Plastic Conical!

After struggling with racking my last brew to secondary and talking to the guys at St. Louis Wine and Beer Making,  I decided to risk $140 on the FastFerment conical.  It should eliminate racking to secondary and make yeast reuse a lot easier. I also have a plan to make kegging easier.  I am going to  mount a cheap boat winch and pulley to the basement support pole and beam respectively, allowing me to lift the conical out of its stand and gravity feed into the keg. It has mounting bolts on either side above the balancing point that will work great for attaching a cross chain and in turn the winch cable.  Another bonus is that FastFerment will soon be introducing an insulated wrap that you can pump cold water through to control temperature!  I would just have to add a pump and my temperature controller to get the same effect as an expensive jacked setup.

Fixing Acrid Aftertaste (RO water)

Every brew that I have done on the electric system, other than the porter, has had a very pronounced acrid after taste.  You take a drink and think, this is GREAT, then right as you swallow you get hit by this taste that I can only describe as over cooked super strong black tea.  After some research I came to the conclusion that my mash is suffering from high residual alkalinity.  I never obtained a water report but I know from seeing extreme scale build up on water faucets that our water is EXTREMELY hard.  All along I have been using PH 5.2 stabilizer but apparently it was not able to lower the PH that much.  My experiment of using Potassium chloride softened water to dilute by half also had no effect.  In fact, the American Wheat I made was even worse.  At this point I decided that I was not going to waste any more beer or time experimenting and I installed an RO water system.  Rather than trying the dilution trick again I decided to simply use all RO water and just build a balanced water from scratch.  I am planning a brew day for Sunday the 24th where I plan to brew a NB English Pale Ale.  I will be using Burton Water Salts from LC Carlson to approximate the Burton on Trent water profile.  I will also make sure to have precision PH test strips and gypsum at the ready just in case.  What I am not sure about is if I will use the PH 5.2 stabilizer.  After doing some forum research I discovered that most people recommend not buying it and if you have already bought it, through it away.....