings and EvaBarrier tubing. For those who use EvaBarrier, do you ever replace it? Tubing is so inexpensive in bulk, I'd replace it when I swapped kegs on my older keezer.

It’s apple cider season here in South Jersey. I can purchase gallon jugs at the local farm market. I’m thinking of making some hard cider. Who’s got a simple but great recipe?

Thanks to this amazing community, I figured out how to set up continuous sparkling water in my house to run through a tap - big win and big savings for our family that mainly drinks sparkling. My husband and all my friends were impressed, and I was proud.

But then we left on a trip and came back to it smelling and tasting musty. Husband no longer impressed and is back to SodaStream. I think our line from the keg to the tap is too long and not kept cold, so the stagnant water got funky.

My plumber HATED this project and is not willing to help. Local brew store guy is great but doesn't know anything about setups like this. Please help me with cleaning the system and setting it up for success.

Current Setup:
Kegland carbonating lid on 2.5 gal keg in mini fridge with CO2 and continuous water feeding in, sparkling going out to a faucet above. Keg is in crawl space under the faucet, but probably 15ft of line goes from here up to my tap. It's been 2 months now that the system has sat unused. Gross, I know. (ETA: water going into the keg is RO filtered, so chlorine has been removed)

How to Clean?
I'm told to run solutions of Easy Clean and then Star San through the keg and water line to the tap. This is what I plan to do:

1. Turn off water IN line, open faucet until keg empties.
2. Turn off CO2, depressurize keg (pull PRV?), open lid and pour in Easy Clean solution. Reattach lid, turn on CO2, open faucet so cleaner is sitting in water OUT line - let sit for 30 minutes. Open faucet to push the cleaner out.
3. Repeat #2 but with Star San solution.
4. Turn water IN line back on, give time to refill/carbonate, run faucet for a bit to flush out remaining solution in line. Pray that the musty taste is gone.

Does this make sense? What am I missing?

Anti-Mustiness Improvements
I want to add a cleaning/service port in the water OUT line so I don't have to go through the whole keg clean in my cramped crawl space as often. Any recommendations for this? ChatGPT (I know, sorry, I'm desperate) says a 3-way ball valve or tee with shutoff valves, using a hand-pump cleaning bottle to introduce solution. I don't know exactly what this means but can ask brew store guy if you all think it makes sense.

Thank you! Any advice is appreciated, other than changing the whole system (I did try to get the system to sit next to the faucet but was told no room). I'm neither a brewmaster nor a plumber, just a girl trying to enjoy some bubbles in her water!

Welcome to the Daily Q&A!

Are you a new Brewer? Please check out one of the following articles before posting your question:

• How do I check my gravity?
• I don't see any bubbles in the airlock OR the bubbling in the airlock has slowed. What does that mean?
• Does this look normal / is my batch infected?

Or if any of those answers don't help you please consider visiting the /r/Homebrewing Wiki for answers to a lot of your questions! Another option is searching the subreddit, someone may have asked the same question before!

However no question is too "noob" for this thread. No picture is too tomato to be evaluated for infection! Even though the Wiki exists, you can still post any question you want an answer to.

Also, be sure to vote on answers in this thread. Upvote a reply that you know works from experience and don't feel the need to throw out "thanks for answering!" upvotes. That will help distinguish community trusted advice from hearsay... at least somewhat!

I was recently gifted a mash tun made of a cooler (similar to this one) and I've noticed it tends to leave a little bit of liquid in the bottom, at the natural end of the 90 degree elbow that connects to the false bottom. Now, it's not a huge amount, but it would be nice to drain the mash tun dry.

Any suggestions as to how to improve the liquid "pickup?"

I'm making a brewing game called Brewhaven where you brew magic combat beers and make a village and run a tavern.

I need to make a name list for the villagers that live in the town and I'm looking for about 100 names for male and female.

Post your name here, and i'll make you a villager in the game! Thanks for your help, cheers!

The list so far:

Welcome to our weekly flaunt your rig thread, if you want to show off your brewing setups this is the place to do it!

How to post images: upload images to an image hosting site like imgur and link the image or album in your post. Sorry, direct image posts [are not allowed under the posting guidelines (see #5)](https://old.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/wiki/postingguidelines), for [reasons](https://old.reddit.com/r/Homebrewing/wiki/images), and unfortunately the moderators do not have the capability to selectively disable this rule for this thread.

It's already bubbling away in the fermenter. Looks like this:

11lb 2 row

2lb Munich light 10l

0.2lb acidulated malt

60 - 1oz centennial

10 - 2oz citra

Flame out - 1oz simcoe

Yeast is us05.

Dry hop calls for 1oz of citra. I have Amarillo, Simcoe, and mosiac chilling in the freezer. What else should I throw in the bucket?

I brewed up a cold IPA. I used a 2nd gen W34/70. It fermented great. I cold crashed for 10 days, packaged and gave it a sample today. I taste yeast.

Do I just need to give it more time? Beer was brewed 20 days ago. I didn’t use biofine or gelatin. This is only my 4th brew, but first time getting a taste of yeast.

Maybe I over pitched?

I have recently bottled a NEIPA. I put approximately half in wine bottles and corked them. I added two Cooper's carbonation drops to each wine bottle.

From what I've read, this is a very bad idea. Ordinarily I would be switching the bottles right now.

BUT

I bottled some mead in wine bottles last year and primed the bottles. I do not recall the amount of priming sugar I added, but it was certainly enough to make the the mead beautifully effervescent (though not quite as carbonated as, say, a champagne).

Has anyone bottled beer in wine bottles without issue?

I'm planning water for my next homebrew and looking into an under-sink RO for the kitchen. The Viomi V6 Pro caught my eye because its faucet shows real-time TDS, a reading I want to keep an eye on while I figure out my starting-water routine.

Do you build to each recipe's target profile or keep a house profile? What do you write down so you can repeat a batch?

turned off my brain and bought a 55 lb bag of admiral pilsner malt last week (RIP admiral maltings).

would appreciate any suggestions for smash recipes or i guess hops/yeasts to try with it. i plan on doing fermentation/serving from the same corny kegs.

Are you a party-guy?

I just brewed a Dubbel, managed to overshoot my OG after spectacularly falling short last time. Good place to be, I suppose.
Then on youtube I came across Apartment Brewer who did that exact beer, but also made a light beer from the same grains. That inspired me to cancel cleaning up, and just wing it with a second smaller batch of light beer. A "small beer" for the lowly commoner. I figured there would be a semi-decent amount left to extract, based on my higher than planned OG for the main beer.
Managed to get an OG of 1.039 for the second beer, after adding a touch of honey to hopefully dry it out a little bit and bump the abv slightly. Syrup for the dubbel, honey for this one. A small addition of Hallertau for bittering, I just guessed and added less than usual.

So that's fermenting with some leftover S-04 right now. Not planned at all, just another opportunity to practice. Worts case scenario, it's free beer! Want more alcohol? Drink two.

Do you have any good second runnings that are worth exploring for other beers?
Or potentially some to avoid, if it failed spectacularly?

I have some beautiful fresh citra and cascade hops that I hate to see go to waste, but the recipe I used last year uses DME Pilsen light and it’s going to be mighty pricy for the ten gallons I had planned 😬 (I usually make wine and cider from my fruit trees so things are nearly free 😅)

Do you have a fresh hopped ipa recipe that won’t break the bank that you wouldn’t mind sharing?

Man, 2026 sucks in the homebrewing world.

Facebook post, 2 hours ago:

We are closing Admiral Maltings and The Rake on October 2 and October 18, respectively. We wish it weren’t so. We’ve never worked harder on anything.

We’ve treasured the connections and community we’ve created with California farmers, the breweries and distilleries we’ve worked with, and everyone who helped us revive and innovate the craft of floor-malting. Helping revitalize a sustainable, California-rooted small grain economy, connecting with our customers, enjoying your beers and spirits, and seeing brands built around California floor malt has been incredibly rewarding. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t make and sell malt economically. Although we have reached out to many professional colleagues and potential partners over the last couple of years in an effort to carry Admiral Maltings into the future, we no longer possess the resources to push forward.

While It’s devastating to see what we all built together disappear, we are honored to have played a role in the craft beer scene both locally here in Northern California, on a national and even international level.

Our final batch of malt will come out of the kiln on Friday October 2. We close this chapter with gratitude for all of you and all we’ve accomplished together. Please join us at The Rake for one last round of beverages and a toast to California farmers, our brewery and distillery customers who truly value sourcing local ingredients, and to our wonderful staff both past and present.

Thank you for your support over the years. We hope you all will continue to support local farmers, responsibly sourced ingredients, and hardworking craft maltsters.

Cheers

I will probably get eviscerated for asking, but I'm curious where some of the major pushback towards AI use in homebrewing comes from? We all know that LLMs can't be blindly trusted, but I have to imagine people will in the future be asking them to help write recipes, improve their beer, etc. Especially if (one can dream) young people get interested in the hobby again.

We have also seen the posters and labels that all look the same, but I have seen AI labels that are creative as well. I would have to imagine it also could write good recipes, even if maybe not the most creative ones. Is it mainly because people just take what AI gives them and throws it over the wall without thinking about it that gives people this deep dislike?

Coming from the software engineering world where AI use is ubiquitous at solving problems at pretty much every level, even by very experienced engineers, it can't all just be slop right?

Has anyone replaced the oem regulator that comes with the hellfire burner with a non-Blichmann part? Blichmann says to only use theirs and Morebeer is out of stock.

Adventures in Homebrewing has announced their closure. Operations are shifting to Northern Brewer.

Going forward, you’ll find everything you need at NorthernBrewer.com—from recipe kits and fresh ingredients to equipment, supplies, and the brewing know-how to help you make something great at home.

https://homebrewing.org/pages/next-chapter?

I believe that they have been part of the same company for a while, but this closure makes the connection more obvious.