I think I'll want to be moving up to 5 gallon batches soon. 7 bottles for about a month of waiting is a small yield, especially since I'm the sharing type.

Can you ship us up a few bottles Peter?
I hear the price on a 24 is rising over a buck soon in the province.

Congratulations on making your beer Peter, welcome to the homebrewing club.

Just a few thoughts, hopefully I’m not repeating myself which could be a sign of to much homebrew in my past.

One good way to activate your yeast is to make a starter culture especially if you start using liquid yeasts which IMO are vastly superior to dry ones. Lots of methods but I preferred to make a batch of low specific gravity wort and put it in canning jars. The usually the night before brewing I would pitch the yeast in the starter wort and by the next day the yeast would have already started it growth cycle so when it was pitched in the fermenter it would be a larger and already viable culture. This also allows you to tell if the culture was any good. Sometime you get a dead or very week culture and your beer can sit for days w/o fermentation starting or not start at all. If you know ahead of time that the yeast you are pitching is viable it reduces the risk of ruining the wort because it doesn’t start fermenting quickly enough.

Also though not necessary “air locks” are easier to use in most cases than a tube because they make carrying the fermenter around w/o risking introducing O2 or “bugs” easier.

When you switch to 5 gal batches get a 7 gal carboy to give headspace for the fermentation. If you try your hand a dry hopping even a tube can get clogged and pop out of the fermenter letting crap in.

I also found that making gallon batches 5 at a time was useful to test various things like adding spices or dry hopping. Or even using 4 brew pots (4 burners) to try out various hop or even steeping grain mixes. If you really get into brewing this lets you experiment a lot faster to see how different hop additions and other things effect the final beer.

Also as mentioned above some beers take more time to mature. Usually the denser the wort and the longer the fermentation the more time the beer needs. However once active fermentation has stopped you should rack it off either into bottles or a secondary fermenter within a few days. Low specific gravity beers are usually safe to bottle however, high specific gravity beers can keep fermenting at a low level for awhile so it’s safer to rack them into a secondary fermenter to avoid over carbonated beer or exploding bottles.

A lot of great info here for my sponge brain. Thanks!

I want you guys who make beer to organize my life!

That was all good stuff from Grunt.

If you know your local brewers, they may be willing to hook you up with a growler full of yeast off the bottom of one of their fermenters. The guys at BJs did that for me for years. They also shared some of their special small batch creations. Mega

A trip to the local brew pub while you're mashing is convenient. Stuff an air-lock into the growler and stick it in the frig.

I think I have read about problems with pitching TOO many yeast into a wort, but I personally never had a problem with a growler into 10 gallons.

Never tried that sure sounds interesting and you’d know you were getting good and viable yeast that way.

I opened a bottle of my maple porter today, knowing full well it probably wasn't ready. My suspicion was true, but I liked what I tasted anyway. First, it's a bit too carbonated, bursting from the bottle soon after I popped it. Due to the carbonation, the dark tan head dissipates quickly. The beer itself is nearly opaque. The aroma is of toasted grain with a slight tinge of malt.

Flavor is toasty and very dry, suprisingly so. I'm not sure there's any residual sugars left in here. Hops are there but are in the background behind the toast. At first, the bubbles seriously detracted from the flavor -- almost Coke-like carbonation that gave it an acidic edge. That got much better after I let it sit for a few minutes. My wife was impressed with my first effort, as was I, and it should only improve with additional weeks in the bottle. Anyone have any opinions on what I to expect after more time?

Older beer?

Dustier bottles?