Soaked some decomposing oak leaves for 36 hours in preboiled water with some yeast flakes. Stirred, put 1-2 ml into test tubes with 5 ml of malt beer ("Karamalz", I just picked a random brand), filled up with equal amounts of 5 % vinegar and whisky (didn’t have any vodka at hand). Put a thin layer of neutral vegetable oil on top.

Should keep out the vast majority of bad microbes and provide a mostly oxygen free environment for yeast.

IIRC, I’ve also read on suigeneris brewing that oak leaf litter has a 50 - 80 % chance of catching bretanomyce, which I’d be thrilled to find.

My test batch setup is nearly complete (please also appreciate the "beautiful" tiles) and I tested it with a wet hop beer. As you can see, those were clearly at the upper end of their ripeness scale, but it was the only time I could manage to pick some at all due family & kids.
In they went in for a ~20 minutes 80 ˚C hop stand, during which my kitchen smelled a troubling lot of garlic and onions. By removing the bag with the hops, I stirred up the already settled trub, so I had to pour all hop debris & hot break into the minikeg along with the wort. Let's see what that does to the beer. I've overshot my OG quite a bit with the setup in the pictures, with a lot higher efficiency than predicted, only by stirring every now and then, so we're looking at an OG of 1.051 instead of 1.046.

Yesterday, after a week of fermentation under rising pressure, it was time for a gravity sample. It's fully attenuated already, and except a hint of some sharpness, I'm happy to report that we're apparently free of off-flavours. :) It came down do 1.008 (vs 1.010 predicted) , which leaves me with a 5.6 % ABV beer instead of 4.2 % with a lot less residual sweetness (US-05, you monster). Next time, I'll certainly mash hotter, and check the temperature with an external thermometer as well. I also wonder what a Kveik yeast would do to the result.

Here is the base recipe I intend to use for ongoing experiments with malts, yeasts & hops.

Hi!

I noticed that I don't get anywhere close to the gravity Brewfather estimates for a given recipe. Latest example is a SMASH IPA with a good 5 kg of pilsner malt that, which on my BrewZilla Gen 4 should have landed me somewhere around 1.054 pre boil. Everything went according to the recipe: 71 °C strike water, 64 °C mash for one hour (even a tad longer than that due to being interrupted by having kids), nice recirculation all along, no visible dough nests. What I got though was a pre boil gravity of 1.037 (forgot to test for starch being still present with iodine though).

This is only my fourth brew on the system, the first I forgot to measure and two were rather experimental, but I am still noticing a pattern here in that my efficiency is rather consistently sub par. I now wonder where to find room for improvement. For me, there's no need to squeeze every last bit of sugar out of my grains, yet at a mash efficiency of only 54% where in theory I might even get 80% does not only strike me as unnecessary wasteful, this way I don't know if I could even make anything bigger than an IPA at all without stretching the limits of my system.

My grain milling is one of the things that I suspect might contribute. So much so that I already wish I hadn't bought a three roller mill but one that I can adjust with simple advice from the internet, it seems everything in this field is geared towards two roller mills.
Also I started thinking about pH. Until now I never tampered with it, does it really have the potential to make such a huge difference?

All other suggestions are welcome as well. Cheers!